The sword graveyard lay silent as always—windless, breathless, frozen in its own long decay.
Raen returned before dawn, his injured leg dragging behind him in the cold mist. His hands were bandaged, and his eyes were hollow from a night of fevered dreams. Yet, despite the weariness gripping every joint in his body, his mind burned with something unfamiliar: clarity.
He could still hear the whisper from last night. It wasn't a voice exactly—but a feeling, a pressure. Something old and sharp and deeply wounded, like the echo of a scream that had never stopped ringing.
He stopped before the same buried sword. It was dull, bent at the tip, the leather on the hilt long gone. Nothing about it should've mattered.
But when he knelt beside it, he felt it again—that faint tremor in the air, like steel remembering the moment it died.
Raen placed his hand on the hilt. "You're still here," he whispered. "Then I'm listening."
The world shifted.
Everything around him—the graveyard, the sky, even his breath—froze.
Then a flame roared into being within his mind.
A man stood at the center of it. His body was clad in blackened armor, one arm entirely burned away, the other clutching a sword that didn't exist. His face was lined with ash, his mouth unmoving—but Raen heard the voice in his bones.
"You do not listen. You reach. You grab. Like a thief. Like a coward."
Raen flinched. "Then teach me how to do it right."
"Why should I?"
"Because I didn't die," Raen said, jaw clenched. "Everyone left me to rot. My clan. My blood. Even the wind stopped noticing me. But I'm still here. So if all that pain meant anything, then I'll carve something out of it."
Silence.
Then the ash-man's eye flickered once.
"Then stand."
Raen blinked. "What?"
"Stand. If you cannot stand on a broken leg, you will never carry a broken sword."
Pain flared through his side as he tried. The muscle refused. The spine twisted. Sweat soaked through his tunic. His body screamed, his mind blurred.
But he stood.
Wobbling. Bleeding. Shaking. But upright.
Kavran stepped forward in the vision. Or was it Raen's soul? Or the blade's?
"Good. Then kneel— not to me, but to the art you claim to want."
Raen obeyed.
Kavran raised his burned hand and pressed two fingers to Raen's forehead. The heat was searing, but not fleshly. It burned something inside.
In that moment, Raen saw:
A woman carving blade forms into tree bark with a broken finger.
A child swinging a sword until his arms bled, screaming into a windless night.
A battlefield of corpses, and one man standing—alone, his sword rusted but held high.
"The sword remembers. It never forgets its wielder. But it will not forgive the unworthy."
The memory shattered.
Raen gasped, collapsing into the dust. He coughed blood. His vision flickered. But this time… he felt stronger.
Not healed.
But awakened.
---
Later that day, Nira found him lying beneath the rusting blades, skin pale, hands still trembling.
"Gods, Raen! You're bleeding again," she said, rushing to him.
"I learned something," he muttered through cracked lips.
"You learned how to die."
He smiled faintly. "Not yet. But I'm closer to the sword than I've ever been."
She sighed, pulling him up, her hands rough but careful.
"Promise me," she said, "you won't lose yourself chasing voices in metal."
Raen looked toward the sky. It was turning gold now, the sun spilling light through the broken sword hilts.
"I don't chase them," he said quietly. "They chase me."
---
In the distance, beneath the graveyard, something stirred.
And far away, a woman with shattered twin blades whispered to her master, "He's begun to listen."
The Crimson Fang had marked him.
And the Sibilant Coil had already begun preparing the next fragment.
The true path of the whisper had only just begun.