The Ashenflow never truly killed anyone.
It only borrowed.
Bodies went in bloated with fear or drink or both, and days later they washed up somewhere downstream: pale, waterlogged, strangely serene, as though the river had whispered secrets while they drowned. The slum children called them "river saints." They stripped the corpses of rings, boots, and anything else worth a crust of bread, then left the saints smiling at the sky.
Vett woke to teeth nibbling his ear.
A rat the size of a house-cat had mistaken his lobe for breakfast. He sat up slowly. The movement tore open the crusted letters on his chest; fresh blood seeped warm beneath the rags someone had wrapped around him in the night. WHORE, the wound still read, though the edges had begun to blacken.
He was lying on a sandbar of soot and broken glass, half a mile downstream from the bridge where Lilith's boys had thrown him. Dawn was a bruise-coloured smear above the smokestacks. The air stank of burnt fat and wet dog.
The rat squeaked indignantly and fled.
Vett pressed two fingers to the carved word, testing the depth of the pain. It answered eagerly, bright and singing, like a bell struck inside his bones.
[Authority +0.3%]
[Total: 1.3%]
A soft sound—almost a sigh—escaped his lips. Pleasure, unmistakable. He hated how good it felt. He loved how much he hated it.
Footsteps crunched behind him.
"Still breathing, pretty boy?"
The voice was old, cracked, female. Vett turned.
Granny Mael stood ankle-deep in the shallows, dragging a hook-line baited with a child's shoe. She was eighty if she was a day, skin like boiled leather, one eye milky, the other sharp as a fish-gutting knife. Rumor said she had once been beautiful enough to make dukes weep. Rumor also said she had eaten three of them when beauty stopped paying rent.
She studied him the way a butcher studies a questionable cut of meat.
"Red Lanterns usually finish the job," she rasped. "You must've pissed yourself special for them to gift-wrap you for the river."
Vett bowed his head, water dripping from his hair. "I smiled too much, Grandmother."
Granny Mael barked a laugh that ended in a wet cough. "That'll do it."
She waded closer, hooked finger lifting his chin. Her nail was yellow and split, but the grip was iron.
"Letters still bleeding. Good. Means you ain't dead inside yet." She peered at the carved word. "WHORE. Lilith's handwriting. Girl always did have a poet's touch."
She released him and spat into the river. A glob of pink phlegm floated away like a tiny jellyfish.
"You got somewhere to bleed, boy, or do I leave you for the gulls?"
Vett considered. His attic room had been ransacked weeks ago; the landlord had sold his blanket for gin. The only thing waiting for him there was a noose made from his own belt.
"I have nowhere," he said politely.
Granny Mael nodded as if that was the correct answer.
"Then you got me."
She turned and began walking, dragging the hook-line behind her. After three steps she glanced back.
"Well? River saints don't walk on their own."
Vett rose. His legs shook, but they held. Each step reopened wounds; each wound fed the thing inside him. By the time he caught up, his Authority had crept to 1.6%.
Granny Mael's home was a shack built from shipwrecks and regret. It leaned over the river on stilts made of coffins—real coffins, emptied and turned upright. The door was a church confessional dragged from some ruined cathedral. Inside smelled of tar, dried blood, and something sweet-rotten that might once have been apples.
She pointed to a pallet of straw and sailcloth.
"Lie down before you fall down."
Vett obeyed. The straw prickled his flayed back. Pain flared, exquisite.
[Authority +0.2%]
Granny Mael lit a lantern made from a human skull. The flame danced inside empty eye sockets.
"Take off what's left of your shirt."
He did. The rags peeled away with scabs. Cool air kissed raw flesh; he shivered, half from cold, half from something else entirely.
She produced a jar of something black and viscous—river mud mixed with crematory ash and gods knew what. With two fingers she began packing it into the carved letters.
Vett hissed.
"Good," she muttered. "Hiss louder. Pain keeps the soul from wandering."
The paste burned worse than the knife had. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. He did not wipe them away.
[Authority +0.7%]
[Total: 2.5%]
Granny Mael noticed nothing, or pretended not to. She worked in silence until the word WHORE was a raised black scarab crawling across his chest.
