Chapter 14 · free to read
First morning. Nine knots each, and Nok's mark had not moved in the night. It was the first thing that had ever worked.
She had been saying the ward number out loud while she checked. She did not say it again for two days.
It did not feed on blood, or fear, or sin. It fed on being attended to. Every time one of them so much as thought the number, a fibre let go.
Twelve hours of deliberate forgetting, and the fraying stopped dead. They had found the lever. All they had to do was never again be interested in the thing that was eating them.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.