The moment Caelum stepped fully into the circle, the world forgot how to be only one thing.
The forest.
The academy.
The sky.
All of it… folded.
Not in sound.
Not in color.
In meaning.
The light bleeding from the cracked earth surged upward in a column that only he could see—threads of pale radiance twisting like exposed nerves. They passed through him, around him, into him, test-fitting his shape.
Lira watched from the edge of the ring, eyes wide, throat tight, the bond blazing like a live wire.
"Anchor," Kael said sharply, voice taut. "Do not move. Do not blink. Do not lose him."
She didn't answer.
She couldn't.
All of her attention was buried in that line between them.
Caelum — Standing on the Cut
The ritual wound was not a place.
It was a statement.
He stood at its center and felt it read him.
Layers unfolded.
The forest's memory rose around him, not as images, but as threads of recorded pain.
Roots torn.
Sigils carved.
Blood poured into stone.
Names cut from existence one by one.
The Silent One of Secrets had watched as men and women inscribed their betrayals into earth, begging the god for erasure.
They had offered up bloodlines.
Whole branches of humanity.
Remove them, they had prayed.
Cross them out of history.
The god had listened.
Obliged.
Collected.
Reality had screamed.
The Great Stitching had come later, frantic, trying to patch what was missing.
It had failed.
Badly.
Caelum's Proto-Sigil resonated with that failure.
Broken thing, the wound whispered, not in words but in jagged impressions.
You tore yourself free. You were not invited. You are a bad edit.
He agreed.
His second-form threads stirred, half-awake, drawn to the raw edges of the ritual.
He could feel Lira at the edge of the circle—warm, frightened, present—her bond-thread tied around him like a loop of gold through the center of his chest.
The wound felt that too.
It did not like it.
Anchored anomaly, it hissed in concept.
Cheating. You shouldn't be held. You should fall.
The ground tried to drop out from under him.
The sky inverted.
His sense of up and down fractured into meaningless directions.
Caelum didn't move.
He had fallen through worse.
Lira — Holding Someone She Can't Touch
From where she stood, it looked like nothing was happening.
No roaring wind.
No glowing sigils.
No collapsing ground.
Caelum stood at the center of the stone ring, coat unmoving, hair barely stirred.
But the bond—
The bond screamed.
Not in pain.
In pressure.
She clutched her chest.
"Something's wrong," she gasped.
Marenne was already scribbling feverishly. "Forest resonance spike—no, that's not just forest, that's below—we're getting bleed-through from the chamber under the academy too—"
Jalen swallowed audibly. "So both horrors are paying attention. S-so that's nice. I hate it here."
Valen's voice crackled through the mental channel.
We're seeing waveform overlap on the ritual site and the academy's lowest seal, he said. Threadbearer, report.
Caelum's voice returned, calm and distant.
"I am standing."
Lira wanted to throttle him.
"That's not a status report," she hissed aloud.
Kael's gaze stayed fixed on Caelum.
"If he were losing, you'd feel it," Kael said.
"I do feel it," Lira snapped. "That's the problem."
The world around her felt wrong. The trees leaned closer without moving. The mist thickened without darkening. Her own thoughts tried to scatter like leaves, but the bond kept pulling them back into a line.
Caelum wasn't stable.
He was… balancing.
On something that did not believe in balance.
Caelum — The Forest Speaks in Cuts
The wound prodded deeper.
It pushed threads of forest-memory through him like testing needles.
He saw—felt—impressions.
A battle in the rain.
A circle of mages carved in roots.
A boy screaming as his name unspooled from his mouth and dissolved into nothing.
A crest burned into bark: a thread spiraling around a dark sun.
House Veylor's ancient sigil.
Caelum's eyes narrowed.
"So," he murmured. "We've met before."
The ritual scar shuddered.
You were cut here, it answered in jagged feeling.
Your line was on my stone. Your memory was on my blade.
He dug through his past life's recollections.
No record of this ritual.
No mention of a forest execution.
But then again—
memories could be cut.
His jaw tightened.
"Explain," he said.
The forest obliged.
