The wind had changed.
Kaelen stood at the edge of a ridge overlooking a silent canyon below, a realm half-swallowed by the mist that refused to burn under any sun. The Riftwilds breathed slowly, like a slumbering beast—twitching, seething, alive in a way the land should not be.
He didn't blink as he watched the horizon shift. The sun in the sky now pulsed slowly, as though caught in a heartbeat not its own.
There was something new.
A weight behind the air. A hum beneath the earth. A sense that every step he took now echoed farther than it should, as if time itself was beginning to observe him.
No, not time.
Something older.
Something that watched.
Kaelen had not eaten in days.
He didn't feel hunger—not as he once had. His body had changed after the escape. Bones reinforced. Muscles sleek, perfect, refined. No blemishes, no old scars. Even the slashes he'd taken across his ribs had vanished, leaving behind silver threads faintly glowing under his skin.
Yet the changes were not just physical.
He could sense fractures now—thin places in the world, where light bled wrong and sound moved sideways. They flickered at the edge of his perception, like insects only noticed when still.
And above all… he knew when something was near.
Not through sight. Not sound.
Through the Weave.
The realization struck him when he found the first corpse.
It hung upside-down from a tangle of trees, twenty feet off the ground, bound in silk-like tendrils. The body was desiccated, skin gray and cracked. Its eyes had been plucked out, the sockets hollow and blackened.
Kaelen stood beneath it, unmoving, not out of fear but calculation.
This wasn't the work of any wild beast.
It was a message.
He looked closer. On the corpse's chest, etched in dried blood, was a spiral—familiar and yet unplaceable.
It triggered something deep inside him.
A memory. A scream. Metal scraping against bone.
He stumbled back.
The Weave pulsed.
A ripple tore through the fabric of the air, and suddenly he felt it.
An eye.
A presence.
Not watching from the woods. Not from the sky.
From inside the Weave itself.
It was not a being. Not in the way one understood gods or monsters.
It was a concept. A fixed point in the loom of reality.
A witness.
Kaelen began to run.
Not from fear. From necessity.
The land responded. Stones cracked beneath his feet. Roots reached toward him. Even the fog seemed to part, as if aware of who he was—what he was becoming.
He moved faster than he had any right to.
Not through skill, but instinct.
A cliff loomed ahead. The mist swirled with strange motion at its base. Yet Kaelen did not hesitate.
He jumped.
The fall should have broken him.
Instead, reality folded.
Space warped mid-air, and the impact he expected never came.
He landed on his feet. Perfectly balanced.
The ground beneath him was soft and wrong—like sand that remembered being stone. His boots left no prints. The air was hot and cold at once.
A dead zone.
He'd landed in one of the Riftwild's deeper scars.
He stood in what appeared to be the ruins of a forgotten settlement. Shattered buildings. Ancient carvings. Statues with erased faces.
And silence.
Complete, suffocating silence.
Kaelen's breath caught.
He was not alone.
At the far end of the ruin stood a monolith—twenty feet tall, smooth, carved of obsidian that shimmered with impossible depth. It hummed, not with sound but with intent.
Carved into its surface was a single glyph.
A spiral.
The same as the one on the corpse.
The same as the one he remembered from—
Pain surged behind his eyes.
Memories slammed into his skull like fists.
Needles. Chains. Burning light.
A name: The Eye That Watches
Not a title. Not a legend.
A function.
A construct buried in the Weave—left behind by something far older than gods.
And now it had found him.
The glyph flared.
Kaelen staggered forward, drawn without choice.
As his fingers touched the monolith, the world stopped.
No light. No sound. No breath.
Only awareness.
Then—
"You Are Not Yet Woven."
A voice, but not.
It came from inside his mind and outside existence.
Kaelen gritted his teeth. "What are you?"
The Eye did not answer.
Instead, it showed him.
Visions poured into his skull.
A world burning under a sky of threads.
A man—his own face—standing at the center, arms outstretched.
Threads dancing around him.
A Weave unraveling and reweaving.
A woman screaming.
A throne of mirrors.
A hand pressing against glass.
Then darkness.
He collapsed to his knees, bleeding from his nose and ears.
The monolith's glow faded.
But Kaelen... changed.
He could see more now.
Not with his eyes—but his mind.
He could see connections between rocks. Fault lines in trees. The natural flow of motion, of tension, of time.
The Weave wasn't just a concept now.
It was present.
Alive.
And it had touched him.
Or perhaps... it had recognized him.
He rose.
Whatever message the Eye had offered—it had passed.
But in its wake, a gift.
Kaelen raised his hand and flexed his fingers.
Space shimmered.
Only a breath—but it responded.
A sliver of air sliced forward, cutting through a stone outcropping like paper.
Power.
Not random.
Not stolen.
Claimed.
He was no longer a subject.
No longer prey.
He was becoming something else.
A thread with purpose.
A shadow with shape.
By nightfall, Kaelen had left the ruin behind.
The Riftwilds remained dangerous, but now, they respected him.
He could feel it.
The ground no longer resisted his steps.
The mist parted when he approached.
Even the creatures that watched from a distance—eyes gleaming from the dark—did not draw near.
And as the moons passed overhead, casting twin lights upon the scarred world, Kaelen made a vow beneath them.
No one would ever chain him again.
No gods.
No factions.
No fate.
He would write his own Weave.
And those who tried to bind him...
Would find themselves unwritten.