The night was not restful. Elias slept fitfully on the thin cot, plagued by fragmented Echoes—half-memories of the tenement's past occupants: a woman weeping over a lost child, a drunken brawl, the precise arrangement of tools in a forgotten carpenter's kit. The Cipher on his chest was a restless organ, constantly attempting to catalog the psychic residue of the environment.
He woke before dawn, the air heavy and cold. Silas was already awake, hunched over his workbench, soldering a delicate wire onto a piece of clockwork that ticked with uncanny precision.
"You still reek of Archon bureaucracy, Thorne," Silas stated without looking up. "And panic. Both will get you killed by a Thread-Cutter."
Elias sat up, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes. "I need to understand what happened with the wrench. The memory… it felt like it was ripping my mind apart."
Silas set the clockwork down. "That was a Rebound. The Cipher gives you the perception of the Threads, but your mind—your Personal Thread Integrity—is still soft. It's a bookkeeper's mind, not a Weaver's. You flooded your consciousness with the raw, uncensored terror of that factory worker. If you had tried to Weave the Threads together into a complex pattern, you wouldn't have just felt the terror; you would have become the Anomaly."
He walked over and tossed Elias a piece of dense, dark bread. "We begin with control. You must learn to filter the Obsidian, not merely absorb it."
Silas's first lesson was maddeningly simple and excruciatingly difficult: to quiet the incessant, visible noise of the Obsidian Threads.
"The world is shouting its history at you, Archivist. To listen to the world, you must first learn to listen to nothing," Silas instructed, leaning back in his chair.
He bound a rough cloth around Elias's eyes, plunging him into darkness. "Now, focus on the Cipher. It is the filter. Use its cold, mathematical logic to damp the emotional pull of the Echoes. Don't seek the memory; seek the information within the memory."
Elias focused. In the darkness, the Obsidian Threads became more vivid. He could hear whispers, smell phantom perfumes, and feel residual anger pulsing from the floorboards.
"Stop dwelling on the emotion—the sorrow, the fear," Silas's voice commanded. "That's the soft meat the Rebound feeds on. Look past the fear of the boiler worker. See the precise angle of his wrist. See the timing of his hand movement. Find the technical specification within the memory."
It took hours. Elias fought against the tidal wave of feeling, attempting to impose the detached, archival logic of his former life onto the psychic residue. Slowly, agonizingly, he began to succeed. Instead of being overwhelmed by the collective misery of the tenement, he could focus his Cipher, isolating a single, useful piece of data: the exact structural stress tolerance of the floorboards, or the optimal pressure point on a window latch.
"Good," Silas finally said, removing the blindfold. "You've learned to be a detached observer of the past. You are now merely reading the Obsidian Ledger. Now, we add the Crimson Thread."
The next step was introducing the Crimson Thread—the raw, chaotic power that flowed through the world, often concentrated around Aetheric energy sources.
Silas placed two items on the table: a small, dented tin cup and a discarded brass button.
"The cup holds a strong Obsidian Thread—the memory of a thousand cold hands warming themselves with cheap tea. The button holds a weak Crimson Thread—it sat too close to a failed generator coil," Silas explained.
"Your first successful Weave will be simple: Temporary Reinforcement."
Silas pointed to the button. "Draw the Crimson Thread from the button. Think of it as pulling a liquid fire. Now, push that fire—that power—into the cup's memory. Tell the cup: be stronger than the memory. Temporarily Bind the power to the cup's form."
Elias focused his will. The Cipher on his chest responded immediately, pulling the raw, chaotic Crimson energy from the button. It felt less like fire and more like high-frequency vibration—intensely unstable.
He directed the energy into the tin cup. This time, he didn't try to force it. He used the disciplined mental filter he had just learned, treating the energy transfer like a precise calculation.
Obsidian form + Crimson boost = Enhanced Durability.
A soft, audible 'click' echoed in the small room. The tin cup, which had been dull and dented, took on a subtle, hard sheen, appearing momentarily flawless. The Crimson Thread from the button was gone, transferred entirely into the cup.
"Success," Silas murmured. "You have created a Temporary Weave. The tin is now stronger than steel. It will last precisely one minute before the power is exhausted and the Thread dissipates, leaving the cup as it was."
Elias stared at his handiwork. The cup felt different—unnervingly solid, vibrating faintly with contained power. He had changed a piece of reality, however temporarily.
"This is how the Weavers operate," Silas continued. "We don't draw upon internal reserves; we draw upon the ambient energy of the Threads around us and encode it with information."
Just as Elias felt a flicker of pride, the Cipher gave a painful, sharp spike. It wasn't a rebound; it was an external alarm.
He saw, without looking, the faint, sickeningly bright flash of a Silver Thread—the line of fate—being violently cut somewhere close by.
"Thread-Cutters," Silas hissed, instantly alert. He rushed to the single, grimy window and peered out into the deepening mist. "They are working close. Too close. And that was not a minor severance."
Elias, using his newfound awareness, focused the Cipher. He didn't have to follow the line this time; the violence of the severance was so potent it left a lingering echo of chaos. He instantly read the location through the Obsidian Threads of the neighborhood's collective history: The Iron Gate Exchange.
"The Financial District," Elias said, his voice tense. "They're hitting the Iron Gate Exchange. It's the symbolic heart of the Archons' power."
Silas grabbed a heavy, oil-stained overcoat. "That building is saturated with ancient, dense Silver Threads—threads of commerce, capital, and influence. A full severance there will plunge the city into true economic chaos, creating the perfect environment for Anarchy."
He handed Elias a knife—a plain, cheap steel blade. "We're not fighting, Archivist. We are going to observe. We need to see how they cut, and what tools they use. But you will not go unarmed."
Silas quickly pulled a powerful, pulsing Crimson Thread from a hidden Aetheric battery beneath his cot and, with a complex, silent mental command, Bound it perfectly to the common steel knife. The knife did not glow or change color, but its surface took on the mirror-like finish of impossible sharpness.
"This knife is now a Temporary Bound Focus," Silas explained, tossing it to Elias. "It will slice through reinforced concrete for about ten minutes before the Crimson Thread is exhausted. Use it to escape, not to fight. Your task is to Weave a Thread of Observation and bring back everything you see."
Elias, gripping the impossibly sharp knife, felt the adrenaline return, but this time, it was tempered by the cold calculation of the Cipher. He was no longer running. He was going to the scene of a cosmic crime.
"Let's move, Archivist. The chaos has started."