Chapter 1 — The Song No One Hears
The bone shuddered beneath his pen.
Corren Vayle paused mid stroke, ink trembling at the nib. The rib fragment pale as moonlight and longer than his forearm—had always thrummed faintly with the soft, golden pulse of the Seventh Vein. Tonight, the pulse had vanished.
No, not just vanished. It had been pulled away.
A cold draft slid through the tiny attic room, curling around his hands. The streetlamps beyond his single dusty window burned dim, their halos shrinking. A thin, metallic scent, like rain on brass, began to fill the air. He leaned closer, the candlelight catching in the shallow grooves he'd been etching—sigil-script meant to capture the melody of the Vein before it faded from memory.
A whisper slid up through the ribbone.
Not words. Not song. A shape of silence, cold and heavy, pressing into his mind. He blinked, and the lines on the bone bled black, his own ink retreating into the grooves, then vanishing as if swallowed.
The pulse returned.
But it was wrong.
Every Vein had its tone—a hum, a tremor, a chime you felt more than heard. This one was absence, pulling the sound from the room, muffling the street noise until even the candle's hiss seemed to die.
Then it spoke.
"Corren Vayle."
His hand locked around the pen. No one should know his name inside the weave. Not unless they were standing right behind him.
The voice came again, softer, threaded with something almost… amused.
"The others record the songs. I will teach you the silence that shapes them."
The ribbone split down the center with a brittle crack, scattering ink, parchment, and dust across the table. Somewhere in the street below, a bell tolled—but the sound reached him warped, like it had been pulled through water.
Corren's breath caught. His candle guttered low. The air felt woven too tightly around him, threads of it tugging at his chest.
The Scribe of Veins
Corren pushed away from the desk, heart hammering. His chair's back leg snagged on the uneven floorboards, nearly sending him sprawling. He forced his breathing steady, the fear a sharp, bitter tang on his tongue. But beneath the fear was a dangerous curiosity. This wasn't a false note. It was a proposition, a secret and forbidden power that no one else could access. The thought was terrifying, but also exhilarating.
He slid the cracked rib fragment into a cloth sleeve and wrapped it twice, binding it with twine. The Vein-broker wouldn't buy damaged stock, but maybe Mareth down at the bone-market could sell it to a charmwright. Even a few copper marks would keep him fed until Firstday.
A low groan from the rafters made him glance upward. The candlelight danced against warped beams, casting shapes in the shadows—shapes with too many joints. He blinked, and the angles straightened into ordinary wood. He needed sleep, yes, but he also needed to think. The silence had offered him a new kind of power, and that was a secret worth keeping.
Down the Spire Streets
The attic's trapdoor creaked as he pushed it open. Below lay the cramped single-room he called home, one of many stacked in a leaning spire that rose from the Old Loom District. The air smelled faintly of dye vats and wet wool.
Outside, night clung to the cobbled streets. Steam hissed from brass grates, curling upward in plumes. Lamplighters had already finished their rounds, leaving the gas flames to burn low in their glass cages.
Corren kept to the edge of the street as he made his way toward the riverfront. Old habit. A lone scribe with a satchel of bones was an easy mark, but tonight he felt something else—a new sense of being watched. He passed a tarnished brass lamppost, its base etched with a small, coiled thread—the symbol of the Weft. It was a common sight, a reminder of the secret order's ever-present authority, and it made the hair on his arms stand on end.
At the corner of Loomer's Row, an elderly woman was selling weft charms from a blanket. Each was a knotted loop of colored thread, faintly warm in the hand. "Keeps the threads tight around you," she rasped as Corren passed. "One mark for safety. Two for silence."
He didn't stop, but her words stuck in his mind. Two marks for silence. The shadow-song had given him silence for free.
The Vein-Broker
The bone-market was still open, its narrow stalls lit by guttering oil lamps. Traders haggled over knuckle shards, femurs, even entire tusks pulled from riverbeasts. Every piece carried a Vein's hum, captured when the creature lived. Scribes like Corren translated those hums into sigil-script for scholars, artificers, and mages.
Mareth was at his usual place—a heavyset man with pale eyes and hands that never stopped moving, polishing bone after bone.
"You're late," Mareth grunted as Corren set the wrapped rib on the counter. "And this is cracked."
"Fractured in the night," Corren said. He knew he had to be convincing. "Just an old rib splitting. The Vein's pulse had been fading for weeks." It was a half-truth, a believable lie. He chose his words carefully.
Mareth's pale eyes narrowed. "You hear anything odd when it happened?"
The question sent a ripple of unease through him. Mareth was fishing for something, a specific kind of false note. Corren met his gaze steadily. "Nothing I haven't heard before, just the usual phantom echoes." He shrugged, dismissing the entire experience.
Mareth grunted, unconvinced, but counted out a small stack of copper marks. "Word to the wise, boy—if you hear something that isn't a Vein, you walk away. You don't write it, you don't hum it, you don't even think about it."
Corren took the coins, muttered thanks, and left. He had just lied to an old professional, and gotten away with it. A thrill, cold and sharp, ran through him.
The River's Edge
The River Grell was black under the moon, its surface broken by the slow churn of waterwheels. Corren leaned on the railing, letting the damp air wash over him.
Valmorra wasn't silent, not truly—but something felt off. The river's usual rhythm was muted, and the world seemed to be losing its color. The gaslamps across the river were pale disks without halos. The moon looked painted on the sky, a flat, silvery disk in a sea of gray.
He closed his eyes.
The hum of the Seventh Vein was faint, distant… and beneath it, like a thread pulled taut under cloth, was the shadow-song.
"Corren Vayle."
He opened his eyes to find the world had gone flat.
And standing beside him was a figure.
Not a man. Not a woman. A shape, its edges fraying like loose thread, as if reality couldn't hold onto it. It was the same absence from his attic, given form.
"The others only bind the weave," it said again, the voice now right beside him. "I will teach you to unmake it. And you will be the only one who remembers."
Corren's mouth was dry. He wasn't just a scribe. He was now a target, and a potential weapon.
Before he could speak again, the figure dissolved into strands of shadow that swirled around him and sank into his skin.
The world snapped back.
He was alone on the bridge, heart pounding, the hum of the Veins rushing in like a tide. Only one thing was certain:
He had heard a fourteenth.