For a moment, the wound opened fully.
Threads of history slammed into him.
He saw a Veylor ancestor kneel in this very circle, face empty, eyes distant.
Heard a voice promise:
Your treachery will be undone. Your name will not stain the weave again.
Saw a knife descend.
Blood hit the stone.
A whole branch of possibility vanished.
The forest remembered.
The god of Secrets remembered.
Reality had tried to forget.
And now, the wound hissed, one of their line comes back with a soul that refused to stay dead. Broken. Rewritten. Thread-stitched. You are an insult.
Caelum almost smiled.
"Good," he said softly. "I'm tired of being polite."
The Proto-Sigil surged.
Lira — When His Threads Try to Climb Out of Him
She felt it before she saw anything.
The bond went from hot to white.
Her knees hit the ground.
"Caelum!" she choked.
From the outside, the air around him shimmered.
Threads bled into visibility around his form—hundreds of fine white lines unspooling from his skin, whipping through the air like searching snakes.
Marenne cursed.
"That's second-form escalation—no, that's beyond what he did in the ravine—"
Kael took a step forward, aura flaring.
Valen's voice sliced through the channel.
Hold positions. No one touches the ring.
Jalen clutched his head.
"He's going to rip himself out of his body!"
Lira couldn't breathe.
The threads didn't just wrap around Caelum. They stabbed downward, piercing into the cracked earth, burrowing into the ritual scar like sewing needles forced through old cloth.
She felt all of it.
His pain.
The forest's outrage.
The wound's desperate attempt to push him back out.
"Caelum," she whispered, voice breaking. "Stop—"
"No," his voice echoed through the bond. "Watch."
Caelum — The First Stitch
He understood suddenly.
He wasn't just standing on a wound.
He was standing on a gap.
The ritual hadn't just cut names and lines.
It had left empty spaces in the pattern.
Blankness.
Silence where there should have been song.
The Great Stitching had tried to bridge those spaces with crude patches.
The forest hated those patches.
They itched.
They bled.
Caelum's Proto-Sigil recognized them.
This was his territory.
Broken things.
Unfinished edits.
He drove his threads deeper.
The pain was exquisite.
His nerves screamed.
His bones hummed.
His soul felt like it was being threaded through a needle backwards.
He welcomed it.
"Threadbearer," the entity murmured from far below the academy, voice like silk dragged across a blade. You play with cuts you don't own.
"Be quiet," Caelum told it.
He found the first patch.
A clumsy knot of conceptual sealant, stuffed into a gap where a bloodline used to exist.
He recognized the structure.
It was similar to the patch that had formed around his own soul at reincarnation.
Fascinating.
He didn't tear it out.
That would cause collapse.
He did something worse.
He spliced it.
His threads wrapped around the patch, sliced through it with surgical precision, and began weaving it into a new pattern—one that allowed pressure to bleed out instead of building endlessly against the forest's skin.
The wound howled.
Not in sound.
In recoil.
Streams of stored resentment surged up his arms, trying to burn him from the inside.
Caelum grimaced.
His knees buckled slightly.
Outside the circle, Lira screamed.
Lira — Refusing to Let Him Fall
The moment he bent, even a little, the forest lunged.
It felt like hands grabbed her from behind—dozens of them, cold and wet and eager—pulling her backward, away from the ring.
You don't want this, they whispered.
You're not meant for this.
Let go. Let him fall.
She saw it in her mind's eye: Caelum vanishing into white light, the forest satisfied, the academy scarred but intact, her free.
All she had to do was loosen her grip.
Tears burned her eyes.
Fear rose like bile.
She almost—
No.
No.
Lira slammed both hands into the dirt and clung to the bond like a lifeline.
"I'm not letting you go," she hissed.
Pain surged up her arms.
Her palms split.
Blood hit the ground, bright and hot.
The forest recoiled like it had been slapped.
The bond snapped tighter.
Caelum's balance stopped slipping.
Her blood on the perimeter, his threads in the core.
An unplanned, unwanted circuit.
The ritual shuddered.
Marenne gasped.
