The Last Cursebound

Black Chains of the Abyss

"The Abyss does not grant power. This is the central misunderstanding of every scholar who has studied it from a safe distance. Power implies something given, a gift from a source to a recipient. The Abyss takes. It has always only ever taken. The bearer does not wield it. The bearer is the aperture through which it feeds."

Fragment, Umbral Houses Research Codex, Author Classified, Circa Year 280

The building Mire brought him to didn't look like anything. That was, Zareth gathered, entirely intentional. It sat at the end of a collapsed street in the Outer Ring three stories, unremarkable stonework, windows boarded from the inside rather than the outside, which was the small detail that told you someone was maintaining it rather than abandoning it. No signs. No guards visible. The door was a plain wooden thing with no hardware on the outside at all, no handle, no hinges you could see, just a flat surface set into the frame. Mire put his palm against it and his curse-class mark flickered briefly red light threading through the jagged lines and the door opened inward without noise.

"Warded," Zareth said.

"Everything down here is warded." Mire stepped inside. "It's not manners. It's infrastructure."

Inside was a single long room that had been, at some earlier point in its life, a workshop of some kind. The bones of that were still visible the high ceiling, the wide floor, the deep ledges built into the walls that had once held equipment and now held something else entirely. Books. Dozens of them, stacked in configurations that looked accidental but probably weren't. Rolled documents, sealed with various wax marks. Glass cases holding objects Zareth didn't have vocabulary for things that were either very old Sigil tools or very old weapons or both simultaneously, which in his experience was more common than people admitted. A long table ran down the room's centre, covered in papers and ink and three separate cups of tea at various stages of going cold, which told him the room had an inhabitant who was either very busy or very scattered or had the kind of mind that started things and returned to them nonlinearly.

There was no one in the room.

"Sit down," Mire said, moving toward one of the cold cups of tea with the ease of someone who had sat at this table many times. "She'll be back in a minute. She always says she'll be back in a minute."

"Who is she?"

"The Houses' primary researcher on Abyss-class phenomena." He picked up the least cold of the cups, considered it, set it back down. "Her name is Sable. She's been working on this question for eleven years. She is going to be extremely, uncomfortably excited to meet you, and I am telling you this in advance so you have time to prepare for it."

As if on cue and perhaps it was on cue, perhaps she'd been listening, the thought occurred to Zareth and did not leave a door at the far end of the room opened and a woman came through it with the velocity of someone who had been in the middle of something important and was annoyed at being interrupted and was going to finish her sentence regardless:

"which completely contradicts the Vayne-period records, but those were compiled fifty years after the fact and the original sources were" She stopped. Looked at Zareth. Her eyes went immediately to his arm, the way Crane's had, but with an entirely different quality not the cold measurement of threat assessment but something closer to hunger, the specific focused appetite of someone who had spent eleven years building a theory and was now looking at the primary evidence.

She was maybe thirty, small and dark-haired and wearing a coat that had seen better decades, and she had ink on three of her fingers and what appeared to be a burn mark on her left sleeve from something that had been sealed too hastily. She looked, in short, like someone who cared about exactly one thing and that thing was not her appearance.

"Show me," she said.

"She gets that from Crane," Zareth said to Mire.

"She's never met Crane."

"Then it's just a thing people say when they want to look at my arm."

He pulled up his sleeve anyway, because the argument for not doing it at this point was getting thinner. Sable crossed the room in eight quick steps and leaned over his forearm with the total unselfconscious absorption of someone examining a specimen, her face six inches from his skin, her breath warm. She didn't touch. She looked at the fracture pattern, at the branching lines, at the particular quality of the mark's darkness, which had settled now into something quieter but no less present, a permanent blackness sitting in his skin that seemed to drink the lamplight rather than reflect it.

"Ninth generation," she said, to herself. "The branching in the secondary lines is different from the eighth see how it terminates at the wrist rather than continuing to the palm. That matches the pattern from the Aldric Scroll, which described the ninth bearer as well." She straightened. Looked at him. Seemed to actually see him as a person rather than a primary source for the first time. "Sorry. I'm Sable. You're Zareth."

"You know my name."

