The rain in Blackhaven never fell clean. It carried the taste of iron and old smoke, sliding down the cracked windows of the third-floor room Elias Vorn had rented for three months and three days. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed, elbows on his knees, staring at the unfinished letter on the desk. The ink had dried hours ago. He still had not signed it.
Outside, the city hummed with the low, constant noise of trams and distant factory whistles. Somewhere below, a woman laughed too loudly, the sound cutting through the walls like a knife. Elias barely noticed. His attention remained fixed on the small, tarnished silver pendant resting in his open palm. The surface was smooth except for a single carved symbol he could not read—an angular mark that looked almost like a broken wing.
He had found it the night the fever took his sister.
