The pain was a country, and Cassian was its only citizen.
It lived in the ruin of his left arm, a topography of knotted, weeping scar tissue that had once been the Sigil of Concord. Now it was just the Brand. It didn't throb; it gnawed. A cold, insectile chewing at the edges of his soul, constant as the tide. It was worst just before dawn, when the world held its breath. As if the fading night gave the pain more room to breathe.
He lay not in a bed, but in a nest of foul straw in the loft of a derelict riverside tannery. The stink of old piss, rot, and chemical vats was a perfume he'd grown accustomed to. It masked other smells. His own, for one. The smell of the Brand, for another—a metallic ozone tinged with salt, like a storm over a bloodied sea.
A skittering sound, soft as rat claws on bone, echoed from the far corner where the shadows were too deep. Cassian didn't turn his head. He didn't need to. He could feel it coalescing—a prickle across the Brand, a sudden drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the pre-dawn chill.
God-Whisper.
He called them Ethereals. The tannery's previous occupant, a beggar with milky eyes, had called them "the price-takers." He'd been found frozen solid in the height of summer, a look of ecstatic terror on his face.
Cassian slowly sat up, the straw crackling. Every movement was a calculated economy. Broken ribs, mostly healed, still sent a hot wire of complaint through his side. His right hand found the hilt of the weapon beside him—not a proper sword yet, but a length of rust-pitted ship's iron he'd hammered roughly straight and edge-sharpened. He'd named it Pilgrim. It was heavy, brutal, and undemanding.
In the corner, the darkness thickened, then flowed. It resolved into a spindly, child-sized shape, but all wrong. Its limbs were too many and bent at angles that suggested snapped twigs. It had no face, just a smooth, pale surface where one should be, but Cassian felt its attention like a physical weight on the Brand. A low, wet gurgle emanated from it, the sound of water choking a drain.
Hunger. Not for his flesh, but for the specific, refined agony the Brand represented. The suffering of betrayal. The marrow-deep taste of a shattered covenant.
"Not today," Cassian rasped, his voice unused gravel.
He pushed himself to his feet, the world tilting for a dizzy second before the iron discipline he'd forged in the Eclipse Legion's pits locked his spine straight. The Ethereal skittered forward, a blur of unnatural motion. The air around it warped, a heat-haze of absolute cold.
Cassian didn't wait. Waiting was death. He swung Pilgrim in a short, horizontal arc, putting the weight of his shoulders into it. The iron didn't pass through the creature so much as shatter its temporary form. There was a sound like breaking icicles and a psychic shriek that vibrated in his teeth, not his ears. The form dissolved into wisps of black vapor that stank of grave-mould and regret, sucked back into the nothingness from which it came.
The effort cost him. A fresh, sharp agony lanced from the Brand up into his shoulder, and a trickle of that thin, black vapor seeped from the scar tissue. The "bleeding" would attract more, eventually. It always did. He was a lighthouse in a sea of shadows, and his pain was the beacon.
Dawn's first grey light began to finger its way through the broken slats of the tannery roof. Time to move. He had a purpose today, fragile as it was. A rumor, bought with the last of his coppers from a one-eyed riverman in a stinking tavern two nights prior. A man in the Mudway district was asking about "sunken stones" and "old prayers." A scholar, maybe. Or a fool. Either could be useful.
Cassian shrugged into his "armor"—a quilted gambeson so stained it was beyond color, reinforced with pieces of boiled leather scavenged from a dozen different corpses. Over it, he slung a tattered cloak the hue of mud. He was a ghost, a smear on the landscape of Veridia's underbelly, the district they called the Sump.
Stepping out of the tannery, the world greeted him with its own particular misery. The Sump was Veridia's bile-duct, a maze of sagging wooden buildings on stilts over a sluggish, oily canal. The air was a broth of fog, coal-smoke, and the pervasive sweet-rot of the marsh. Above it all, gleaming like a mocking dream, rose the distant spires of the Sunspire and the Silver Citadel, catching the first true rays of the sun. The seat of Valerius the Golden. The heart of the lie.
Cassian kept his head down, moving with the loose, rolling gait of a laborer, but his eyes missed nothing. A cutpurse eyeing him from an alley decided against it after meeting Cassian's flat, dead-eyed stare. A city watch patrol in their polished, blue-enameled breastplates clanked past on the elevated walkway, laughing. They didn't glance down into the Sump. They never did.
He found the place as described: a leaning structure called The Drowned Sage, more a shack than an inn. Inside, the gloom was thick enough to chew. A few haggard figures hunched over bowls of gruel. Cassian took a seat in the darkest corner, his back to the wall, Pilgrim leaning against his leg beneath the table.
