When the Threadless Howl

Dawn tasted of ash that hadn't fallen yet.

I woke with the mirror-boy's eyes already on me, his burned face catching first light like an omen. He sat exactly as I had in sleep—knees drawn up, arms wrapped loose, head tilted just so. But his breathing came too slow. Too old. Like his child-lungs were remembering how to hold centuries.

"You dream loud," he said.

The shard pulsed once against my ribs. Not words anymore—just heat that felt like ownership.

Around us, the threadless children stirred in their clusters. They'd learned to wake without sound, to assess before moving. Even the youngest—barely five summers—opened her eyes like a predator checking for threat before showing consciousness.

I selected five with gestures. The scarred boy. The silent girl. Three others who'd proven quick to learn. They rose like smoke, fell into step behind me as I led them deeper into the forest's throat.

The first lesson was burial.

I kicked leaves over the smallest girl, kept kicking until only the shape of her suggested presence. She held perfect stillness while I walked away. Counted heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. Fifty.

The others watched, waiting for instruction that wouldn't come. In the pack, teachers explained. Out here, understanding came through survival or not at all.

The girl didn't burst free. Didn't dig out. She became the leaves—moving with them, through them, until she stood beside us again. Dirt crowned her hair like blessing.

"The forest teaches through silence," I said. "Through hunger. Through—"

Movement. All five children oriented left before I'd even registered the disturbance. Good. They were learning to feel the world's pulse.

A thornbush shivered. The scarred boy moved to investigate, shadow-quick and twice as quiet. His focus was perfect until the moment it wasn't—thorns caught deep, tore a red line from wrist to elbow.

He didn't cry. These children had learned that tears brought worse than pain.

"Let me see."

I cradled his arm, studied the wound. Long but shallow. It would heal clean if left alone. But the shard stirred against my chest, eager, and the flame came before thought could stop it.

Silver light pooled in my palms. For one breath, I felt it working—flesh knitting, hurt fading. Then the healing twisted.

His fingers began to stretch.

Joints multiplied. Skin took on a sheen like moonlight on water. His smallest finger had already transformed completely—too many bones, too many ways to bend, too beautiful and wrong to be human anymore.

I jerked back, but the damage was done.

"Does it still work?" he asked, flexing his changed digit with the fascination of youth. It bent in places that made my teeth ache to watch.

The shard burned like molten shame. As if daring me to pretend they wouldn't worship even their ruin, so long as it came from me.

"Keep it wrapped." I tore cloth from my shirt, bound his arm tight. "The rest heals human-slow. Safer."

He nodded, but I caught him testing the new joints when he thought I'd turned away. Learning what his transformed flesh could do. And why not? In a world that had already broken him, what was one more change?

The mirror-boy had watched it all. When our eyes met, his smile was old as winter.

"You taught me this before," he said. "When your hair was red as heartsblood."

The words hit like ice water in my lungs. Red hair. Not mine. Never mine. But the shard contracted, squeezed, as if trying to crush the possibility that I'd existed before it claimed me.

I wanted to ask what else he remembered. Wanted to grab his thin shoulders and shake answers from whatever ghost spoke through his child-throat. Instead, I turned away.

"Practice your stillness. All of you."

They scattered into the underbrush, became nothing, became absence. All except him. The mirror-boy who remembered things that hadn't happened yet.

The walk back to camp stretched like a held breath. Every step, I felt the shard's weight—not just physical but temporal. Like it was adding years to my bones with each pulse. Making me older. Other. Less the girl who'd been rejected, more the thing that would light the last fire.

Would I remember their names when it happened? These threadless children who trusted me with their breakage?

Would I remember my own?

Dorian waited at the camp's edge. He'd taken to walking the perimeter during my absences—guardian and exile both. When he saw us returning, something flickered across his face. Relief? Regret? The distance between us had grown wider than the physical space suggested.

"Trouble," he said, but his eyes lingered on the wrapped wound on the boy's arm. On the way the child now moved his hand like he was learning a new instrument.

I wanted to explain. Wanted to say I tried to heal him gentle but the power comes wrong, comes hungry, comes like change instead of mending. But the shard flared hot at the thought of confession. Of showing weakness to someone who was just—

Just a man, it pulsed. Temporary as breath.

"What kind of trouble?" I asked instead.

He gestured deeper into the forest. "The trees. They're... reacting."

I followed his gaze, felt my blood slow. The ancient oaks wept silver—sap running down bark in patterns too deliberate for nature. Where it pooled, the wood had begun to split. But we were too far to see more, and the children—

The children needed tending first. Always first.

"Tonight," I said. "We'll look tonight."

He nodded, but something in his jaw tightened. The careful distance he maintained felt heavier now. Like he was watching me become something he'd helped create but never intended.

That evening, I sat surrounded by my threadless pack while they practiced silence. The youngest girl curled against my side, fever-warm and trusting. Her weight should have been comfort. Instead, it felt like prophecy.

The shard didn't like how I held her. Didn't like the gentleness, the purely mortal gesture of comfort given without power. It pulsed warning—or was it threat?—against my chest.

But I held her anyway.

Held her and wondered if this was what drowning felt like. Not in water, but in destiny. In power that came with too high a price. In the growing certainty that the girl who'd stood in that rejection circle was already gone, and what remained was just...

What?

Vessel? Mother? Monster?

All three, maybe. None complete without the others.

The scarred boy flexed his transformed finger in the dying light, and I watched the extra joints bend like accusation. Like promise. Like proof that my touch would always change more than intended.

"Aria?"

I looked down. The girl against my side had spoken—rare for her.

"Yes?"

"Are you scared?"

Of the Inquisitor hunting us? Of the Trial Moon approaching? Of the prophecies written in silver tears and old wood? Yes. But not as much as I feared the hunger in my own chest. The shard that grew more possessive with each passing hour. The flame that transformed instead of healed.

The possibility that one day I'd wake up and not remember why any of this mattered.

"Sometimes," I admitted.

She nodded, satisfied with truth over comfort. Then: "I dreamed you had different hair. Red like blood. Is that real?"

The shard contracted so hard I tasted copper.

"I don't know anymore."

And I didn't. Reality had become negotiable since the rejection. Since the shard. Since these children started calling me by names that tasted familiar in languages I'd never learned.

Dorian passed close on his circuit, and our eyes met over the children's heads. For one moment, the distance collapsed. I saw what he saw—a girl disappearing into something larger. Saw his wanting to reach out. Saw him stop himself.

The space between us ached like a severed thread.

But some bridges burned the moment you became too large to cross them. And I was growing. Changing. Becoming something that might not fit in the small, warm spaces where mortal love lived.

The shard pulsed satisfaction at the thought.

The children slept in their crescents, and I counted their breaths like prayer. Tomorrow would bring new lessons, new failures, new transformations I couldn't control.

But tonight, they were just broken children who trusted me.

And I was just a broken girl pretending that was enough.