Wenrel woke to a city that smelled of iron and warm bread, as if Sunspire were trying to pretend last night had not happened. His mouth tasted faintly of copper where the anchor had opened a complaint in his throat. The ringing behind his ears was softer than yesterday but persistent — a reminder that the work of holding an echo was not finished when the echo itself seemed still.
Lysara met him in the northern lane, hands tucked into her sleeves, eyes like knots pulled tight. "You feel fit enough for fieldwork?" she asked without preamble.
Wenrel tried for a laugh and found it thin. "Fit enough to listen. Not to shout."
"Good." She looked past him at the terraces. "There's been movement in the southern rib. Merchants report small thefts — not of coin but of recollection. An old woman can't remember a child's name; a smith forgets the face of his wife for an hour and then recalls it wrong. Elaris thinks the lattice is redirecting fragments." Her gaze sharpened. "I want you to see them, not fight them. Learn their cadence."
Elaris was already waiting where the terrace narrowed into a tangle of ropewalks and stalls. She handed Wenrel a strip of Whisper Vine wound tight between finger and thumb, its leaves cold and still. "We'll take a sample and—" she hesitated, giving Wenrel a look that said the rest: measure, then anchor if necessary. No heroics.
They moved like that — quiet, practiced, listening for the tiny percussion the city made when it shifted its mind. The southern rib smelled of roasted grain and wet wood. Children chased each other between crates; an old merchant sorted beads as if trusting his hands to remember what his mind now doubted.
At the edge of the market, they found the first sign: a scatter of minuscule loops in the air, like dust motes arranged in filigree. Wenrel's fingers tingled. Threads, thin as hair, braided and unbraided themselves when he watched. When he leaned closer, one of the motes panicked and drew together into a shape — small as a fist, made entirely of woven light and memory. It blinked like an animal deciding whether a hand was friend or tool.
Elaris breathed, half delight, half fear. "Skeinlings," she said. "We suspected they existed — threads made animal, not animal made thread. They're attracted to strong anchors and to the leftover cadence of clever hands."
The creature hopped forward with a curious, feather-soft click and touched the edge of Wenrel's cloak with a filament tongue. In that touch Wenrel felt a surge: not his thought, but the echo of his thought rendered as color — the market bell when he was small, a laugh now dim. The skeinling drank in the memory like a moth at a candle.
It was beautiful and obscene at once. The old merchant's face went slack; for a breath he did not know his own name. Wenrel felt the anchor's echo react, tugged by the skeinling's hunger. It would not break the city, he knew — skeinlings were scavengers of resonance, not predators — but left unchecked they braided wrong memories into a person until the person no longer trusted what was theirs.
Wenrel stepped forward. The rules rose in him like a tide: perception first, interference second, anchor last. He reached for the skeinling's thread, gentle as a fisherman taking a knot, and found the weave was more complex than strand and pulse. The creature's being comprised not only of human recollection but of city-lore, of market rhythms, of weather patterns — a patchwork stitched across Sunspire's terraces. The skeinling was a small loom.
Elaris whispered, "They aren't malicious. But they're drawn to our work. Someone has baited them."
At the words, the hair along Wenrel's forearms stiffened. Kael's methods sought leverage. Use lures; shift perception; let suspicion grow until it fed itself. Skeinlings offered a quiet, efficient way: steal a name, misplace a memory, make neighbors doubt one another. The apprentice might be a crude hand, but someone with patience — and access to creatures — could fray the city without blood.
The skeinling pressed itself to Wenrel's palm. He felt the tug: if he pushed, he could reroute the creature, teach it new cadences — anchor it to benign memories, let it carry a pattern of belonging instead of theft. But to do that he would have to thread three echoes at once: the skeinling's pattern, the merchant's memory, and his own anchor. Layered interactions multiplied strain. Everything beyond a single thread rose the cost by a sharp degree.
He chose.
Wenrel let the market bell in his mind become a spine to hold the skeinling's weaving. He fed the creature a second memory — the old merchant's laughter when his child had been born — a bright, simple filament. Finally, he braided a third loop: the Whisper Vine's chorus Elaris had given him, a stabilizing lattice the plant remembered of village rituals. He laced the three as gently as tying a shoelace.
The skeinling stopped trembling. Its woven surface smoothed like linen under a hand. The merchant blinked, a name sliding back into place as if dropped into a slot. Wenrel felt the cost immediately: his mouth went dry, the ringing in his ears doubled, and a small fragment of his own past — the detail of the patch on his left sleeve from when he was a child — blurred and then fell away like a leaf.
He staggered back, hands trembling. Elaris steadied him, eyes wide but approving. "That was thread-lacing," she said. "You re-tuned the skeinling instead of fighting it. It's cleaner — but you paid for it."
Wenrel forced a breath, tasting the loss like ash. Small memories were the currency of this work; he had spent one to save another's ownership of themselves. The ledger of consequence made itself known in the ache across his ribs.
A sound moved in the alleys then: soft, purposeful footfalls. The youth from the plaza — the apprentice — watched them from shadow, hands folded, expression unreadable. He had not expected Wenrel to choose lacing over breaking. His eyes glittered, not with triumph but with assessment.
As if to underscore the moment, the skeinling lifted, fluffed its woven edges, and took to the rooftops in a scattering that looked like a flock of living tapestry. Where they passed, children's games resumed with fewer hesitations; old arguments softened into apologies. The city smoothed, briefly, as if a hand had ironed a crease.
The apprentice made no move. He vanished into the weave of alleys, but from the corner of Wenrel's perception a small sigil winked where his boot had rested — a spiral within a ring, faint and almost private. Kael's mark. The logic in it was simple and terrible: bait creatures to fray people; use the boy who could anchor to make the city brittle enough to be rewoven.
Wenrel felt the numbness at the base of his tongue like a warning bell. He had saved a dozen small memories today — and given up a single shard of his own. The balance was merciless. Lysara's words arrived then, calm and cold: Be measured. Be merciful when you can, and ruthless when you must.
He looked at the terraces, at the skeinlings fading into sunlight, and at the alley where the apprentice had stood. The weave of Sunspire was changing, not by accident but by design. If Kael's followers could bend creatures as tools, the war would be invisible until it had already won.
Wenrel straightened. He could feel the missing patch of sleeve as a tiny phantom ache, a void shaped like an old comfort. For a moment he mourned it. Then he folded the loss away with the patience he had learned from listening to vines and cords.
"We teach the skeinlings to carry belonging," he said quietly. "We make them stitches in the city, not scissors."
Elaris nodded, closing her notebook. "And we watch who gives them patterns."
Above them, where ropes braided the terraces like veins, one skeinling paused on a line and turned, its woven face catching the sun. For a breath it looked at Wenrel — not with hunger now, but with something like recognition — before it was gone, a trailing filament that hummed of markets and bell-time and a child's unchanging laugh.
The apprentice, wherever he went, had left a sigil. The city had lost a small thing of Wenrel's past for the sake of keeping larger ones. The ledger balanced, and the work — as Lysara had said — was only beginning.