The rain in the Low-Stitch did not fall so much as it despaired. It was a viscous, charcoal-colored drizzle—the atmospheric bile of a city that had long ago forgotten the taste of clean air. It tasted of oxidized copper, sulfur, and the collective, unwashed prayers of ten million souls living in the shadow of the High Spires. Silas Thorne crouched in the jagged silhouette of a rusted brass exhaust pipe, his fingers trembling as they traced the irregular, crystalline edges of a discarded mana-shard.
In Caelum-Ru, to be born without a soul-core was to be born an architectural error. A ghost. A vacuum in a world obsessed with fullness.
Silas looked down at his chest. Beneath the threadbare grime of his tunic, a faint, translucent indentation pulsed in the center of his sternum. It was a literal hole in his being—a Void-Soul. While others drew in the Aether of the gods to light their fires or mend their bones, Silas simply... consumed. But he consumed nothingness. He was a vessel that could never be filled, a mouth that could never swallow.
"Check the ventilation grates," a voice rasped through the swirling smog. It was a heavy sound, wet with the phlegm of a man who had spent his life inhaling industrial soot and cheap Aether-fumes. "The boy is a Void-Soul. He lacks the metabolic reserves for a long chase. He's gone to ground somewhere nearby."
Silas pressed his spine against the freezing metal pipe. The cold was a predatory thing, nipping at his malnourished ribs. He clutched the mana-shard tighter. It was a "Dirty Bit"—low-grade, erratic energy discarded by a mid-level merchant's caravan. To a Weaver or a Needle-Master, it was a piece of trash. To Silas, it was a volatile gamble with his own existence.
He closed his eyes, listening to the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of boots on wet cobblestone. Three of them. He could hear the low, vibrating hum of their Refined Garments. Even from twenty paces, the magical resonance of their gear made the air around Silas feel heavy and pressurized. These were Needle-Jackals—low-tier hunters who specialized in the "unmaking" of those the city had deemed redundant.
"You know what the Spire-researchers pay for a living Void-Soul?" another voice chuckled, this one higher, more melodic, and infinitely more cruel. "They want to measure the collapse. They want to see exactly how much pressure it takes to make a vacuum go pop."
Silas felt the vocabulary of his fear expanding. It wasn't just the dread of death; it was the existential horror of being treated as a laboratory curiosity. In the Spires, Aether was divinity. Here, in the gutters, it was a currency of blood.
The footsteps slowed. A shadow detached itself from the fog—a mountain of a man with skin the color of bruised plums. His eyes glowed with a sickly, synthetic yellow luminescence, the hallmark of a tainted core. In his right hand, he held a Weaver's needle—a foot-long spike of etched silver that thrummed with a lethal, high-frequency vibration.
"Found you, little ghost," the Jackal grinned. His teeth had been filed to points, a fashion choice common among the dregs of the Needle-Guilds.
Silas didn't beg. Begging was a transaction of hope, and Silas had been bankrupt of that currency since birth. Instead, he stared at the silver needle, his mind racing through the few options left to a boy who shouldn't exist.
"Don't kill him yet, Drax," the melodic voice called out as the other two hunters emerged. The speaker was lean, wearing a tailored coat of reinforced leather that shimmered with interwoven Aether-threads. "The core-harvest is cleaner if the subject is conscious. The vacuum needs to be active when we insert the dampeners."
Drax, the large man, stepped forward, the silver needle held like a surgical instrument. "I'll just take his tendons first. Keep him from fluttering away."
As the man lunged, Silas didn't retreat into the darkness. He did the unthinkable. He took the jagged "Dirty Bit" mana-shard and slammed it directly into the hollow indentation in his chest.
The world did not explode. It imploded.
For a heartbeat, the cacophony of the Low-Stitch—the hiss of steam, the roar of the exhaust pipes, the shouts of the hunters—vanished into a singular, absolute silence. Light was not reflected; it was swallowed. Silas felt a sensation that defied description—a cold, ravenous pull that originated in the marrow of his bones and extended into the very fabric of reality.
