There was a dampness to the stone in Tallowmere that never quite dried.
It clung to the skin, seeped into your lungs, crept between your ribs like moss taking root. Noah had lived in it long enough to forget what clean air felt like. Tallowmere wasn't a place you escaped. You adjusted. Molded to it. Let it claim your name and call it faith. He had learned the rhythm of the breath it stole from him, learned how to match it.
He sat up slowly, still wrapped in his thin blanket of threadbare weave, and waited for the ache in his shoulder to ease. The pain came from a memory he no longer held, a wound that didn't scar right. Maybe a Rite, maybe a fall, or maybe something worse.
The cold of the dormitory made Noah shiver. It was cold in a different way. Not the usual breath-fog chill of canyon air and Vein seeping through the cracks, but something slower. Heavier.
The others stirred around him in silence. Dozens of bodies — orphans, marked pilgrims, Choirless wanderers — sharing a single stone floor, separated by hanging curtains, mats of pressed moss, and thin layers of cloth used as bedding. All laid out in quiet reverence, like offerings that knew better than to speak.
They called it the Stonewomb.
The name had always made Noah uneasy. A womb meant birth. Beginning. Nothing in this place ever began.
He dressed without thought. Robes of faded gray, stitched with a dozen different hands. He moved without sound, feet slipping across worn bone tiles as the bells began to ring above — soft, hollow chimes that rolled down the cathedral's spine.
The others began to rise. None of them spoke.
Speaking here was for confession. For pain. Or for those with enough weight behind their words to survive what followed.
Noah didn't speak.
Not in the Womb. Not in the Terrace. Not in the Market.
That was the lie that kept him breathing.
He crouched beside his cot and pressed two fingers to the edge of the floor tile. The stone was loose. With slow, practiced care, he pulled it free and revealed the Ledger.
Wrapped in oilskin. Bound in a torn scrap of priestcloth. Tied shut with a thread that once belonged to someone else.
He didn't open it.
Not yet.
The other residents passed him in solemn processions, heading toward the upper levels of the city — toward incense prayers, whispered sermons, flesh-stitched rituals. They carried small relics in their palms like children clutching broken toys. Talismans of bone, tongue-stamped parchment, braided hair tokens. All of it meaningless.
But they believed. That made it dangerous.
Noah left last, as always. Unseen. Unimportant.
The name they called him here was Nol.
A thin name. Easy to say. Easy to forget.
He had no memory of where he got it. Maybe he gave it to himself. Maybe someone else whispered it into his mouth when he arrived, and he just nodded.
It fit the kind of boy who never spoke back.
Tallowmere stretched upward like a fractured spine. The old city had been built down into the canyon — layer upon layer of stone, flesh and Vein-root. No one remembered when the Vein began growing through the stone. The Seam called it sanctified. Others just called it alive. What was once holy had rotted into necessity. Shrines turned to sleep halls. Temples to kitchens. Markets to harvest pits.
Out the eastward arch, where the steps forked: one path for prayer, one for errands. Noah passed the first spiral stair without ascending. He didn't attend sermons anymore.
Not since Avael started looking at him during the rites. Her eyes lingered too long, her smile knowing. Seamstress of Song, they called her. Gentle hands, quiet voice, a face like forgiveness stitched too tight.
She scared him more than anything else in this place.
So he slipped past the upper terraces and made his way to the lower causeway, where the Needle Market would just be waking.
The air was sharper here. Closer to the edge of the canyon, where wind sliced through the hanging banners and carried the scent of rusted incense and damp relic bone.
Vendors were unrolling their wares — half-awake, twitching with last-night's stimroot or shivering from too little Vein exposure. A man with no tongue laid out preserved glyph-skulls. A girl in ash-veils adjusted her pet cage, where a severed hand twitched softly against its chains.
Noah didn't look at them. Just kept walking, slipping through the fog and crowd like water through cloth.
He stopped at Kell's stall. It was tucked beneath the rusted ribcage of an old bell-bridge, halfway down the eastern slope. Not much to look at — a tattered awning, a flatstone table, and a scatter of incense-burnt parchment marks.
The Riteforger wasn't there. Only the mark — a string of red prayer beads laid in the shape of a broken circle. That meant the package was beneath the table.
Noah ducked down, retrieved it: a wrapped parcel, faintly warm, light as air. No tag, no seal.
The usual kind of danger.
He began his walk across the Spine Bridge, where the wind pulled at robes and the canyon gaped beneath.
It was there that he felt it — a wrongness. Subtle. Not loud. Not sharp. But present, like a weight shifting in the air. Like a step missed on stairs. A sound that didn't belong. Not heard, exactly, but noticed. Like the air changed shape behind him. Eyes. Watching. Not many. Just one. Still. Unblinking. He slowed. One foot grazing stone. Shoulders tense. Turning slightly — but not all the way. There was no sound. No breath. No motion. Only that feeling. That pressure. That wrongness.
There was a girl standing near the edge of the bridge.
Gray robes, like the rest. Thin. Tall for her age. One eye veined red like a cracked lens. Skin pale with canyon dust.
No fear in her expression. Only stillness.
He didn't recognize her.
Then she said:
"That's not your name."
Noah stopped.
The wind caught the edge of his robe.
"You're not Nol."
The girl's voice wasn't accusing. Just… quiet. Honest in a way that made his bones shift.
She stepped closer. Her face looked like something from a forgotten life — a painting seen before sleep, or a voice heard underwater.
"You were with us. In the Fold."
Her voice was soft. Not whispering – but near it. Careful, like she was afraid the air might cut her words to pieces.
"You told her you'd come back."
She wasn't looking at him. Just standing still – arms tucked in, sleeves pulled over her hands, as if holding onto the words she hadn't said yet.
He didn't move. Didn't answer.
The wind howled between them. Cold and sharp, like something trying to cut them apart.
Then she turned and walked away. Not quickly, not angrily, just… like she already knew he wouldn't follow.
Noah stood there for a while. Long enough for the wind to rise again. Long enough for her footsteps to disappear down the corridor's curve.
He didn't call after her. Didn't even try.
But he stayed standing, like maybe he'd changed his mind five seconds too late – and refused to admit it.
That night, in the dark of the Stonewomb, Noah sat with the Ledger in his lap.
It was open. He hadn't opened it.
The pages were blank.
Then they weren't.
On it was one sentence, written in ink the color of dried blood:
She dies here, if she remembers too much.
Noah didn't sleep.
Not that night.
Maybe not the next.