“Your first *real* lesson begins at dawn, apprentice. You will learn what it feels like to have a memory torn away.”
His words, cold as the mountain winds that clawed at the conservatory’s ancient stones, followed Anja as she was dismissed. Jorim, reeking of ash and crushed pine needles, pushed her forward down the narrow stair. In her drafty cell, grease candles guttered against bare granite.
She dropped onto the cot, the silver pendant biting into her palm. Tatiana had handed it over with warm palms and lowered lids; Tatiana had stood beside Valerien as he snarled, offering only a helpless twist of her mouth. The word *thief* joined *Mind-Breaker*, burning against her ribs like lime.
Chirri, her small Vesperwing companion, stirred from his perch on a high shelf. His luminous, feather-light body drifted down, landing softly on her shoulder. He nuzzled his head against her cheek, a soft, empathic trill vibrating through her. It was a sound of deep distress, mirroring her distress. When her knuckles grazed his side, Chirri hissed, snapping his iridescent pinions wide and skittering across the rafter. He stared at the metal oval with dilated pupils, refusing to settle.
“Chirri?” she murmured. He had never recoiled from trinkets before. Valerien claimed it was stolen from his ancestral vault; Tatiana had slipped it into her pocket behind the refectory. Anja laid the silver piece on the scrubbed pine table, away from the bird. Chirri fluttered back down to her collar, feathers bristling.
Beside the grease candle sat the volume Valerien had dropped there at noon: scuffed calfskin titled *The Sins of the Weaver: Forbidden Pathways of Dream-Crafting*. Iron clasps held the warped parchment shut.
She opened it, the dry scent of old paper filling the small space. The opening plates depicted silver needles driven through the temples, unspooling memory strands until the subject ceased to recognize their own reflection. Dawn was four hours away.
Anja forced herself to read, her eyes scanning the dense text. Her survival depended on understanding this. Page after page of intricate diagrams and philosophical warnings about the sanctity of the self. Halfway through a plate depicting severed psychic cords, her thumb caught on a cramped marginal note beside a spool diagram.
“Every weaver's resonance,” the script warned, “sears into the dream-mesh. Invisible to casual inspection, yet distinct as carved bone. The mark persists in every severed thread, an unalterable signature of the craftsperson.”
She traced the crabbed ink twice. A maker's mark. If every dream-craft bore a signature, then the shattered lattice that left Lykov comatose carried the pattern of the hands that spun it. Not her own timid thread-work. Katiya's, or someone else's entirely.
If she could touch the ruined web locked in the Duke's laboratory, she could show him the foreign whorl. The margin noted that discerning such signatures required polarized prism glass and prolonged attunement, but the principle stood.
A rapid tap rattled the bolt. Anja cracked the timber door. In the dark passage stood Instructor Jael, her wool shawl pulled tight around braided hair.
“Take this,” Jael whispered, thrusting a linen bundle into Anja's hands while glancing toward the guard post. “Skovnik root and dried vesperbloom. Brew it before dawn. It numbs the cranial nerves.”
She vanished down the spiral stairs before Anja could reply.
Anja dropped the herbs on the table next to the silver piece. Chirri hissed again, digging claws into her tunic as her fingers closed over the casing. The silver felt unnaturally warm, humming against her skin.
Anja ran her thumb over the delicate engravings. A small, stylized rose. She pressed against it, wondering if there was a catch, a hidden mechanism. Her finger found a minuscule indentation along the seam, almost imperceptible. She pushed. With a faint click, the rose motif swiveled open, revealing a tiny, shallow compartment inside. Coiled against black velvet lay a single, lustrous strand of silver hair. Neither her own sable nor Katiya’s dark chestnut, it gleamed pale as winter birch, giving off a faint, metallic scent.