The desert was white.
Not pale, not bleached—white. Pure, perfect, and flat. The ground was made of cracked salt plates, sharp-edged and fractal, stretching endlessly in every direction until they vanished into light. Not a hill. Not a shadow. Not a mark of life. The horizon had dissolved into the sky, leaving only one color above—and silence.
Lucien stood at the center of nothing.
No wind moved his hair. No dust clung to his skin. He stood barefoot on the salted floor of the earth, unmoving, untouched, as if he had already been there. The late spring heat shimmered in faint waves along the surface, but the air was dry and weightless, too still to feel real. His shadow fell directly beneath him, dark and sharp, like a crack in glass.
He wore only a sleeveless black undershirt and light gray sweatpants. His body was carved in stillness—tall, lean, honed. His face unreadable, his posture resting but absolute.
Then, his thread stirred.
It began from his chest. A pulse—barely perceptible—radiating outward through his skin like heat traveling through metal. Thin lines of emerald light emerged along the surface of his chest, crawling in smooth spirals across his ribs, down his arms, up the back of his neck. The glow was quiet, the color rich and deep, pulsing softly like breath.
The threads began to weave.
They grew. Like roots searching for structure, they laced over his limbs in ordered patterns, crossing over his collarbones, tightening across his spine. They pierced through the fabric of his clothes, reinforcing them, reshaping them—not replacing, but enhancing. The simple cotton twisted and became something else, bound in filaments of living light.
His chest plate formed first. It rose from his torso like glass being drawn from heat—smooth, ridged, and sculpted to match his exact anatomy. The light caught in its seams. The threads solidified into armor—not metal, not cloth. Something in between. Something impossible.
Gauntlets formed next, encasing his forearms in lines of living weave, with fine seamwork running down to the tips of his fingers. They shimmered faintly at the joints, like glass flexing under pressure. His legs followed—greaves of thread-plate wrapping downward over his sweatpants, anchoring into the soles of his feet.
A spine of emerald thread-light glowed faintly down his back. Dozens of smaller strands flared off—subtle, drifting in the still air like hair in slow water, humming at the edge of visibility.
Then his eyes glowed.
Color ignited behind them first—deep, vibrant green, bright as an open wound in the void. No flicker. No flare. Just a permanent, unwavering burn. The world reflected off them like mirrors.
Finally, he breathed.
A single, quiet, elongated exhale—smooth, steady, like pressure releasing from a world no one could touch. The salt beneath his feet didn't move. The thread-lines in his armor pulsed once, faintly.
He stood there—alive, armed, and powerful.
***
Lucien moved.
One step forward—deliberate, slow, and precise.
His heel struck the salt.
The ground cracked, then—recoiled. A ring exploded outward from beneath his sole. Concentric circles of force rippled through the white desert like a stone dropped in water. The earth flexed. The salt lifted in sheets, peeling upward like shattered parchment. Air distorted around him, warping in sharp bends that refracted light into ghostly ribbons.
Dust rose—then froze. Grains of salt and dirt hung suspended mid-air, trapped in the silence, their fall forgotten by time. Even the wind held its breath.
And then—Lucien vanished.
He appeared dead-center in the pulse's outbound wave—just ahead of the leading edge—still, composed.
The wave caught him.
It hit with force—reality compressed into a moving wall of resistance. Instead of bracing, Lucien leaned into it. Let it carry him. He rode it. His body, still sheathed in glowing green thread-light, surged backward like a thrown blade, carving a perfect trail through the rising dust.
The salt beneath him buckled under the sudden acceleration. A white wake spiraled behind him, kicked up in layered arcs that glittered like frost in the sun. For a moment, he was a streak of green light against an endless canvas of white.
He landed low.
One knee to the ground. Hand dragging a shallow trench in the earth. Head slightly bowed. Not shaken. Not strained. His armor held—no burn, no fracture.
Lucien raised his eyes—still green, still glowing.
Then—without rising—he lifted one hand.
The salt before him began to shift.
Threads of green light arced from his fingers, stabbing into the fields. They twisted, split, and expanded upward, pulling matter with them like strings. The surface warped as a towering vertical slab rose from the ground—smooth, seamless, fifty feet tall, perfectly geometric. It's presence was unnatural. It cast no shadow.
Lucien stood.
He squared his stance. Thread-light crawled down his right arm, flooding into his palm.
A hum began.
It didn't fill the air—it drowned it. The desert seemed to fall into silence. The horizon faded. The sky dimmed slightly, as if bracing.
He opened his hand.
A beam erupted from his palm—thick, green, blinding. It was light—thread-light, pure and terrifying. The beam carved a direct line into the towering monolith.
The slab exploded.
It detonated, then disintegrated—not into fragments, but into nothing. The light stripped it from time itself, unthreading it from reality. The salt behind it buckled inward, as though something massive had imploded in slow motion. The very horizon bent, light dragging sideways along an impossible arc. A gale followed—not from pressure, but from void. The beam tore a wound into the landscape, and the world gasped to fill it.
For a second, nothing existed.
Then it all came crashing back.
The wind. The sound. The color. The heat.
The salt that had been lifted now fell in a roar, cascading like shattered glass from the sky.
Lucien stood unmoving.
One hand still raised.
Eyes calm. Armor glowing.
All powerful.
A terrifying being.
With nothing to lose.
***
Twilight coated the flats in gold.
The salt had transformed—no longer sterile white, but radiant. The ground reflected the amber sun like liquid fire. Every crack in the earth was lit from within, every ripple of motion etched in light. The sky above stretched wide and blood-warm, fading from orange to ash-blue in long gradients.
Lucien stood alone at the edge of it.
His armor no longer blazed. The green thread-light now pulsed in low rhythm, dimmer but steady—like embers cooling. Thin lines still flickering across his chest and down his back, but slower now, coiling in quiet patterns of breath and exhaustion.
He looked up.
"You've been quiet long enough," his voice cut the stillness—calm, unmovable, absolute.
"I searched every corner of this world. I built machines to reach beyond echos. I rewound moments until they cracked.
"And still… nothing."
"They were never here. Were they?"
"I know it was you. You kept them from me. You severed their threads. Erased them from this world and left me here with delusions."
"I'm done with this world."
"I will find them. I will get them back. I will pull them from another world with my own hands if I have to."
"I know you won't sit still now. What I'm about to do… you'll feel it."
"Then come."
His eyes flickered white.
"I'll be waiting."