For two days after the shadow's probing, the village kept a brittle sort of watchfulness. Market stalls opened later; children's laughter came more guarded, as if each chuckle might invite some darker thing to the edge of the terraces. Wenrel moved through the hours with the sensation that the world had thinned — that the bright membrane between everyday and otherness had been nicked and bled light.
He woke before dawn. Mist pooled low among the sky-vines; the Titan Trees exhaled slow, resonant groans as if reminding those who listened that they had been standing since before most names could be remembered. Wenrel sat on the terrace rail and breathed in the sap-heavy air. He tried to summon the sensation again: the faint answering beat he'd felt in the shadow's motion — not a sound but a cadence, a tremor in perception that answered when he nudged it. The memory of it made his fingers tingle.
Lysara found him there, as if she knew where he would seek refuge. She wore a half-smile that did not reach her eyes. "You should be sleeping," she said when she sat opposite him. The morning light gilded the side of her face; the scars at her jaw were pale lines of remembered violence. "Or training. Which will it be?"
"Both," Wenrel answered. He said the word with a hardness he tried not to admire. "I don't want to… wait for it to test us again."
She watched him for a breath. "Good. Waiting teaches less than action. But remember: action without discipline is how bright things burn out." She slid a narrow wooden box across the rail toward him. Inside, a length of Whisper Vine lay coiled like a sleeping thing — its leaves small, iridescent, and shimmering faintly in the predawn. "Start with this," she said. "Listen to what it remembers."
The Whisper Vines were an odd, local flora: they braided themselves around old ruins, grew thin tendrils into stone, and their growth rings — if you knew how to read them — registered events. Tavren had once called them "the world's palimpsest," and the name had lodged in Wenrel's mind. He reached toward the vine with reverence, not thinking in words but in careful touch. The leaves were cool, and when his fingertips closed, a soft choir of impressions unstitched itself in his head — a market bell, the creak of a cart, a laugh. They were not the vine's memories as much as the impressions it had taken on: sensory residues of human life.
Lysara's voice was quiet. "Veilcraft begins as listening. You do not coax; you attend. Let the perception widen without forcing it." Her words were prescriptive and patient, a manual for a thing that had no manuals.
He tried. At first the impressions were diffuse, like a crowded painting smeared by rain. Then Wenrel let go of wanting results. He let the memory-chorus wash over him, and — as if a door in the air had been nudged — the cadence returned: the faint counterbeat that had answered the shadow. He felt it slip into his awareness and, with it, an understanding so small it barely fit into a thought: shadows leaned on what people forgot. They did not prey only on light; they fed where recollection thinned.
That assertion was more like a discovery than a fact. Wenrel said nothing aloud. Kael, who had been watching from the garden ropewalk, broke into a grin that tried to be joking and failed. "You're getting weird in that good way. Don't get even weirder."
They had just started to laugh when the sound came: an alarm-bell from the lower terraces, three short peals followed by a long, keening note that set dogs to baying and older women muttering names under their breath. Tavren's face changed in a way Wenrel had learned to read — from calm to sharpened concern. "Mourners," he said. The word, when spoken, seemed to make the air colder.
They ran. The terraces blurred; hands grabbed ropes and hauled, and the village split into motions that had been practiced in the old, hushbound drills. Lysara slid into position with the economy of someone who had seen too many dawns of violence. Kael moved like a live wire, stumbling but fierce. Wenrel's pulse hammered different rhythms against the new cadence he had learned to hear.
The Mourner took shape at the rim of a lower terrace — larger than the last thing Wenrel had seen, a rolling absence that ate the color out of the air. But this Mourner did not move blindly. Its surface churned with stolen echoes: slivers of laughter, a child's lullaby, a merchant's bartering. Those stolen pieces of life made it clever: it would mimic a voice to draw a person out, it would make an empty doorway feel like home to an unwary traveler.
A shriek cut the morning. Down beneath them, near the market, a little girl had been lured by a voice that sounded like her mother calling. She stood at the edge of the stall, frozen, while the Mourner bunched like a dark muscle, preparing to slide and take the child's shadow.
Lysara tensed. "Hold the line!" she barked. Men with poles and lanterns formed a ragged cordon. They tried to beat the darkness back with light and noise — old, practical defenses — but the Mourner simply folded away from the lanter's glare and reemerged where light was weak. It was a predator of contours.
Wenrel did not think of fear so much as of an unbearable responsibility that had the texture of a weight pressed to his sternum. The cadence called him forward. He tasted the memory of the market bell he'd felt inside the vine and caught the echo of the child's newest laughter — a small, high thread. He reached inward, not to the vine this time but to the memory-song that rode in that small laughter. He felt for its tether: where that child's memory attached to the world.
He had only a sliver of what would be called skill; mostly it was raw and embarrassing in its infancy. He opened his perception like a little window and slid the song through until he touched the child's shadow, and then — like a craftsman laying a cord — he burned an instant of the market bell into that tether. A memory-anchoring, nothing more: a bright pulse that hummed in the child's shadow and made it coherent to the world.
