The wind that crossed the Bleached Barrow carried grit sharp enough to skin a man.
Sister Murdina tasted iron on her tongue and knew the grit was half sand, half powdered bone.
She knelt anyway.

The corpse at her feet had been a boy when the sun last rose.
Now it was meat stripped to mapwork: red rivers, pale continents, a slack mouth still shaped around a word it would never finish.
His left hand was missing.
She had already slipped the severed thumb into the reliquary box at her belt, next to the needles and the salt.
One digit was all the Order required; the rest could feed the crows.

Behind her the pilgrimage waited, twenty-three penitents roped neck-to-neck, hooded in sacking that had once held grain.
They chanted the Catechism of Ash, but the wind kept stealing their breath and flinging it south toward the ruins of Vultisium.
Murdina’s own voice was gone.
She had screamed it out the night before when the boy tried to flee.
The memory of his sobbing apology still rang inside her skull like a cracked bell.

On the crest of the ridge stood the Watcher.
No hood, no robe, only ribs lacquered black by centuries of smoke, and a crown of rusted nails driven through the yellowed bone of its brow.
It leaned on a staff of petrified sinew and watched her with sockets that held no eyes yet never blinked.
The Watcher had followed the pilgrimage since the third bell of lamentation, pacing the horizon the way a wolf paces a dying campfire.
It had not spoken.
It did not need to.
Its presence was a command: finish the rite or join the boy.

Murdina drew the bronze stylus from her sleeve and pressed its tip into the sand.
Blood from the boy’s wrist pooled obediently, held in the furrow by nothing more than the will of the dead.
She began the outer circle, forty paces across, scoring the earth with the copper stink of life.
Inside that circle she drew the pentaknot, five mouths swallowing each other.
The runes came next, each one a lie she had memorised as truth at the monastery:
GEBUR for severance,
SKAAR for silence,
THRIN for the road that opens only one way.

When the final rune closed, the wind died.
The sand hung mid-air like frost reversed, every grain a frozen star.
The penitents’ chant choked into whimpering.
Murdina felt the familiar pressure build behind her eyes, the price of knocking on the world’s locked door.
She spoke the invocation without tremor.

“Witness, O Thirsting Court.
I trade this fragment of tomorrow for passage through tonight.
I trade this voice for the voice beneath the world.
I trade this warmth for the warmth that never cools.”

The corpse jerked.
A beetle crawled from the hollow of its throat, shell polished to mirror.
In the reflection Murdina saw her own face aged a thousand days, lips sewn shut with gold wire.
She did not flinch.
Flinching was a luxury for people who still believed tomorrow was theirs to spend.

The beetle split.
From its back rose a thread of smoke thicker than rope, darker than priest-blood.
It coiled, tasting the air, then darted toward the nearest penitent.
The woman had time to inhale once before the smoke rammed down her mouth and claimed the space where her soul had been.
The body folded like parchment, skin crackling, bones clicking into new positions.
When it stood again it was taller, jointed wrong, smiling with too many teeth.

The Watcher lifted its staff.
At the gesture the sky tore open along a seam no human eye could see.
Through the tear came the sound of distant siege engines, the thunder of a city falling in another age.
Murdina felt her knees sink deeper into the blood-wet sand.
She thought of the boy’s name—Petyr—and discovered she had already forgotten it.
Names were seeds; the rite required the field be burned.

The thing wearing the penitent’s skin stepped inside the pentaknot.
It spoke with a voice of rusted hinges.
“Sister, the road is open.
Walk.”

Murdina rose.
The stylus had melted in her grip, fused to flesh so the bronze and bone were one.
She flexed her fingers; metal answered.
Around her the remaining pilgrims sagged in their ropes, understanding at last that redemption had never been the destination.
They were simply the trough from which something vast would drink.

She started forward.
Behind her the Watcher descended the slope, each footfall planting lilies of frost that withered before they finished blooming.
Ahead, the horizon shimmered like a mirage of cities burning.
She did not look back.
Looking back was for stories that still pretended choice existed.

Somewhere beneath the grinding of reality she heard the boy’s heartbeat continue, stubborn, inside the reliquary box.
She would carry that sound until the end of the trilogy, or until it carried her.
Both outcomes amounted to the same mile of road.

The Bleached Barrow swallowed the sun.
Night came on legs of oil and teeth, and Murdina walked to meet it, stylus dripping, pilgrims following because the rope left them no other direction.
Above them the pentaknot glowed dull red, a brand on the hide of the world.
The brand would scar.
Scars remember.