The boarding house smelled of boiled cabbage, old wood, and something sour that no amount of open windows could fix.
"This way," Renn said.
He led Zayn up a narrow staircase that sagged in the middle from too many years and not enough repairs. Each step creaked under their weight. The walls were close, stained by smoke and touched with the faint shimmer that said a Thread had once been worked here—sound-dulling, maybe, or heat-holding—but it had faded with time. The house had been important once. Now it was tired.
On the second floor, Renn knocked on a door with peeling green paint. A sliding hatch snapped open at eye level. Two dark eyes peered out, quick and sharp.
"You're late," a woman's voice said. "And you brought trouble."
"I brought rent," Renn said easily, and pinched Zayn's shoulder. "He's quiet, half-broke, and probably Thread-scorched. You like that type."
The eyes narrowed. The hatch snapped shut. Bolts slid; the door opened.
The woman was short and solid, her greying hair bound in a tight knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a plain dress and an expression that had seen every kind of lie. A thin, pale mark circled her wrist where a Thread-binding cuff might have rubbed in the past.
"Name?" she asked Zayn without greeting.
"Zayn Morel," he said.
"Domain?"
Zayn met her gaze. "New," he said. "Unstable."
Her mouth twitched. "Everyone thinks that makes them special."
She stepped closer, raising a hand as if to touch his chest. Zayn's new Thread stirred defensively, coiling tight. The air between her fingers and his shirt tingled.
She frowned. "Feels wrong," she murmured. "Not weak. Not frayed. Just… wrong."
"Null-flare?" Renn suggested. "He was out cold by the south docks. Might've crawled too close to a block."
"Null doesn't make a Thread feel like that," she said. "It usually just makes it feel gone."
Her eyes flicked back up to Zayn's. "You remember anything useful?" she asked him. "Work you've done, people you owe, people who might come asking?"
He considered the question. Fragments shifted uneasily in his head: a mountain, cold wind, three figures at the edge. A council chamber. The smell of smoke. None of them belonged here.
"No one who would find me here," he said.
That, at least, felt true.
"Good," she said. "I'm Mera. I keep this floor full and the Wardens out. Rent is due every fifth day. You cook when it's your turn, you clean your own mess, and if your Thread goes wild, you take it outside before it burns my house down. Understood?"
"Yes," Zayn said.
She studied him one heartbeat longer, then stepped aside. "Room five," she said. "End of the hall. The lock sticks; kick it twice."
Renn clapped him on the shoulder. "See? Easy," he said. "I'll come by tomorrow. There's a place near lower Weir that pays for strong backs and discreet Domains. We'll see which you've got more of."
He headed back down the stairs without waiting for an answer.
Zayn walked the dim corridor to the door marked with a crooked "5". The lock did indeed stick; two sharp kicks loosened it. The room beyond was small and bare: a narrow bed, a cracked basin, a single chair by a window that looked out onto the alley. Light filtered in grey and thin.
He closed the door behind him and leaned against it.
Silence settled, thick and close. Downstairs, someone coughed. Pipes rattled. The city's low hum seeped through the walls.
Zayn crossed to the window. The glass was warped, making the world outside bend and blur. He undid the latch and pushed it open. Cold air washed over his face, carrying the smells of smoke, damp stone, and frying onions from somewhere nearby.
He rested his hands on the sill and looked out.
From this angle, he could see the top of the Weir tower in the distance, its pale light pulsing irregularly against the clouded sky. The sight stirred something like nausea and longing at once. Between here and there, roofs and chimneys crowded together, crisscrossed by clotheslines and ropes. People were moving everywhere, even up here: someone tending a rooftop garden, another hauling water, a pair of children chasing each other along the narrow spine of a wall with terrifying lack of caution.
All of them threaded into the Loom. All of them unaware that a man who had fallen out of it now watched them through warped glass.
He closed his eyes.
Inside, his new Thread waited.
Elric's habit was to listen first: to reach for Memory and let the world answer. Zayn forced himself to approach this differently, slowly. He could not afford to unravel in a boarding house on his first day.
He focused on the knot behind his breastbone. It responded, a coil of dense darkness tightening. The sensation was not like remembering. It was like standing at the edge of a pit and knowing he could make it wider.
Show me, he thought.
The Thread stirred. Instinct guided him to test it on something small, something that would not scream when lost.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the windowsill.
A dead fly lay there, legs curled inward, wings dulled with dust.
Zayn's gaze fixed on it. He reached, not with fingers, but with that new sense, brushing the insect's shape. There was barely anything there: no Thread, no mind, only the faintest residue of a life that had already gone.
He pulled.
The fly vanished.
Not decayed, not disintegrated. It was simply gone, leaving behind a speck of clean wood where it had lain, as if it had never existed. The dust on either side remained undisturbed.
Zayn inhaled sharply.
Nothing in the room changed. The city still murmured. Mera still moved downstairs, doors still banged, voices still rose and fell. But a piece of the world that had been there a moment ago was not there now, and the Loom—if it noticed—made no sign.
His Thread hummed faintly, pleased.
He searched for a backlash: a headache, a nosebleed, a flash of someone else's memories, any of the signs that came with Thread strain in his old life. There was only a faint chill in his fingers and a hollow tick of tiredness behind his eyes.
"You don't record," he said softly to the empty room. "You remove."
He let go of the Thread. It settled reluctantly.
A knock made him start.
"Food," Mera's voice called through the door. "If you want it."
Zayn opened up.
