The night bled purple as Kaelen stumbled through the gaping fissure in the ruined mountainside, lungs tearing with each breath, his vision swimming in darkness and fractured starlight.
Behind him, the Spindle groaned. A distant metallic whine curled into a scream as twisted towers collapsed inward, devoured by their own foundations. Shards of reinforced alloy, broken runes, and blackened surgical glass rained into the chasm where the facility had once stood. The ground trembled like a dying beast.
Kaelen didn't look back.
His feet dragged over wet stone and gnarled roots, leaving faint trails of blood where old sutures tore anew. His wrists were still wrapped in broken manacles, the metal half-melted, fused to his skin by the last uncontrolled outburst that had reduced half the Spindle's containment level to dust.
Everything hurt.
Every thought was a whisper interrupted by shrieks of memory—needles under the tongue, glowing threads stitched into his spine, a voice whispering in impossible dialects.
And beneath it all: the Weave.
It pulsed.
Not with sound. Not with color.
But with presence.
Kaelen felt it constantly now—like a second heartbeat, rippling beneath existence. Lines crossing in space and curling around people, objects, and motion. The trees ahead shimmered at odd angles, leaves vibrating in rhythm to a tune he hadn't yet heard but somehow recognized.
He stumbled and fell to one knee.
Mud clung to his palm. His breath steamed in the cold.
Around him, the forest loomed—alien and unfamiliar. The stars overhead flickered in unnatural constellations, and the moon was wrong. No—moons. Three silver-white orbs rotated around one another in a slow spiral.
"Where…?" Kaelen rasped.
This wasn't the world he remembered—if he could even trust those fragments. Faces, names, seasons… they were all ghosts now, blurred into mist.
The wind cut through him.
He rose, muscles screaming, and pressed forward. His balance faltered. The weight of his own body felt wrong—denser, sharper. Like gravity pulled at him from two different directions. Every step made his spine crack, every breath left the taste of ozone on his tongue.
Eventually, he found shelter.
A jagged cliffside gave way to a shallow cave hidden behind thorny bramble and collapsed stone. It was barely deeper than a grave, but the shadows inside were thick enough to hide him from the sky.
Kaelen collapsed inside.
Darkness swallowed him.
He didn't sleep. Not truly.
The dreams were louder than ever now.
He saw a black throne atop a dying sun. A shattered loom the size of a city. Blades made of memory. A woman with no face weaving stars into a dress made of time. And always—always—a voice whispering in his bones.
"You are the fracture. You are the thread left unbound."
He awoke vomiting black ichor.
It hissed where it touched the stone floor, releasing faint smoke. Kaelen convulsed, body seizing as internal forces surged again.
His skin pulsed with unseen threads, glowing faintly in patterns beneath the surface—silver lines that traced veins like circuitry. Bones cracked. Muscles twitched, reknit, hardened. His heartbeat accelerated into a strange rhythm, synchronizing with something beyond him.
He screamed into the void of the cave.
Then silence.
And breath.
When the tremors stopped, Kaelen curled against the stone wall, shivering despite the heat rising from his own body. Steam rolled off his back. His skin looked different now—sleek, refined, as if the torture had burned away imperfection itself.
He flexed a hand.
No pain.
Only power.
But raw, chaotic. Like a dam ready to burst.
Kaelen looked to the mouth of the cave. The forest beyond had changed. The trees moved when he blinked. The moonlight shifted in unnatural angles. The lines of the Weave shimmered even stronger now.
A squirrel darted into view.
His eyes focused, and for a moment—only a moment—he saw it.
Not the animal.
But the thread of it.
A thin silvery string trailing behind its motion like a temporal echo, anchored to a dozen possibilities. His breath caught. The thread shimmered, snapped, and the squirrel froze in mid-motion, twitching. It blinked—then exploded into smoke and scattered fur.
Kaelen fell backward, trembling.
"I didn't…"
He hadn't meant to do that.
It was as if reality had responded to an impulse—a flinch of emotion made manifest.
He stared at his hands, breath heaving.
"What did they turn me into…?"
He didn't get an answer.
Only the forest, still humming with quiet menace.
The next few hours passed in cold agony.
He rationed what little awareness he had left to slow his breathing, to keep his senses alert. At times, he imagined shapes crawling outside—creatures sniffing the air for something wrong. At other times, he caught glimpses of his own reflection in puddled water—though the face was unfamiliar.
More angular. Sharper. Almost… perfect.
It was like someone had sculpted beauty and cruelty into one form. His silver-black hair fell over his eyes, which now glowed faintly with flecks of violet. His physique was lean but defined, carved by forces that cared little for mercy.
A weapon, designed.
He should've felt pride.
But all Kaelen felt was emptiness.
What was left of the man who had once laughed? Once spoken gently? Once dreamed?
He had no name but the one they whispered in fear—"Subject 9-A: the Nullborn."
But even that wasn't his true name. He remembered his real one, didn't he?
"Kaelen," he murmured aloud. The name tasted foreign.
It would do.
That night, he wandered further from the cave, limping through a gully filled with frost-burned leaves and crystal flowers that pulsed faintly when touched. The air smelled like ash and iron.
Above, the sky fractured.
Not a hallucination.
A real fissure opened in the night sky, revealing something behind the stars—a rotating sigil of impossible geometry. It flickered, casting light over the land. The animals froze. Trees leaned. Even the wind halted.
Then a sound.
A deep, resonant chime.
Kaelen fell to one knee as pain exploded behind his right eye. His vision swam, split, folded in on itself.
And he saw.
Not just the world.
But the layers beneath.
The Weave.
Reality wasn't solid. It was threads. Loops. Knots. A vast tapestry strung between truths and lies, pulsing with memory and law. And he… he was not outside it.
He was within.
And now, for the first time, he had pulled.
The fissure closed.
The chime ended.
And Kaelen lay gasping, blood trickling from his nose.
He returned to the cave.
Not because it was safe.
Because there was nowhere else.
He needed rest. A plan. Answers.
The Spindle was gone. The Scales of Equilibrium wouldn't stop looking for him. The world he now walked through felt as broken as his mind.
But he was alive.
And somewhere inside him burned a question that refused to die:
Why him?
Why had they chosen him?
Why did his soul, of all souls, resonate with the Weave?
Sleep finally came in short bursts.
And in one final dream that night, he stood on a hill overlooking a world made of threads, burning from one end to the other.
In the distance, a woman made of stars reached for him.
"Find me," she said. "Before the threads fray completely."
Then the dream collapsed.
And Kaelen awoke—alone, reborn, and hunted.