Kaelen had always felt like a misplaced thread.
Even before the whispers, before the nightmares stitched from memories he never lived, there had been something off about him. He didn't belong in the village of Darsil Hollow—not truly. He walked its snow-bitten paths with practiced steps, greeted elders with the right bows, and hauled wood for coin like any other orphan with no name worth repeating. But there was a weight to his stare. A silence to his movements. The kind that drew suspicion. Or fear.
Still, life here had a rhythm. Cold mornings, quiet evenings, and the soft scrape of frostbitten boots on ancient stone. The village sat nestled in the forgotten curve of the northern Vale, isolated by cliffs on one side and a skeletal forest on the other. Darsil Hollow had no temple, no guards, and no interest in the outside world. It was the kind of place people came to disappear.
Kaelen never asked why his caretakers brought him here as a child. He remembered only vague flashes: blood on stone, a woman's scream, a tower collapsing inward like it was being devoured from within. Dreams, maybe. Or something older.
By seventeen, Kaelen stood tall, lean, with a physique chiseled by relentless labor and solitude. His silver-black hair fell past his collar, and his eyes—amethyst, unnatural—marked him as something more than the Hollow was meant to hold. Women watched him when they thought he didn't notice. Men eyed him with unease. No one stopped him when he wandered beyond the borders, into the forest's mists.
Because something about him belonged to the fog.
The forest paths were Kaelen's sanctuary. There, among the ruins of broken watchtowers and moss-covered relics, he felt something stir within. As if the wind carried secrets only he could hear. As if the stones remembered his steps. That's when the whispers began—not voices, not truly. But intent. Patterns that brushed against the edge of his mind, like fingers threading through strands of thought.
At first, he ignored them.
Until the day he found the mark.
It was etched into the bark of an ash tree near the southern path. Geometric, precise—too clean to be natural. A perfect circle, within which three spindles wove around one another like a knot.
Kaelen reached out and touched it. Pain lanced through his fingertips—brief, bright, and electric. He yanked his hand away and stared.
When he blinked, the mark was gone.
That night, the fog crept thicker than ever before. It clung to rooftops like mold. It seeped beneath doors. Three villagers vanished without a trace—the baker's boy, an old spinner, and one of the hunters. No blood. No tracks. Just absence.
No one spoke of it.
Darsil Hollow didn't believe in mourning. They believed in forgetting. In surviving.
Kaelen couldn't forget. He wouldn't.
So he returned to the tree. Left an offering beneath it—bread, a carved stone, a bloodied ribbon from a childhood injury. A memory. Something personal.
Not for the vanished.
For whatever had taken them.
The wind howled that night. And in his dreams, Kaelen saw something vast—a loom stretched across the sky, stars woven into its web, threads burning as they twisted into new shapes. A voice echoed, ancient and layered:
"Found."
He woke with blood in his mouth and pain behind his eyes.
The next day, they came.
Kaelen was splitting wood behind the elder hall when he heard the bell. Darsil Hollow hadn't used its alarm bell in decades. When it rang, villagers froze. Doors slammed shut. Children were snatched off porches. The entire square emptied in moments, like the place had rehearsed for this exact moment.
Kaelen stood still, axe in hand, heart thundering.
They stepped through the fog in single file.
Robes of dark grey, trimmed in silver thread. Masks—each one different. One like a bird's skull. Another featureless and polished like a mirror. Their steps made no sound on the stone, no footprints in the frost.
The Scales of Equilibrium.
He didn't know the name then. Only the dread. The certainty that they had come for him.
Kaelen ran.
He darted through alleys, leapt fences, vaulted over frozen carts. The mist clawed at him like fingers. His breath came in ragged gasps. He didn't look back.
Didn't need to.
The village was silent.
He passed bodies slumped over tables, asleep. Not dead. He hoped. Poisoned, maybe. Drugged. Even the livestock lay still, eyes open, breath shallow.
He screamed—but no one stirred.
A hand found his shoulder.
Ice. Strength. Finality.
He turned—and the world shattered.
—
Kaelen awoke in darkness.
His wrists burned. His ankles throbbed. Cold stone beneath him. Metal cuffs. Chains? No. Something stranger. They hummed—with rhythm, with intent.
A dim, blue light pulsed overhead.
He blinked against the glare, but the world refused to settle. The walls curved unnaturally, like they were breathing. The air stank of oil, rot, and something older—like burned silk soaked in blood.
Figures approached. Masks again. Robes again.
One held a needle. Another a glowing sphere. A third simply watched.
"Subject Twelve," the first one spoke, voice warped through a throat-tube. "Stabilized. Begin resonance breach."
Kaelen screamed as the needle sank into his neck.
Pain bloomed. Not physical. Conceptual. His body convulsed. His mind split. He saw something—himself, older, surrounded by corpses. Himself, younger, laughing in a place that had never existed. Himself, nonexistent.
Then it was gone.
Blackness returned.
So did pain.
It never left again.
—
Time dissolved in the Spindle.
That's what he learned they called it. The Spindle Facility. A ruin buried beneath reality, kept alive through rituals and machines no human mind was meant to understand. They weren't scientists. They weren't priests.
They were Weavers of Balance—and Kaelen was their thread.
They broke him in silence. No screams, no threats. Just cold procedures.
Injections. Ritual glyphs. Chambers of shifting gravity.
Every few days—or hours, or years, he no longer knew—they opened him. Not to cut flesh. To cut meaning. They unstitched things from him—memories, dreams, instincts—and then sewed them back wrong.
They called it "tuning."
Kaelen called it hell.
But something inside him survived.
Every time they pried open his soul, something pushed back. The whispers returned. Stronger. Focused.
"Awaken."
He began to see the Weave. Thin threads connecting machines. Lines of pressure between footsteps. Ripples where time bent around a dying light.
One day, he moved.
Just a little.
A flicker of defiance.
One of the masked ones noticed.
"Anomaly detected."
Kaelen smiled.
It was not kind.
—
The facility shook days later.
An explosion? An intrusion? Maybe something Kaelen himself triggered without meaning to.
He didn't wait to ask.
The restraints failed. His body—long starved, long punished—moved like it had remembered something ancient. He shattered a wall with bare hands. Not strength—pressure. Matter yielding to intent.
His eyes glowed violet. His veins laced with light.
He stumbled through the chaos, half-mad.
But free.
And behind him, the Spindle burned.