The common room at the end of the hall held a scarred table, four mismatched chairs, and a stove that hissed in the corner. A pot of something thick and pale simmered on top. Two other boarders sat at the table: a middle‑aged man with ink stains on his fingers, and a woman with close‑cropped hair and a bandage around her throat. Both looked up when Zayn entered, weighed him with quick glances, and said nothing.
Mera ladled stew into a chipped bowl and handed it to him. "Sit," she said. "Eat. Then we talk."
The stew was bland but warm. Zayn ate slowly, listening.
"…Council's talking about re‑classifying Hunger," the ink‑stained man was saying to the bandaged woman. "Putting it on the restricted list. Again."
"They can't," she rasped. "Half their own priests use it."
"They'll just license themselves, like they always do."
"You'd think they'd have learned after the last famine," she said.
Zayn's spoon paused halfway to his mouth.
Famine. The word hit like a stone dropped into deep water. The surface of his mind shivered. For a second, the room shifted, overlaid with another: wooden benches in a council hall, maps on the wall, the taste of dust in a king's mouth as he said crop failure instead of starvation.
He squeezed his eyes shut until the vision passed.
When he opened them again, he was back in Mera's boarding house. The woman with the bandaged throat was watching him.
"You look like you just bit a bone," she said. Her voice was rough, as if someone had dragged glass across her vocal cords.
"Headache," Zayn said.
"Everyone's Thread aches in this city," she replied. "Too much pull, too many cuts."
Mera wiped her hands on a cloth and sat opposite Zayn.
"You said no one will come looking for you," she said. "I need to know if that's wishful thinking or experience."
Zayn set his spoon down. "I have… gaps," he said. "Before the docks. Before waking." He searched for words that weren't treason. "I remember enough to be trouble, not enough to be useful."
"What kind of trouble?" Mera asked.
"Questions about the Loom," he said. "Opinions about who should decide what is remembered. It did not end well."
Mera's gaze sharpened. "You were Loomist? Council, church, or something worse?"
"In another place," Zayn said. "Far from here."
Mera studied him for a long moment. Then she nodded once, as if making peace with something she couldn't change.
"Fine," she said. "You're not the first stray to wash up at my door with more history than sense. You keep your head down, you pay rent, you don't bring Wardens here—then your past is your own."
"And if I don't?" Zayn asked.
"Then you're someone else's problem," she said. "Probably in pieces."
The matter settled, conversation drifted. The ink‑stained man complained about new licensing fees for Memory services. The bandaged woman mentioned a rumour that a Tangle‑Seer had arrived in South Weir to inspect the clinics. Mera grunted at both, unconvinced that anything would change.
Zayn listened, filing away names and structures.
Licenses for Domains. Councils that could reclassify entire kinds of people as dangerous with a vote. Churches that sold absolution for Thread abuses. Clinics that treated Fray with pills and beds instead of incense and song.
Different language. Same fear.
Later, back in his small room, he lay on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling.
Rain began to fall, pattering against the window. Somewhere in the city, a long, low horn sounded, followed by the distant clang of metal being struck in regular intervals. Shift change, perhaps, at some factory or Weir facility.
He should sleep, he knew. His body ached with a deep, unfamiliar weariness, like he had fallen a very long way.
But the world outside and the world inside refused to stay quiet.
He turned the day over in his mind, testing the edges of this new place.
Threads open and casual in the street. Null blocks where power went blind. Clinics and licensing offices. Guilds and syndicates, churches and councils. A Weir tower that pulsed like a mechanical heart. A temple that claimed to speak for the Loom. And under it all, graffiti that urged people to cut themselves free.
In his old life, he had raged that those in power did not feel enough. Here, they felt too much and sold the overflow.
He thought of Elric Veyne—of himself—standing on the mountain, refusing binds, letting his Thread fray in an act of defiance and despair. He thought of Marek's scar, Lena's song, Gesh's rust. Of a name dropped like a stone at the bottom of a gorge.
He thought of Renn's easy grin, Mera's sharp eyes, the bandaged woman's rasp, the ink‑stained man's muttering. Of the fly that had never existed.
Zayn turned his head toward the dark window. The reflection there was faint: a thin face, eyes shadowed, hair still damp from river mist. It might have been a stranger's.
"Who am I?" he asked, just above a whisper.
The room did not answer.
But the new Thread shifted, as if the question had brushed against it. A hollow ache opened in his chest. The feeling was not memory. It was hunger.
Not for food, not for comfort. For removal.
This Domain—a shard of the Loom he had chosen or had chosen him—did not care about preserving truth. It was not built to hold stories, to anchor events so they could not be denied. It was built to take away. To carve gaps into the tapestry where inconvenient threads lay.
In a city where everyone feared being altered and recorded, where memories were commodities and addictions, a man who could make things disappear without trace would be priceless.
Or monstrous.
Or both.
Rain beat harder against the glass.
Zayn closed his eyes and tried to sleep, knowing that he would not.
Far away, the Central Weir's light pulsed, tugging Threads across the city in patterns he could not yet read. Nearer, in the High Loomist Temple, Seers might be waking from dreams of strange knots in the tapestry. Somewhere, the Council discussed lists of Domains and their dangers, unaware that a new one had slipped into their world through a broken man's fall.
In a small room in a tired boarding house, that man lay awake, listening to the city and to the quiet hum of his own absence.
He had no intention of being thrown from a mountain again.
Next time, if the world wanted to cut him out, it would have to do it without remembering he had ever been there.