the wren the wren

SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO Kokoshka_77 FOR THE COVER ART. YOU’RE THE BESTEST!!! Wren wakes up already working. He doesn't know his own name until someone else says it. He doesn't know why his hands move through a servant's chores like they've done it a thousand times, or why a jagged scar sits across his chest where a wound should have killed him. Three days of memory is all he has. Before that — nothing. Not even the truth of who left him bleeding out in a tower that trains mages by making them draw their own deaths in chalk and ink. In the Tower, magic is not a gift. It is a debt — paid in scarred hands, failing organs, and years quietly stolen from a caster's own body, unless a mage is skilled enough to send that cost somewhere else. Apprentices seed their first circle young, under a steady hand, because drawing it alone takes a kind of will that kills almost everyone who tries. Wren tried anyway. And survived — barely, memorilessly, and with a circuit precise enough that the Tower Master himself has never seen its equal. Now reassigned from servant to apprentice, Wren has to learn in weeks what his new classmates have had years to master, all while an institution built on hard-won safety quietly wonders if he's an anomaly worth training, or a mistake worth watching. Somewhere beneath his missing past waits an answer neither he nor the Tower is ready for — one that starts with a shard of metal, a name half-remembered from a stranger's textbook, and a kind of magic no one has willingly touched in centuries. He doesn't remember who he used to be. He intends to make sure no one forgets who he becomes.