"Her resonance—! Valen, her blood just synced with the circle—"
"Stabilization spike across the entire wound," Valen replied, voice taut and awed. "They're locking the pattern between them."
Kael swore very, very quietly.
"…Monsters," he muttered. "Both of them."
Caelum — A New Rule
He felt her.
Not just as warmth.
As a second hand on the thread.
Fear poured into him again—but this time it wasn't a flood.
It came in shape.
Her terror of losing him.
Her refusal to abandon him.
Her stubborn, half-broken resolve.
He caught it.
Used it.
Anchors don't just hold, he realized.
They define which direction "down" is.
His Proto-Sigil seized that definition and wrote it into the wound.
Down is toward her.
Not into the forest.
Not into the god.
Not into the entity below the academy.
Her.
He exploited that.
Cruelly.
Efficiently.
His threads wove faster, stitching around three more concept-patches, splicing their pressure lines into new vents that bled tension out into harmless loops.
The wound bucked.
The forest groaned.
Trees leaned, then jerked back.
Roots cracked and re-knitted.
The pressure that had been building under this spot for decades began to… settle.
Not heal.
Never heal.
But rearrange.
The Silent One of Secrets watched through whatever passed for its attention.
It did not scream.
It did not rage.
It smiled, ancient and cold.
New rule, it mused.
Threadbearer may edit my ledger.
The knowledge slid across Caelum's bones.
He didn't like it.
He kept going.
Lira — The Moment It Sees Her
As the pressure shifted, the forest's focus shifted with it.
It stopped trying to pull her away.
It started… looking.
Not at her body.
At her soul.
Images slammed into her.
Not hers.
Old ones.
Wounds she never took.
A woman with Lira's eyes kneeling in the mud, begging for her child's name to be spared.
A man standing in a circle much like this one, arms bound, face calm, as the world wrote him out.
Voices all overlapping.
Cut me instead.
Erase me first.
Leave them behind.
It took Lira a moment to realize—
These were anchors.
The forest had seen many.
They had all failed.
Not because they let go.
Because they were cut out to punish the thread they tried to hold.
The realization hit like a physical blow.
Her stomach lurched.
Her grip tightened until her nails dug into bloody dirt.
"I'm not them," she whispered, voice shaking.
The forest leaned closer.
We will see.
The bond hummed.
Caelum's presence surged through it, steady as a pillar rammed into bedrock.
"Lira," he said—not aloud, but in that too-intimate space between thought and thread.
She gasped.
"Yes—?"
"Do not take its memories," he said. "Let them pass through. They are bait."
She wanted to argue.
She wanted to say too late.
She didn't.
She focused on his voice.
On the exact texture of his awareness.
On the way he felt when he was analyzing something versus when he was annoyed versus when he was—very rarely—amused.
She used those as handholds.
The foreign images faded.
The forest hissed, displeased.
Good.
The Wound Bends, But Doesn't Break
Minutes bled into each other.
Caelum's threads continued weaving.
Lira's blood dried on the circle's edge and glowed faintly with stolen sigil-light.
The academy's support web absorbed shock after shock as the ritual's resonance changed shape.
Marenne's voice shook as she gave updates.
"—stability rising on vector three—panic signatures from the forest receding—pressure on the academy's lowest seal has dropped by twelve percent—this is… this is actually working—"
Jalen clung to one of the support pylons, eyes wide and unblinking.
"I don't understand anything that's happening," he whispered, "but I feel like if I blink, the universe picks a different option on a multiple-choice test and we all fail."
Kael watched without blinking.
Valen's mental presence was a tight coil of focus and calculation.
Artheon, far below, laughed until his chains bled.
And Headmaster Serath, watching from the highest vantage point, tightened his grip on the railing until the stone cracked.
Because this was not supposed to be possible.
The wound wasn't sealing.
It wasn't closing.
But it was—
accepting.
Not him.
Not her.
The pattern.
The forest stopped pushing them out.
It began to… move with them.
Like a muscle unclenching after centuries of tension.
Caelum felt the shift.