When she finished she sat back on her heels.
"Tell me what you saw when you went under."
Vett blinked. "Saw?"
"Everyone sees something. River shows you the shape of your death if you're lucky. Shows you the shape of your life if you're not."
He remembered darkness, cold, and then—a vast and formless thing uncoiling, wrapping around his heart like a lover who intended never to let go. It had no face, only weight. Only hunger.
"I saw a throne," he said slowly. "Empty. Waiting."
Granny Mael went very still.
"Throne, you say." Her voice dropped to a whisper that scraped like bone on bone. "Describe it."
He tried. Words failed. It was not made of gold or iron or any mortal substance. It simply was—an absence that demanded a presence, a silence that required a scream. Sitting on it would mean owning everything. Kneeling before it would mean surrendering everything. Both prospects had tasted, in that underwater moment, exactly the same.
Granny Mael crossed herself with a hand missing two fingers.
"Some things even the river shouldn't show a body still breathing."
She stood abruptly and shuffled to a shelf of jars. From the highest she took down a small iron box. Inside lay a single black seed, no larger than a child's tooth.
"This grew out of a hanged man's tongue," she said. "Planted it in corpse-soil thirty year ago. Never sprouted. Figured it was waiting for the right kind of rot."
She pressed the seed into the packed wound directly over his heart.
"Keep it warm," she instructed. "Feed it what it asks. Might be it'll grow into something useful. Might be it'll eat you from the inside. Either way, you won't be bored."
Vett felt the seed settle against raw flesh. It pulsed once—curious, tasting.
[Foreign Concept Fragment Detected]
[Resonance: Unknown]
[Authority +0.1%]
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again Granny Mael was watching him with something that might have been fear.
"Boy," she said quietly, "what in the nine hells are you?"
Vett smiled. It hurt his split lip. The expression felt natural anyway.
"Someone who finally found the right kind of pain," he answered.
Outside, the rain began again, drumming on the coffin-stilts like impatient fingers.
That night he dreamed of Lilith vi Rosso.
She stood above him in a room made of mirrors, coat open, boots shining. In every reflection she held a different tool: whip, brand, scalpel, smile. She did not speak. She only looked down at him where he knelt, bleeding and grateful, and in the dream he felt his Authority climb and climb until the mirrors cracked from the pressure of what he was becoming.
He woke gasping, soaked in sweat and someone else's blood—his own, probably. The seed over his heart had split. A thin green shoot, no longer than a fingernail, curled against his skin like a question mark.
[Authority +1.4%]
[Total: 4.0%]
Granny Mael sat in the corner, whittling a bone into a flute. She did not look up when he stirred.
"Four percent," she said to the bone. "Faster than any Bearer I ever heard of. Whatever you are, boy, you're drinking pain like mother's milk."
Vett touched the green shoot. It twitched under his fingertip, greedy.
"I need more," he whispered.
The old woman finally met his eyes.
"Then you'd best start walking, little saint. Blackthorn's full of women happy to give it to you. Question is how many pieces you'll be in when you decide you've had enough."
She tossed him a bundle wrapped in oilskin: a threadbare coat two sizes too big, a pair of boots with mismatched soles, and a knife—clean this time, newly sharpened.
"First rule of surviving the Concepts," she said. "Never go barefoot into a war you intend to win."
Vett stood. The coat hung on his narrow frame like a prophecy. He bowed low, forehead brushing the floor in front of her ruined feet.
"Thank you, Grandmother."
Granny Mael snorted. "Thank me when you're still sane enough to remember my name."
He stepped out into the dawn.
Behind him the shack creaked, coffin-stilts settling deeper into the hungry river.
Ahead, Blackthorn Slum waited—factories belching corpse-smoke, alleys sharp with knives and cruel laughter, and somewhere in the crimson heart of it all, a woman with rosewater perfume and a smile that could carve souls.
Vett pulled the coat tighter. The green shoot over his heart uncurled another fraction, tasting the air.
He smiled, small and secret and terrifying.
The river had given him back.
Now it was time to start collecting interest.