"Every bonded weapon has a threshold. Before the threshold, it is an object with qualities. After it, the relationship between carrier and weapon becomes something that requires a different vocabulary."
Six months after arriving at Ashenveil, the blade's inscriptions became readable.
Not suddenly. Not in the way of revelations that announce themselves. Over the course of three weeks of morning sessions in the lower cultivation space, the resonant-impression reading he had been developing since the Void Sight first emerged shifted incrementally toward something more precise, until one morning he held the blade in both hands with the core fully open and the Void-saturated environment amplifying everything, and the inscriptions resolved into language.
Not a language he knew. Not a language anyone in Aethermoor knew, or had known, in any era he could identify from the Voidshaping texts.
He read them anyway.
This was the quality of the Void Sight at its current depth: it did not translate language. It transmitted meaning. The inscriptions communicated not as words but as the compressed intention behind words, the way music communicates not as notation but as feeling. He sat in the amber light of the lower level with the blade and received the inscriptions the way you receive something that has been waiting for you specifically for a very long time.
The meaning came in sequences.
The first: a name. Not his name. The name of the practitioner who had forged the blade, pre-Pantheon, in the world the Voidshaping texts described. A name he would not repeat aloud because names had specific weights in the Void-adjacent tradition, and this one was not his to carry.
The second: the blade's nature. Not Voidtouched, as Seris had named it in the Ashenreach — or not only that. It had been forged as a Void anchor: an object designed to stabilize a Void practitioner's core during the most volatile stages of deep development. The fracture it resonated with was not an accident of its Void exposure. It had been built to contain a specific architecture of absence. It had been waiting for the architecture it was built for.
It was made for someone like me. Not for me specifically — the maker did not know me. They made it for the shape of what Void cultivation produces. And it found that shape, after three hundred years, because the Void has its own sense of alignment.
The third: a warning, and this one arrived with a weight that required him to sit with it for several minutes before continuing.
The deep Void development — the non-linear progression, the fracture that went down without a visible ceiling — had a threshold. The texts had described it obliquely as the Sovereign equivalent for Void cultivation, the point at which the practitioner's Void-core underwent a fundamental transformation rather than a progressive deepening. The conventional cultivation system called the equivalent moment in conventional cultivation the Sovereign Breakthrough: the transition from human-scale power to something categorically different.
The blade's inscription called the Void equivalent the Unmade Threshold.
And the inscription's warning about the Unmade Threshold was specific: the transition, when it occurred, would not be survivable by a practitioner who reached it unprepared. Not because the power would destroy the practitioner from outside. Because the absence would. The fracture, deepening past a certain point, risked consuming the self that inhabited the space around it. The practitioner had to be anchored — to something that the Void could not absorb, something outside the fracture's capacity.
An anchor. The blade is one. What else. The inscription is clear that the blade alone is insufficient for the Unmade Threshold. The anchor must also be living. It must also be chosen.
He sat with the blade for a long time.
Living. Chosen. Someone whose presence is outside the Void's reach. Someone the absence cannot consume because they exist in a category of reality that the fracture recognizes as boundary rather than resource.
He thought about the wall in Ardenveil. About the distance that had changed. About the brand integration points he had unmade one by one while she sat patient and still.
Not yet. You are not at the Unmade Threshold yet. There is time. But the preparation is not a theoretical matter. It is a practical one. And it begins now.
He put the blade down.
He went to find Seris.
✶
She was in the upper library, which was what the largest of the private wing rooms had become: a collection of texts assembled from the Voidshaping documents Vael had provided, Theron's primers, the Unmarked network's practical manuals, and a growing collection of cultivation theory texts that Yrenne had catalogued from memory and that the two teacher-practitioners were in the process of reconstructing from those memories into written form.
She was reading, which she did with complete attention in the way of someone who treats information as a resource to be maximized.
She looked up when he came in.
"The blade," she said immediately. She could read it on him — had been able to for months, the particular quality of his attention after the lower-level sessions.
"It spoke," he said. And told her everything.
She listened without interruption, which was how she listened to everything significant. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment, doing the thing she did: calculating.
"The Unmade Threshold," she said. "Do you know how far away it is?"
"No. The progression is non-linear. The blade's inscription describes it as appearing without warning — not a staged advancement you can see coming but a structural shift that occurs when the depth reaches a certain quality rather than a certain quantity."
"So it could be soon."
"It could be."
She looked at the book in her lap. Set it down.
"The living anchor," she said. Carefully. With the care of someone handling something that has multiple edges.
"Yes," he said.
A pause. The quality of the pause was one he recognized: not the pause of someone who does not know what they think, but the pause of someone who is deciding whether the moment has arrived for what they think to become what they say.
"How does it work?" she asked. Not "who" — how. Which was information-seeking rather than conversation-avoidance, but it was also, he understood, her way of approaching the conversation that was inside the question.
"The inscription describes it as a resonance anchor," he said. "A person whose Aether signature is sufficiently entangled with the Void practitioner's core that when the fracture deepens past the Unmade Threshold, the entanglement creates a boundary. The absence encounters the anchor's presence and recognizes it as structure rather than resource."
"Entangled," she said.
"Over time," he said. "Through repeated proximity and cultivation interaction. The breaking of the brand integrations, for instance — that was a significant entanglement event."
She looked at her hands. At the collarbone where the brand had been and was not.
"I can already feel the Void resonance," she said quietly. "In the land here. In the lower level. In you, when we are close." A pause. "I have been feeling it for months. It is not uncomfortable. It is the closest thing in my experience to something I do not have a word for."
She is describing the entanglement from her side. The resonance she feels is the anchor forming. It has been forming for months. It will continue forming. This is not a decision in the conventional sense. It is the recognition of something that has already been happening.
"Seris," he said.
She looked at him.
"I am not telling you this because I need something from you," he said. "I am telling you because you should know the whole truth about what the blade said, and because if this is where the path leads, I would rather you walk it knowing than arrive at the destination having been kept from the map."
She held his gaze for a long time.
"I know," she said. "That is precisely why I am listening instead of arguing with you."
The quality of the afternoon light in the library was amber and patient, falling across the assembled texts and the two of them and the space that was no longer the distance it had once been.
"All right," he said.
"All right," she agreed.
And they returned to their respective work, which was the most honest way available to say what they had just said.