Thorn Runehand — Shardbound

The Story of Thorn Runehand

Thorn Runehand once lost his name for three days.

A curse placed by a rival order did not injure his body. It erased his sense of identity in layers: first familiar faces, then personal history, then the certainty that the person in the mirror was himself.

Lumenveil healers stopped the curse, but Thorn considered survival by someone else’s intervention an unacceptable solution.

He spent a year carving protective equations into the skin and bone of both forearms. The runes do not block ordinary harm. They are designed around one specific principle: no external will may reduce the part of Thorn that decides who Thorn is.

That became Rune Ward. Attempts to diminish his Spirit meet a lattice of self-referential symbols that simply refuses the premise.

Thorn works as a Specialist because he has since become Lumenveil’s foremost expert in identity wards. He is poor at raw Power and no faster than average, but extraordinarily difficult to unmake emotionally or spiritually.

His interest in the Convergence is deeply personal. Threads can carry people into worlds where laws, memories and even forms differ.

Thorn travels to answer one question: how much can change before a person becomes someone else?