"I've been building a file on probable ninth-generation candidates for four years. You were on the list." She said it without any particular drama. "Your mother's bloodline traces through the Vayne outer provinces back to a family that was removed from the Throne's census records in year 310. The removal was... non-consensual. The family had a history of Abyss-adjacent Sigil markers across three generations. Your wind-class mother third tier, minor, never fully expressed that's consistent with a diluted lineage in the dormancy cycle."

Zareth sat with this for a moment. The idea that someone had known, even probabilistically, that he existed and was what he was that his entire life of careful hiding had been hiding from an empire while being filed in a folder in this room was a strange feeling. Not quite violation. Not quite relief. Something in between that didn't have a comfortable name.

"How many people are on the list?" he asked.

"Were. Past tense." She moved around the table and began pulling papers from several stacks with the fluency of someone navigating a filing system nobody else could read. "Seven, originally. Two have since been confirmed as non-viable the lineage branched wrong, the dormancy didn't hold the pattern. Three others I've been unable to locate. One died last winter fever, not Throne-related." She set a specific document in front of him. A diagram complex, intricate, what appeared to be a genealogical tree overlaid with Sigil-mapping notation. His name was not on it, but there was a blank space at the bottom right that was clearly meant for one more entry. "You're the last one on the list."

"The last cursebound," Mire said, from somewhere behind Zareth. His voice was neutral in a way that suggested he'd known this and was watching to see how it landed.

It landed quietly. Which was not the same as painlessly.

They fed him real food, not stale bread, actual hot food that Sable produced from a back room with the distracted efficiency of someone who cooked the way she did everything else, adequately and without interest in whether it was enjoyed and while he ate she talked, and he let her, because the food was good and the information was better than anything he'd had access to in nineteen years of not knowing what he was.

The Abyss Mark, she told him, was not a Sigil.

Not technically, not in the framework the Celestine Throne used to classify marks. Sigils were divine inscriptions the Throne's official position was that they were granted by heavenly will, assigned at birth, reflective of a soul's place in the divine order. The Abyss Mark predated the Throne's taxonomy entirely. It predated, by her research's reckoning, the Throne itself by at least four centuries and possibly considerably more. It had a different mechanism, a different structure, a different relationship to the person who carried it.

"A Sigil gives," she said, sitting across from him with one of the cold teas finally warmed in her hands. "Fire-class bearer calls fire. Water-class shapes water. The mark and the ability are linked the mark is a conduit for a specific kind of energy, and the bearer channels it. Clean, directable, bounded. The Throne likes that. It can be measured. Classified. Conscripted." She set the cup down. "The Abyss Mark doesn't give. You know this. You felt it this morning."

"It takes," Zareth said.

"It consumes. Specifically and this is the part that nobody outside this room has properly documented it consumes Sigil energy. Other people's power, when they use it near you. When they use it against you." She leaned forward slightly. "That's why the Throne soldier's light attack dissolved on contact. He threw Throne-class divine energy at you and the mark ate it. Not deflected, not absorbed in the conventional sense consumed. Taken into the void and gone."

"And the soldiers who disappeared."

Sable was quiet for a moment. "The void energy, when it's uncontrolled it doesn't discriminate. It doesn't distinguish between Sigil energy and the person generating it. This morning the mark was in full emergence with no direction from you, no framework, nothing to tell it where the boundary was." She said it carefully, clinically, but not unkindly. "The eleven soldiers were between the mark and the void it was creating. They had Sigils. The mark consumed the Sigil energy and took them with it."

Zareth put down his fork.

He'd been not thinking about the eleven soldiers specifically since the square. He'd been letting it sit in a locked room in the back of his mind, the door closed, something to be dealt with when he had more floor space. Sable had just opened the door. He sat with the contents of it for a moment the weight of eleven people who had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time while something used his body as a door, and who were now nowhere, not even remains and he felt it the way he thought it deserved to be felt, which was badly, and then he put it back and closed the door again. Not because it didn't matter. Because it mattered too much to carry openly right now, and he'd learned a long time ago that grief you couldn't afford in the moment had to be stored somewhere dry and dealt with later, or it flooded everything.

"Can it be directed?" he asked. "Controlled, I mean. Properly. Not just stop when I've already panicked and it's already consumed most of a cathedral."