He didn't have to wait long. The man was out of place. His clothes were worn but of decent cut, frayed at the edges from travel, not poverty. He had the pinched, nervous look of someone who lived more in books than in the world. He was talking in a low, urgent voice to the innkeeper, holding up a small, water-worn stone with a faint spiral carving.
"…just need to know if you've seen others like it. From before the Unification. It's for a… a study."
The innkeeper, a woman with arms thick as hawsers, wiped a tankard with a filthy rag and shrugged. "Looks like a rock. We got plenty."
Cassian watched. The scholar's name was Kaelen, according to the riverman. He was desperate, and desperation was a scent sharper than the Sump's rot. He was also being watched. Two men by the door, their dull eyes and the tell-tale, too-casual grips on their belt knives marked them as opportunists. Wolves scenting a weak lamb.
Kaelen, failing to get answers, turned to leave, clutching his stone like a holy relic. The two men pushed off the wall, falling into step behind him.
Cassian let out a long, slow breath. He didn't care about the scholar. But the stone… a pre-Unification artifact. A piece of the world before Valerius. A fragment of a truer past. It was a thread. And in the absolute darkness of his existence, even the faintest thread was something to grasp.
He left a tarnished copper on the table—overpaying—and slid out after them.
The confrontation happened in a narrow alley between two weeping brick walls. Kaelen was backed against a slimy surface, the two thugs advancing.
"The rock's pretty," one sneered, a lanky man with a pox-scarred face. "What else you got for us, scholar?"
"I have nothing! Please!"
Cassian stepped into the alley mouth, blocking the light. "He's telling the truth," Cassian said, his voice low. "He has nothing you want."
Pox-Face turned, his knife flashing. "Piss off, gutter-scum. This ain't your pickin's."
They rushed him. It was not a fight; it was butchery. Cassian didn't duel. He broke the first man's knife-arm with a precise, crushing strike from Pilgrim's pommel, then drove his forehead into the bridge of the man's nose with a wet crunch. The second, wider and slower, swung a cudgel. Cassian caught the blow on the thickest part of his left forearm, on the unmarked flesh above the Brand. The impact sent a jarring shock up his arm, but he barely flinched. Before the thug could recover, Cassian drove Pilgrim point-first into the soft hollow of his throat. The man dropped, gurgling, his life pattering out on the filthy stones.
Pox-Face was writhing, whimpering. Cassian looked at him for a moment, then turned his back. Let the Sump have him.
Kaelen was pressed against the wall, vomit on his chin, eyes wide with a terror that had now found a new focus: Cassian. "Y-you… you killed them."
"They were dead the moment they followed you," Cassian said, wiping Pilgrim's crude blade on the dead man's tunic. He held out his hand. "The stone."
Trembling, Kaelen placed the carved rock in his palm. It was cool, heavier than it looked. The spiral seemed to shift in the dim light. For a fleeting second, the gnawing pain in his Brand… lessened. Not much. A drop of water on a desert stone. But it was the first respite he'd felt in a year.
He closed his fist around it. "What do you know of the old gods, scholar?"
Kaelen swallowed, his academic curiosity warring with his survival instinct. "M-more than is safe. They… they weren't gods of light. They were gods of balance. Depth. The counter-weight. Before the Golden Lie…"
Cassian's eyes snapped to his. "Say that again."
"The… the Golden Lie. It's what my mentor called Valerius's reign. A light that blinds, a peace that suffocates. He was researching… he said the old gods weren't slain. They were drowned. Silenced. And their silence is making the world sick. It's why…" He trailed off, looking at the two corpses.
"It's why what?" Cassian's voice was a blade.
Kaelen met his gaze, a spark of desperate courage in his eyes. "It's why the nightmares are becoming real. It's why people see things in the mist. The world is missing its shadow, and the void… is leaking in."
Cassian stared at him. The scholar saw. He knew. He had words for the unspeakable horror that dogged Cassian's steps.
He tossed the stone back to Kaelen, who fumbled it. "You have a place to stay?"
Kaelen shook his head, mute.
"You do now." Cassian turned and began walking out of the alley. He didn't look back. He didn't need to. The thread was in his hand. The scholar, with his books and his fear, would follow. He was a man drowning, and Cassian, the damned, was the only solid thing in a sea of lies.
Above them, the spires of the Silver Citadel shone with a pristine, hateful light. Cassian touched the Brand on his arm, the pain flaring in familiar defiance.
The hunt was no longer just for survival. It had its first, fragile direction.
He had found a witness.