The vacuum in Silas's chest didn't just accept the mana-shard; it obliterated it. The "dirty" energy, filled with the impurities of the slums, acted as a catalyst. It was like dropping a match into a well of liquid shadow.
Drax's needle stopped an inch from Silas's throat. The yellow glow in the hunter's eyes didn't just flicker; it began to stretch. The luminescence was being pulled out of his pupils in long, agonizing ribbons of light, gravitating toward the hole in Silas's chest.
"What... what is this?" Drax gasped. His voice was thin, echoing as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep canyon.
Silas felt a new instinct awakening. It was the sensation of a needle threading through a stubborn piece of silk. His fingertips began to pulse, and suddenly, ghostly white filaments erupted from his skin. They weren't made of Aether, which was the golden breath of life. These were made of lack. They were the negative image of a spell, the dark threads of the Great Void.
Stitch, a voice whispered. It was not his own. It was a cold, ancient resonance that vibrated through his teeth.
The filaments lashed out with the speed of a striking viper, sewing themselves into Drax's chest. The man tried to scream, but the sound was devoured before it could leave his throat. Silas watched, both horrified and intoxicated, as the Aether-threads of Drax's reinforced garment began to unspool. The magical energy didn't dissipate; it flowed through the dark filaments and into Silas's Void-Soul.
And then came the memories.
This was the true horror of the Stitching. As the energy flowed, so did the essence of the man. Silas saw flashes of a childhood spent in the soot-farms. He felt the phantom taste of a stolen apple. He felt the cold, hard satisfaction Drax had felt when he killed his first victim. Silas was consuming the man's history, his sins, and his strength.
"Drax!" the lean leader shouted, drawing a pair of glowing daggers. "Get away from him! He's a Leech!"
But it was too late. The "Dirty Bit" had opened a door that could not be closed. Silas felt a surge of stolen vitality. His muscles, previously wasted from hunger, suddenly coiled with a borrowed power. His senses sharpened. He could see the individual threads of Aether floating in the air, the "weft and warp" of the world that had always been invisible to him.
Drax collapsed. He wasn't dead, but he was unspun. He lay on the wet stones like a discarded rag, his magical core shattered into a thousand useless splinters, his eyes now dull and vacant. He had been hollowed out, his destiny harvested to feed a ghost.
Silas stood up, his movements fluid and predatory. He looked at his hands. The dark filaments were slowly retreating into his pores, leaving behind a faint, silver-gray scarring that looked like surgical stitches.
He felt a new weight in his soul—a fragment of Drax's brute strength and a sliver of his combat instincts. It was a clumsy, jagged addition to his being, but it was power.
The other two hunters hesitated. They were no longer looking at a "Void-Soul" to be harvested. They were looking at a predator who had learned how to use the vacuum as a weapon.
"You're a monster," the leader hissed, though his hand trembled as he gripped his daggers. "The Wardens... the Inquisitors... they will hunt you to the ends of the clouds for this. Stitching is a heresy."
Silas looked up at the High Spires, looming like ivory teeth against the charcoal sky. The light up there was beautiful, clean, and utterly indifferent to the suffering below. For seventeen years, Silas had been a ghost haunting the gutters. He had been the one who was hunted, the one who was unmade.
He looked at the remaining hunters and allowed a small, cold smile to touch his lips. It was a expression that didn't belong on the face of a teenager; it was a look stolen from the man he had just devoured.
"The Spires built this world on the corpses of gods," Silas said, his voice now carrying a strange, double-toned resonance. "Why shouldn't I build my soul on the corpses of their servants?"
He stepped out of the shadows, the dark filaments beginning to dance at his fingertips once more. He didn't just want to survive anymore. He wanted to climb. He wanted to see if the gods at the top of the world were as easy to unspool as the men at the bottom.
The hunt had changed. And Silas Thorne was finally ready to start sewing.