"Yes," Sable said. "I believe so. The previous bearers"

"The Residuals."

She paused. Looked at Mire. Looked back at Zareth. "He told you about the Residuals."

"He told me the name Malakar," Zareth said. "The mark reacted to it."

Another pause, longer. Sable set down her cup. When she picked it back up her hands were not entirely steady, which was the first sign of feeling he'd seen in her that wasn't directly connected to the intellectual pleasure of discovery. This was something else. Closer to what a person looked like when they'd been doing work for eleven years and were suddenly, viscerally aware of what the work was actually about.

"Tell me what you feel," she said carefully. "Right now. When you focus on the mark."

He focused on it.

It was always there, he was realising had probably always been there in some muted, dormant form, responsible for the edge he'd always had in the Ash, the way he read rooms better than he should, the way escape routes mapped themselves in his mind before he'd consciously identified the need for them. That had been the mark, asleep. Now it was awake and the difference was like the difference between a coal and a fire the same thing, the same material, but one was visible and hot and undeniable.

And underneath it deeper than the mark itself, deeper than the cold void-feel of the lines in his skin — there was the depth Mire had called a room. He went toward it carefully, the way you went toward the edge of something you couldn't see the bottom of. It was there. It was there and it was aware and it had the specific quality of awareness of something very old and very patient that had been sitting in the dark for so long that sitting in the dark had become its natural state rather than a condition.

"There's something there," he said. "It's not speaking. It's not it's not doing anything. It's just present. Like a person sitting in a room you didn't know was occupied, and you walked in and they didn't announce themselves but now you can feel that they're there and they've been there the whole time."

Sable breathed out slowly. "That's consistent with the dormancy-to-emergence transition. In the hours after first awakening, the Residuals are typically present but inactive they need time to stabilise in the new host's consciousness before they can communicate." She was speaking faster now, the researcher's excitement overriding the other thing. "Malakar specifically the accounts we have are fragmentary, but the consistent detail across all of them is that he was aware of the transition period. He knew it was happening. He chose when to speak."

"So he's choosing not to speak yet."

"Or he's waiting for the right moment." She hesitated. "Or he's testing something. Seeing what you do before he decides what you are."

Zareth looked down at his arm. The lines sat in his skin, quiet, permanent. He thought about the breathing from the dream the first night, six days ago, the dream that hadn't felt like a dream. Something in the dark, breathing with him. Deciding.

"That's not a comfortable thought," he said.

"No," Sable agreed. "But it's better than the alternative."

"Which is?"

"That he's not testing anything. That he already knows what you are and is simply waiting for the right conditions to act on it."

The room was quiet for a moment. Mire, who had been leaning against the wall with his characteristic air of watching something moderately interesting, said nothing. Outside, somewhere in the Outer Ring, a door closed. The wind moved. The lamplight held steady.

"Right," Zareth said. "So. Teaching me to control it."

They cleared the centre of the room. Sable moved her papers with the harried efficiency of someone who'd done this before and resented it each time, stacking them against the walls in configurations that were apparently distinct from the previous configurations despite being indistinguishable to anyone else. Mire moved the table with his curse-class mark active the red-threaded lines on his forearm brightening, the table lifting an inch off the floor and sliding sideways with a smoothness that had nothing to do with physical effort. He did it with the mild economy of someone using a familiar tool, and Zareth watched it and felt the mark on his own arm register the Sigil energy in the room the way a compass needle registered north not dramatically, not with any visible reaction, just a quiet, animal attentiveness.

"Don't," Sable said, watching him watch Mire.

"I wasn't doing anything."

"Your mark was doing something. The void was orienting toward the curse-class energy. I could see it." She stood at what she apparently judged to be a safe distance eight feet, Zareth noted, which suggested she'd calculated this previously. "That's the first thing you need to understand. The mark is always hungry. From the moment it emerged, it's been reaching toward Sigil energy the way a plant reaches toward light. It's not malice. It's not aggression. It's appetite, and it doesn't distinguish between hostile and incidental."

"So every time someone uses a Sigil near me"

"The mark wants it. Yes. And if you're not actively managing it, it will take it." She folded her arms. "Management is the wrong word actually. You can't manage it the way you manage a conventional Sigil there's no technique for that, no form. What you can do is direct the appetite. Give it something specific to focus on instead of everything in the room."

