It was his eighty-sixth unveiling, and the Carver's hands had known the weight of the needle better than they had ever known the heartbeat in his chest. The air in the Bough was cold and sacred, smelling of stone and stillness, and the sharp, sweet trace of something someone's mother or lover must have sung of at least once in their life.
Sila's Willow was neither tree nor river. It was a concept, at best. None of the current generation had ever truly seen it. It filled the endless space with silent, silver streams cascading from suspended branches. From it, the Carver had learned purpose. From within its waves, he had watched worlds fracture and fall away. For seventy years, his had been the only hand steady enough, quiet enough, to translate its silent verdict onto skin.
The child on the plinth, a boy, all sharp angles and terrified hope, shivered. He did not look at the parents behind the screen. The Carver already knew the shape of their hope. He could see how they must have prayed for a Starbinder, or if they were more humble, a Hearthstirrer. He laid his hand on the smooth, humming stream and listened for the soul's signature.
It was simple. Clean lines. Quiet corners. The blueprint of a Carver like himself appeared before his eyes, a pattern of useful squares. He allowed himself a moment of weariness. Another soul soon to be mortared over and forgotten. Like himself, another destined to live a dim life unless it found purpose. But the Carver knew the truth: this one would find none. The Willow would not reach out, and the people below had long forgotten their roots.
He took up the Star-seam, a sliver of condensed starlight, positioned its cool non-point against the boy's shoulder and drew the first line.
And the Willow screamed.
His mother had always said the Willow sang her name before she was born. It was the only thing she ever said about her unveiling before his nineteenth year took him from her grasp. She would get that distant look, fingertips brushing the silver Truthbearer sigil coiled around her wrist, and whisper it like a secret.
It sang my name.
He had dreamed of that song for years. Something holy. Something clean. Something he thought he would never tire of.
The Carver was wrong.
It was not a sound, not truly. It was a psychic shriek that sheared through the connection. A choked, grinding sob, felt in the teeth and spine more than heard. The water that should have flowed with liquid starlight turned murky, thick as lamp oil. Where it should have reflected the constellations, it swallowed the light. The Carver had never known agony like this, never known a wrongness so deep. His lungs caved inward. His hands, steady for seven decades, jerked like a hanged man's foot.
For a moment he knelt there, tree bleeding, arms shaking. The needle had torn through the Bough's chasm. He watched as the clean, geometric lines of the Carver sigil convulsed, twisted in on themselves, and collapsed into a spiraling knot of nothing. The light from the needle was sucked into the mark, and then it went dark, leaving a hole in the boy's future where a sigil should have been.
A raw, animal sound tore from the boy's throat. Chaos descended on Akhnara's Conclave, but the Carver ignored it all. His gaze was on his hands. On the Willow. Where his palm had rested, the stream had blighted. Terror coursed through him at the realization that this was no simple corruption. The stream had come undone.
Grey wisps rose from the place where starlight once flowed, and from its center, thin black filaments sprouted, like cracks in ice, except these cracks drank the substance from the air around them.
Sila's Willow was reality to many. Its roots were the first dawn and its branches held the pattern of every soul to come. And now it was sick. Dying. Poisoned from the inside.
Thoughts raced through the Carver's mind too fast to catch. Of all the sigils he had carved in the past decades, were they all tainted? The Lorekeeper of Jinmae, was her knowledge built on lies? If the source of everything was dying, then everything it had ever bestowed was suspect.
He vaguely registered the boy being ushered from the slab he lay weeping on, a glaring absence on his shoulder. He felt the ghost of a corrupted pattern, and in its wrongness there was a terrible, inverted logic. Where a Carver's mark were meant to clarify truth, this was only accretion and falsehood.
A chill that had nothing to do with the Bough settled into his bones. The void on the boy's shoulder was not an absence. It was a reflection of the world's new, decaying state.
His one true mistake that night was not in creating a sigil-less wretch.
It was letting the one honest thing he had ever carved walk out of the Conclave.