The Mourner moved to take the shadow and halted as if struck by something cold and dense. The air quivered. For a breath, the darkness balked, slowed. Wenrel felt the cost immediately: the strain scraped at the rim of his perception, made the edges of the terrace tremble. His throat tightened; a high ringing started at the back of his skull. He clung to the cadence and pushed a second, smaller memory into the tether — the child's own laughter, preserved in the vine-echo he had felt earlier.
The Mourner recoiled as if stung. A shriek of frustration tore from it and, for the first time, the villagers saw an intelligence vulnerable to a very simple thing: remembered being. The monster shrank back toward a broken archway and, with a reluctant, sighing ripple, vanished into the shade between terraces.
Silence folded over them like wet cloth. The girl collapsed into the arms of someone — her mother, then, not a phantom — and began to sob. Kael laughed, half-crying, and shoved his hands into Wenrel's shoulder in a fierce, rough-hearted hug. "You did it," he said. "You—" He broke off, face too open. "You're a freakin' miracle, Wenrel."
Wenrel could only stand there, fingers numb, eyes wet but not from tears. He had saved a life and, with it, traded a part of himself into the world's ledger. Lysara stepped forward and placed her hand on Wenrel's shoulder — the touch neither chiding nor indulgent. "You helped," she said. "But listen: this is not mastery. It is a bruise. The more you use it, the more the world will take back. Do not let that hunger for effect become your substitute for judgment."
Later, beneath the arch where the Mourner had withdrawn, Veyra Lysand of the Memory Wardens appeared — small, precise, spectacles bright with the reflection of sunlight. She smelled faintly of ink and old paper. Her hands moved with a scribe's care, and she examined the hollow where the Mourner had pressed its absence, fingers tracing the air as if reading from an invisible palimpsest.
"This residue," she murmured, and Wenrel leaned forward at the single word. Residue — the slight, tenacious imprint left when something tried to efface a thing. She produced a small recorder and pressed it to the carved vine. When she replayed the sound, it sounded not like the market bell but like a stuttering of voices, offset by a low, impossible hum. Wenrel's vision shivered for a moment, and in that fissure he saw — or thought he saw — a geometry that felt wrong to look at: loops within loops and a thin, vertical seam, like a stitch in the sky.
Veyra's brow pinched. "There are palimpsests in places they should not be," she said. "Fragments rewritten on top of something older." Her voice had the flat thrill of someone who had touched a contradiction. "This is anachronistic. Whoever or whatever is doing this is not interested in taking life so much as erasing how life was known."
Her next words were softer. "There are signs elsewhere — symbols carved improperly into timber, patterns in frost where frost should not form. Small things that tell bigger lies."
Wenrel's throat went dry. He remembered, in a way that felt like both dream and command, a sigil: a tiny spiral within a circle, almost invisible on a shard of charred bark. The image lodged behind his eyes like a moth. He reached toward it with memory and touched — and for an instant the terrace fell away.
He was standing in an impossible corridor that smelled of metal and old paper. Lines of cocoons — innumerable, hung like sleeping moons — stretched beyond his sight. Each cocoon hummed in a pitch so low it made his bones ache. Somewhere beyond them, a presence, patient and cognizant and without rancor, spoke without sound: remember.
The vision flamed out as if someone had snapped shut a book. Wenrel staggered, breath shallow. Kael thought he had merely tripped at his feet and laughed too loud as he helped him up. Veyra, though, watched his face with a scholar's interest and no further surprise than someone reading a confirmation.
"You saw it," she said simply. "Good. Keep this to yourself for now. Tell Lysara — and only Lysara. They will need a careful mind." She rolled the small recorder back into her satchel and walked away, her footfalls silent but purposeful.
That night, Wenrel lay awake in a bed that smelled of lavender and woodsmoke. He turned the spiral-sigil over in his head, tasting the syllable of its implied command: remember. The cadence that had once answered the shadow now crawled under his ribs like a second pulse. He understood — only dimly — that memory and identity were not mere interior matters; they were structural to how Sunspire held itself together. He also understood, with the plainness of a thing that will not be denied, that someone or something out beyond the terraces was not content with devouring shade. They were unstitiching how things were remembered.
He slept at last, and in the thin, unreliable place that separates sleep from the first waking, an image pressed itself against the inside of his eyelids: the vertical seam again, the endless cocoons, and a single, slow swing as if someone were rocking a cradle that contained a universe. A wordless imperative echoed: remember — but in a way that implied there were those who wanted very much for things to be unremembered.
Wenrel woke clutching at the residue of that image. He did not know how to claim it or who to tell. He only knew, with a trembling clarity that made his fingers ache, that what he had done that morning would not be the last time his memory would be currency. He had been given a small, dangerous instrument. Somewhere in the weave of things, a seam had begun to fray.
Outside, Sunspire moved on. Merchants replaced the stall awnings, children returned to their games, and the Titan Trees shifted under the afternoon sun. The village would speak of the boy who had steadied a shadow. There would be gratitude and, perhaps, a tenderness that could shore them for a little while.
But under the ordinary hum, something patient had noticed that someone had listened. And patient things often keep score.