"How?"

"That's what we're going to find out." She nodded at Mire. He sighed with the expression of someone who had agreed to something they found tedious and was going to do it professionally. He held up his left arm and let the curse-class mark run not a full expression, just a low idle, the red-threaded lines brightening steadily, a contained pulse of prohibited-class energy radiating from his forearm.

Zareth felt the mark respond immediately. Not visibly nothing happened that could be seen but inside the skin of his arm there was an unmistakable pull, a lean in the direction of Mire's energy, the same instinct as looking toward movement in peripheral vision. It was automatic. It required no decision. His body was doing it before his mind had processed that it was happening.

"I feel it," he said.

"Good. Now don't push it down. Don't fight it. That's the instinct and the instinct is wrong." Sable's voice was even, instructional, the voice of someone who had taught before. "The void can't be suppressed from outside itself. Every attempt to cage it creates pressure and pressure finds the weakest point and goes through it. You saw that this morning the ward seals failed not because they were inadequate but because the containment created compression and the mark burst through it."

"So I let it go?"

"You redirect it. There's a difference." She paused. "Think of it as a river. You can't dam it. But you can channel it. Give it a direction that isn't every direction at once." She watched him. "Focus the hunger. Not on Mire's mark on the space between you and his mark. The air. The distance. The fact that you are here and his energy is there and the void is the thing that connects them. Make it a line instead of a flood."

He tried.

It was not easy to describe what trying felt like from the inside, because the internal landscape of the mark was not a visual thing or a physical thing or any kind of thing he had language for. It was something like reaching except the reaching wasn't with a hand, wasn't with anything external, was more like a quality of attention shifting, the difference between staring at everything in a room and looking at one specific object. The void was everywhere in his arm, diffuse, restless, orienting toward Mire's energy with that automatic hunger. He didn't try to stop that. He tried to make it narrow. Give it a shape. A line, Sable had said. A channel.

For about fifteen seconds, nothing happened.

Then not dramatically, not visibly something changed in the feel of the room. The restless diffuse pull in his arm gathered itself into something more specific, and Mire made a small sound that was not a word but communicated clearly that he had felt something, and Sable took one involuntary step forward and then caught herself.

"Hold it," she said quietly. "Hold exactly that."

He held it. It was like holding a position in water not painful, not even difficult in a physical sense, but requiring constant active effort, the kind of effort that would erode if he stopped paying attention. The pull was there. Focused. A line from his arm to Mire's mark across eight feet of empty air. Not consuming not taking just... pointed. Present. Held.

"Good," Sable said. Exhaled. "Now release it. Slowly. Don't snap it closed, let it go gradually, like loosening a fist."

He released it. The focused pull dispersed back into the diffuse background hunger and settled there. Mire lowered his arm and the curse-class mark dimmed. Nobody spoke for a moment.

"That took you two minutes," Sable said. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't immediately categorise somewhere between professional satisfaction and something more complicated, more careful, a thing she was thinking that she hadn't decided to say yet. "The documentation on previous bearers suggests the first successful focusing attempt took between two days and three weeks."

"Is that good?" Zareth asked.

"It's unprecedented." She said it the way people said things they were still computing the implications of. "It's either because you're a fast learner or because" She stopped.

"Because what?"

She looked at Mire. Mire looked at Zareth with his default mild expression, and this time Zareth read it more accurately it wasn't indifference, he decided. It was the expression of someone who cared about the outcome and had learned not to show it because showing it cost things he'd rather keep.

"Because you're not doing it alone," Sable said.

The mark pulsed. Once. Slow.

Not Zareth's pulse. He knew his own pulse. This came from somewhere deeper, something sitting at the back of his mind in that large dark room, and it had the specific quality of a response — of something that had been spoken to and was answering, not in words, not yet, but in the only language currently available to it: the language of the mark itself, the void's own rhythm, confirming something.

Not alone.

They worked for three more hours.

