The mountain split the sky like a blade dragged through silk. It didn't reach upward with grace—it bristled with refusal, a jut of the earth's spine refusing to bend one inch more.
No snow clung there. No rain crossed that air. Even sunlight skimmed its face like a skittish animal, thin and quick, unwilling to be caught. Animals turned long before they neared the base; their bodies knew what their minds could not name. The summit was a wound the world would not touch.
Clan's had stood near its feet and fallen to powder. Armies had climbed with banners bright as new-forged steel, their chants loud, their steps unshaking—until the mountain made them wind and silence. It endured everything. It had always endured. It had outlived oaths and gods and songs. Here, hope didn't die; it was never born.
The air did not move. It seemed poured into the shape of a room and left to set. Each breath came heavy, thick as sap. In the mouth it tasted metallic and old, as if licked from a rusted coin.
And yet the world waited.
Not for relief. Not for light.
For a beginning.
Two moons hung above, at war without sound. One was silver, gentle at a glance, treacherous in its sheen. The other was a dark bruise torn into the night, drinking light and giving none back. Their mixed glow fell on the mountain like oil on stone, and the rock seemed to ripple, to breathe.
At the very tip of that impossible spine sat a house. It had no right to be there. A simple roof, wooden walls, a single door—too slight to withstand wind, let alone the mountain's steady malice. Yet it had outlasted forests and the bones of kings. Its roof tiles swallowed moonlight whole and stayed black. Its planks never cracked, never softened, never remembered that wood should rot. Time had worried at it, clenched its teeth until the teeth broke.
Inside there was only one room.
Empty on purpose. The emptiness had weight. Each absence had been placed like a stone. There was no dust. There was no echo when one breathed, but the silence had edges.
At the center, a chair.
On it, a man.
He did not stir. The stillness of him was not sleep, not rest. It was the stillness of a drawn bow held just shy of release.
His features looked carved rather than grown: high cheekbones, a mouth that seldom remembered a smile, skin that kept its color to itself. Hair black as wet ink pooled to his shoulders, an absence that drank the light around it. His hands lay on the chair's arms as if they belonged there, fingers curved with lazy grace, and yet they weighed as if the chair grew from them.
His eyes were shut. But he saw. Not with sight—sight was for surfaces and the quick trick of light. He watched with the cold patience of a surveyor tracing fault lines through bedrock. He did not look at the room or the mountain. He watched what would be.
Then he opened his eyes.
Black. Not color—depth. A fall without bottom. Eyes in which wonder had been counted and spent and set aside, leaving only a ledger of truth.
He did not glance around. He looked forward at something no wall could hold. Futures scrolled across his gaze, thin and bright as spider silk in a winter field—so many threads, all singing the same final note.
His lips parted.
"Death."
The word landed without echo. It did not accuse. It did not plead. It stated. Everything he had reached for, all he had broken and bound and learned, all the heights he had climbed to stand upon—each path ended the same way.
He breathed in. The air felt sticky in his chest.
"Weakness."
There was no bitterness in it. Only the measurement of a craftsman tapping a beam and knowing it would not bear the weight.
Silence returned, thick and intent. It felt like the quiet before a storm hardens in the clouds, when the world holds its breath and heat gathers under the skin.
Something moved.
Not outside. Not in the room, not in his bones. In the weave itself. A shiver ran through what he watched, so fine it could have been nothing. A flicker at the edge of a field of stars.
A new thread.
So thin it wavered when he looked at it. Weak enough that a thought could have snapped it. But it was there.
On this line, he did not die.
The certainty that had boxed the world in cracked hairline-thin. From that slender break, something rose in him. Not hope; hope was a warmth he had left behind long ago. This was colder. Denser. It clicked into place like a gear finding a tooth.
Light gathered in the air before him. No brighter than a firefly pressed between cupped hands. It did not burn; it was a steady pulse, the smallest heartbeat.
The Reincarnation Clarity Thread.
It had hung in the tapestry longer than seasons had names, waiting like a seed under stone. No one had brushed it. No one had known to try. But now it trembled like a plucked string.
He lifted his hand.
The air bowed. Not space bending so much as the idea of space agreeing to make room.
The Thread slid into sight. Simply seen at last—silver as a breath on glass, thin enough to be disbelief.
It offered no comfort. It did not warm his skin or sweeten his mouth. It felt like a promise written in a language with no word for mercy. A sleeping infant. A sheathed blade.
It was enough.
He did not smile. Gratitude had nothing to do with it. The world had not given him this; he had found it because he had refused to stop looking.
His hand reached.
"If the road ends," he said, voice dry as leaves dragged along stone, "I will cut a new one.
To fight fate is foolish. To fool it..."
His fingers neared the Thread.
Weight fell.
It had no wind, no rumble. It was not force the way storms are force. It was a gravity of attention. Old beyond stone. Patient as dark.
He went still. The skeleton in him felt it. The small bones in his ears rang. The room did not tremble; the world around the room did, thin and hot, like parchment brought too close to a candle's tongue. Time hiccuped and misstepped.
Something watching.
Not anger. Not the kind of power that breaks mountains because it can.
Judgment.
The Will of the Clarity Realm turned its gaze, and the gaze pressed.
The Thread dimmed, its light folding in on itself as if embarrassed to be seen.
Knowledge struck him and burned its outline into him: this path could not be walked under an open sky. It had to be taken blind, by touch, in darkness.
He lowered his hand.
The Thread slipped from sight like a breath drawn back.
To be reborn, he would break the first law the Realm had written into the bones of all things: the line cannot be changed. It had to be done where the law could not look.
He had not failed. He had placed a piece. His mouth tasted copper, and he swallowed it away.
He would not hide in a cave or flee to a far country. He had to vanish where leaving was impossible.
Not from the world.
From the fact of it.