He slowed the stitching.
Let the threads settle.
One final splice.
One last adjustment.
And then—
He withdrew.
The Proto-Sigil threads retracted into his body like silk being wound back onto spools.
The column of light dimmed.
The circle's glow softened from harsh white to dull, watchful gray.
The pressure dropped.
Lira collapsed fully onto her hands.
Breathing.
Sweating.
Shaking.
Alive.
Aftermath — The Price
Caelum stepped out of the circle.
It should have been simple.
One foot.
Then the other.
Done.
His body disagreed.
Pain erupted in every joint.
His vision swam.
His heartbeat stuttered out of sync with itself.
The world tilted, threatening to slant sideways into that other state again.
The Proto-Sigil twitched, hungrily.
The entity beneath the academy pushed, eager to piggyback on his weakened control.
Now, it whispered. Let me through. I will finish the cut.
He didn't have the energy to snarl.
He simply refused.
Line by line.
Thought by thought.
"I am not your opening," he said silently.
His foot missed the edge of the depression by a fraction.
He started to fall.
The bond yanked.
Not gently.
Lira threw herself forward, ignoring Kael's shouted curse, and grabbed him before gravity could claim him.
Her hands closed around his coat.
His chest.
His reality.
The Proto-Sigil flared—
then snapped back into its most contained state with a soundless jolt.
They both hit the forest floor.
Hard.
For a moment, the only sound was the harsh rasp of their breathing.
Lira's forehead rested against his collarbone.
His hand was fisted in the dirt beside her.
"Idiot," she croaked, voice raw.
"Yes," he agreed.
Marenne rushed toward them, only to stop at the very edge of the circle, as if an invisible line barred her.
"Status?!" she demanded.
Lira pushed herself up slightly.
Caelum's face was pale.
His eyes, when they opened, held that faint shimmer again—but this time dimmer, like whatever had tried to bloom had been forced to wilt halfway.
"I am functional," he said.
"That is not the same as okay," Lira snapped.
"Okay is an imprecise metric."
"Shut up."
He did.
For once.
Kael finally moved.
"Web withdrawal," he barked. "Now. Slowly. No sudden breaks. We're leaving while the forest is still deciding how it feels about being manhandled."
Valen's voice cracked through the link.
Confirming reduction in anomaly escalation. The forest wound is still unstable, but no longer progressing toward breach. We withdraw. Threadbearer, anchor—return under full escort.
Lira helped Caelum to his feet.
He didn't protest.
That scared her more than anything.
She slid under his arm, taking as much of his weight as he allowed.
The forest watched.
Every leaf.
Every root.
Every drop of sap.
It could have struck then.
Could have dragged them all down.
It didn't.
Something in its attention had changed.
Not acceptance.
Not forgiveness.
Recognition.
As They Leave
The path back felt shorter.
That wasn't good.
When they crossed the boundary where the academy gates should be, the mist peeled back and the iron reappeared, as if manifested belatedly out of stubbornness.
Lira stumbled over the threshold and sucked in a breath of academy air like it was the first clean lungful of her life.
The wards hummed.
Reassuring.
Smug.
Alive.
Kael turned to look beyond the gate one last time.
The forest stood quiet.
Then—
faint, almost not there—a line of bark on the nearest tree split open.
Sap bled.
It formed a single curling symbol:
A thread around a dark sun.
House Veylor's ancient crest.
Kael's lips thinned.
"Oh, that's going to be a problem," he muttered.
The Forest Keeps a Souvenir
In the ritual cavity, far beneath the roots, the wound pulsed.
Not as angry.
Not as raw.
The Silent One of Secrets coiled around its ledger of erasures and made a note.
One cut had been edited.
One patch had been altered.
It did not mind.
There would be more cuts.
More patches.
More chances to see what the Threadbearer would do.
And now it knew three things:
He could see its work.
He could change it.
And he would not step onto a wound alone.
The anchor's blood still stained the edge of the circle.
The god of Secrets tasted that too.
It smiled.
Two names, it thought.
One thread.
It would remember them.
Even if the world did not.