Forgrace

The fog outside hadn't lifted.

Not since he'd woken in this body.

It clung to the world like a second skin, thicker near the ground, rising in slow, lazy tendrils that licked the broken cobblestones. The buildings leaned in on either side of the narrow lane, their walls swollen with moisture and time, shutters nailed closed, their windows like blind eyes.

Keiran stepped outside the tenement for the first time since waking.

The air was cold and damp, brushing against his skin with a strange familiarity—like it had known him once, and now refused to greet him.

He kept his hands in his coat pockets. The burn-mark on his wrist—the curved line given in the dark beneath the building—was still fresh. Not red. Not scabbed. But visible in ways that weren't just physical.

He could feel it now and then. Like someone tugging a thread inside his chest.

He didn't know what it meant.

He didn't know who had given it.

But something had changed since that night.

People were noticing him.

As he passed by the corner near the trash alley, a woman hanging laundry stepped back into her doorway. A child drawing with chalk stopped, tilted her head, then erased her marks with her sleeve.

At the edge of the alley, Keiran stopped.

A man sat slumped against the wall, wrapped in layers of threadbare rags. One hand clutched a tin bowl, empty. His hair was matted grey, and his beard hung in a nest across his chest.

But his eyes—

One was glazed with blindness. But the other gleamed violet. So bright it caught the foglight.

Keiran kept walking.

"Does it ache yet?" the man rasped, voice rough with dust.

Keiran froze.

The man didn't look at him. Just shifted slightly, adjusting his grip on the bowl.

"Where they burned it," he muttered. "First it itches. Then it sings."

Keiran turned slowly.

The man's blind eye blinked. The violet one did not.

"What are you talking about?"

A wet cough, then a smile cracked through his beard. "The mark, boy. The mark. You think you're the first to come out of that house breathing that?"

Keiran's blood cooled.

He took a step forward. "You've seen it before."

The man chuckled. A sharp, birdlike sound. "Seen. Dreamed. Fled from it."

"From what?"

The beggar finally looked at him—fully, directly.

"The Serpent you carry."

Keiran stepped back.

The man's eye darted toward his coat sleeve.

"It's incomplete," he said. "But it's waking. You've heard it, haven't you? In the bones of the walls."

"What is it?" Keiran asked.

The man shook his head. "I only know what we were told to forget."

His voice dropped. He leaned in slightly.

"Don't let the Forgers find you first. They don't ask. They don't wait. If they see that mark—"

"—they'll tear it from you. Even if they have to take your spine with it."

Keiran's hand instinctively moved to his sleeve, shielding the burn beneath the cloth.

He wanted to ask more.

But when he blinked, the man was gone.

The bowl lay on the ground, still empty. Steam curled where his body had been.

Keiran stood there for a long time, the mist curling around his boots.

By the time he returned to the tenement, the street had emptied.

Even the birds were gone.

Something about the fog had changed—it was no longer silent. Now it hummed. A low, almost musical tone that came and went like breath.

Inside the building, everything looked the same, but the shadows moved too quickly, and the floor creaked a beat too slow after his steps.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor.

There, nailed to his door, was an envelope.

Grey parchment. No wax. Just a single word scrawled across the front.

Keiran.

He stared at it, heart thudding in his chest.

No one here should know that name. No one.

He snatched the envelope and stepped inside, locking the door behind him.

Inside the envelope: a slip of folded vellum, dry and sharp-edged.

"Subject 3C —

You are summoned under ordinance 42-Delta for review and evaluation.

Arrival expected by second chime.

Noncompliance will be noted.

– District Sentinel Order"

No explanation.

Just expectation.

Beneath the main text, stamped into the bottom corner, was a faint grey seal: a simple hourglass inside a box.

He'd never seen it before. But it pulsed faintly when he touched it.

Something deep inside him stirred.

And then—without a knock or a creak—someone slid a second object under the door.

A badge.

Metal. Round. No crest. No name.

Just a single sigil etched into it:

Two circles. A line down the middle.

The mark from the basement.

Keiran picked it up carefully.

It was warm.

And on the back, written in faint, almost invisible script:

If it speaks again, bring it with you.

Keiran left just before the second chime.

No one saw him go.

The mist parted for him, curling in ways it shouldn't—like it recognized something in him now.