Chapter Seven: Ashes in the Shape of a Man

He did not remember his first name.

It had been burned out of him long ago, sifted to smoke and starlight, along with the shape of his original body.

Now he was ash.

That was how he thought of himself—the Ash Man—not because he was made of ashes (though his skin cracked like old charcoal), but because everything he touched turned to it eventually. People. Trees. Towns.

Names were for the living. For the bound.

He was neither.

He stood atop a low, nameless hill in the southern riverlands, watching smoke rise from the valley below. The remains of a farming village—Grailbridge, he thought it was called—still clung to the edge of the river, even though the fields were wrong now.

They grew white wheat, a crop that never flowered. A crop that pulsed, softly, when touched.

The villagers were gone. Fed to the roots.

The Wurm was growing.

He knelt in the churned, pale soil and pressed his blackened hand against the earth.

The heartbeat came slowly… once every minute… like a drum buried beneath centuries.

It stirs. It hears. It remembers.
The spiral turns.

The Ash Man had not been born in the Old Kingdom.

He had crossed the Wall decades ago—fleeing something, though he no longer remembered what. Hunger, perhaps. Guilt. Love. He had found only snow and silence in the North.

Until he had found the Cairn.

Or perhaps it had found him.

He had dreamed of it first: a great tunnel winding downward, carved into the bone of the world, spiraling into a hollow filled with not darkness, but light like a wound.
The voice had come next.

It did not speak like Free Magic spirits. It did not scream like the Dead.
It hummed. It crooned. It offered wholeness.

And he, broken as he was, had accepted.

He had breathed in ash and breathed out a new name: Servant of the Spiral.

Now, he followed its will.

The Cairn did not act directly. It pressed dreams into the sleeping, bent the choices of the living, laced Free Magic into snowmelt and breath.

But it needed hands to prepare its return.

So the Ash Man worked.

He found children with odd dreams and pushed them toward the Cairn.
He corrupted old wards.
He fed whispers into the clay ears of forgotten constructs.

And soon, very soon, one of the Bells would ring wrong.

The Clayr had seen it, but too late. The Abhorsens were scattered, tired. The Wall was quiet only because it was listening too.

The spiral would open again. And this time it would not close.

A flicker of motion caught his attention.

He turned.

A girl—no more than twelve—stood at the edge of the field, barefoot in the frost. Her eyes glowed faintly, and her skin was carved with sleepwalker's spirals.

One of his seedlings.

“You dreamed again,” he said gently.

She nodded, not afraid. “It told me about the boy with the wooden dog.”

He stepped forward. “What did it say?”

“That he’ll come too close. That he’s not ready.”

The Ash Man crouched, his hands resting on his knees.

“That’s good,” he said. “When he comes, show him the well. Then walk in and do not look back.”

The girl nodded and vanished into the mist like a breath.

The Ash Man turned back toward the cairn’s echo.

He felt it pulsing stronger now—reaching.

And something else: resistance.

A bell that had not been rung in generations had moved.
The line of Binders had stirred.
The Clayr had sent one of their own.

The spiral welcomed challenge.

He walked down the hill and left a trail of ash behind him.