Rowan Neth braced his boots against a fallen tree and pulled. The chains at his wrists were god-forged iron, and he had sworn to break them. Then the prayer symbols stitched across his old robe flared cold. Frost crawled up his arms. His strength drained out through the freezing marks, and his grip failed. The chains held. He dropped to his knees, breath white, horns dragging low. The gods who once called him sacred had built a cage into his own clothes. He had learned the rule after weeks of failing. Every time he strained the chains, the symbols punished him. He could not fight the iron while wearing them. So he had to be rid of the robe's curse first. An old man watched from the treeline. He wore a faded red temple robe, hem torn to rags, a scribe's satchel at his hip. Rowan knew the look of the cast-out. The temples had erased him too. "You're pulling wrong," the old man said. He stepped closer, unafraid of the horns. "The marks feed on your effort. The harder you fight, the colder they bite. I copied those very symbols once, before they threw me out." "Then unmake them," Rowan said. Matthias Ashren crouched and studied the frost-rimed stitching. "You can't reason with a prayer. You can only smother it or cut it." He dug through his satchel and drew out a broken bronze sickle, its blade fractured and green with age. "Scrape the symbols off. But the moment you touch them, they'll fight back harder than the chains ever did." Rowan took the sickle. He set the jagged edge against the first symbol and dragged. The cold struck instantly, deep as a knife in the bone. His hand shook. Threads snapped one by one. Each freed symbol burned worse than the last. Halfway through, his vision blurred and the sickle slipped. "Cover what's left," Matthias said. He pulled a layered mantle from his pack, worn and heavy, and threw it over Rowan's shoulders. The thick folds pressed down over the remaining symbols. The cold dulled at once, trapped beneath the cloth. Rowan gasped as warmth crept back into his arms. He stood. The mantle smothered the marks he had not yet scraped. For the first time in weeks, he pulled the chains without the freezing punishment. The iron groaned. It did not break, but it bent. A link warped under his strength. Matthias stepped back, watching the metal twist. "You've freed yourself from their leash," he said quietly. "The gods will notice that the moment you snap even one link." Rowan lowered his arms and stared at the bent iron. The curse was silenced. Nothing now stood between his strength and the chains but the chains themselves. And somewhere, he knew, the gods who forged them had just felt him push back.