By the end of it Zareth could focus the mark's hunger reliably, hold it for approximately ninety seconds before the effort became unsustainable, and release it without losing control of the dispersal. He could not direct it at will the aiming was still imprecise, more like pointing a water jet than threading a needle and anything beyond the focusing exercise made the mark restless in ways he didn't yet have tools to manage. But the gap between this afternoon and this morning was vast enough that Sable had stopped pretending to be clinically neutral about it and had started writing things down with the focused urgency of someone racing against a deadline they hadn't anticipated.

He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with his body. The physical tiredness was there he hadn't slept properly in a week and the day had been the kind of day that required a great deal of his nervous system but underneath it was something else. A heavier tiredness. The kind that accumulated when you spent hours with your attention pressed against something enormous and strange and only partly known, the way you'd feel after spending an afternoon trying to have a conversation with an ocean.

Mire brought him water without being asked and sat down across from him at the cleared table and was quiet for a minute, which Zareth had come to understand was his version of consideration.

"How are you doing," Mire said. It was stated rather than asked, which suggested he'd already made an assessment and was offering Zareth the opportunity to either confirm or dispute it.

"I killed eleven people this morning," Zareth said. "I didn't mean to. That's not a comfort, it's just accurate." He looked at his arm. "And there's something in here that isn't me and it's been awake all afternoon and it helped me do something that should have taken weeks and I don't know whether to be grateful for that or terrified of it."

"Both seems reasonable," Mire said.

"That's not helpful."

"No. But it's honest." He turned his cup in his hands. "The Houses are going to want a full report tonight. What happened in the square, the cathedral, the ward seals. I can manage how it's framed there's room for discretion in the initial briefing. But they'll want to meet you."

"And if I decide I don't want to meet them?"

Mire was quiet for a beat. "Then I take you as far as I can toward the eastern road and we part ways and you survive as long as you can survive alone, which given the Throne's current posture toward you is probably not very long." He said it without cruelty, just with the same flat honesty he'd used from the beginning. "The Umbral Houses have resources the Throne doesn't know about. Safe routes. Warded locations. People who are very good at not being found." A pause. "You need that. You don't have to like needing it."

Zareth was quiet for a while.

Outside, the afternoon was going toward evening. He could tell by the quality of light coming through the cracks in the boarded windows it had gone from white to yellow to the first edge of orange, the way it did when the sun was dropping toward the city's western edge. Somewhere in that city, soldiers were being briefed. Files were being opened. The name Zareth Noctis was being entered into the Throne's formal threat register beside a classification that hadn't been used in seven hundred years.

He thought about Maret. About whether she'd been caught in the sweep of the district whether the Throne, looking for connections to him, had followed the chain back to the woman who'd made his forged papers for four years. He thought about the Ash district in general, the people in it, the way news of the morning's events would be moving through it like water through stone, slow and thorough and permanent. Some of them would be frightened. Some would be quietly, privately glad the outer districts had no particular love for the Throne's authority, and anything that cracked it, even catastrophically, even at enormous cost, carried a complicated satisfaction.

He thought about his mother's grave on the eastern hill and whether anyone had put a stone there yet or if it was still just a mound of unmarked earth. He thought he should probably do something about that when the empire stopped trying to kill him. He put it on the list of things to do when the empire stopped trying to kill him, which was a long list that he'd been adding to since he was ten years old and had yet to get around to starting.

"Tell me about the Houses," he said.

Mire looked at him for a moment. Then he settled back in his chair and crossed his arms and began to talk, and Zareth listened, and in the back of his mind the thing in the dark room sat quietly and listened too, patient as stone, ancient as everything that came before patience was invented.

He slept on a cot in the back room that Sable used for overnight research sessions, which meant it had a blanket and a pillow and several stacks of documents that she moved with barely concealed resentment at the intrusion of anyone's sleep needs into her workspace. The cot was narrow and the blanket was thin and the documents rustled when the air moved, but he was asleep within four minutes of lying down, because his body had reached its limit and was collecting the debt regardless of what his mind thought about it.

The dream came almost immediately.

He was in the dark room not a metaphor, not an impression, an actual room, stone-walled and high-ceilinged and completely lightless except for the faint glow of the mark on his arm, which in this space gave off just enough light to see the floor and the near wall and the shape of something seated a few feet away. Sitting in a chair that might have been stone or might have been shadow. Still. Watching him with the patient awareness he had felt all day at the back of his mind.

He couldn't see the face. The light didn't reach that far.

He sat down on the floor across from it. Not because he was calm he wasn't, his heart was doing something unpleasant but because standing seemed worse. More exposed. The floor was solid under him and solid was useful.

"Malakar," he said. Not loud. Flat.

The silence held for long enough that he started to think it wasn't going to answer. That this was the dream version of what Sable had described the Residual present but not ready, testing him, waiting for whatever it was waiting for. He was about to say something else, something impatient, something that was almost certainly the wrong choice, when the dark figure spoke.

The voice was old. Not old in the way of an aged person's voice that kind of old had wear in it, erosion, the texture of years of use. This was old the way stone was old, the way deep water was old, the kind of age that had gone so far past familiar age that it came out the other side as something else entirely. Something that had passed through time rather than accumulated it.

"You're smaller than I expected," it said.

Despite everything the dark, the strangeness, the bone-deep surreality of sitting on the floor of his own mind talking to a seven-hundred-year-old dead man Zareth felt something dangerously close to laughter try to surface.

"People keep saying that," he said.

A pause. Something in the dark that might have been the equivalent of consideration. "They said it to me as well," Malakar said. "When I was your age. When the mark first came." Another pause, shorter. "They were wrong about me. They will be wrong about you."

"Is that reassurance?"

"It is observation. I have not dealt in reassurance for a very long time." The darkness around him shifted slightly, the way darkness did in dreams when something was paying very close attention. "You focused the mark today. In two minutes."

"Sable seemed to think that was partly you."

"It was," Malakar said, without any false modesty about it. "I have carried the mark for longer than you have been alive by a margin that makes the comparison almost meaningless. I know its currents. When you reached for the channel, I showed you where it was." A pause. "This is not charity. I cannot act without you. You cannot survive without what I know. The arrangement is practical."

"Practical," Zareth said.

"Yes."

"What do you want?"

The dark room was very quiet. The mark-light pulsed once, illuminating the floor between them, the edge of a boot, the hem of something old and dark. The face stayed in shadow.

"There is a prison," Malakar said. "You will hear about it eventually from the scholars, from the Houses' records, from the mark itself as it matures. It is called Nox Aeterna and it was built by the same hands that built the Celestine Throne, and what is inside it has been inside it for longer than any institution that currently claims authority over this world has existed." The voice was even, uninflected, delivering this the way you delivered a thing you had had a very long time to prepare to say. "I want what is inside it to stay there. That is all. That is the only thing I have wanted for seven hundred years."

Zareth waited.

"The mark," Malakar continued, "is not a key to opening that prison. This is what the Throne's prophecy claims. This is what the Throne fears. This is why they want you dead." The voice held something that was not quite bitterness and not quite grief but lived in the neighbourhood of both. "The prophecy is a lie. Written by the same hands that built the prison, to ensure that every bearer of the mark was eliminated before they could understand what they actually were."

"And what are we actually?"

Silence.

"The lock," Malakar said. "Not the key. The thing that keeps the door closed." Another pause. "That is why they kill us. Not because we open it. Because as long as we live, they cannot."

The dream shifted the way dreams did, without warning or logic and the dark room began to dissolve at the edges, the stone walls going soft and impermanent, the light from the mark spreading and then fading, and Zareth felt himself rising back toward the surface of sleep the way you rose toward the surface of deep water, slowly, aware of the pressure decreasing.

The last thing he heard, from very far below, from the place where the dark room lived and would keep living in the deepest geography of him for as long as the mark did:

"They will come for you tomorrow. They have already been given the order. Rest while you can. We have a great deal of work ahead of us, you and I."

He woke in the grey pre-dawn of the back room, on the narrow cot, under the thin blanket. The documents rustled. The mark on his arm was dark and quiet and present. Outside, somewhere in the unmapped streets of the Outer Ring, Caldenmoor breathed in its sleep, unaware of what was sitting up inside it.

Zareth stared at the ceiling and thought about locks and keys and the difference between them, and about the particular cold comfort of discovering that the thing you were carrying was not what everyone thought it was, and whether that made it lighter or just differently heavy.

He thought about it for a long time.

Then he got up, because Malakar was right, and there was work to do, and he had never in nineteen years waited for a problem to come to him when he could go to it first.