The pressure ramped higher until nausea clawed at his ribs. Then it snapped away, leaving the echo of brightness in his skull and a fine tremor in his fingers.
He opened his eyes to steady ground and a world lined with pale fibers.
He lifted his hand, careful, and held it over a thin strand that ran from the edge of the causeway to a hairline crack in the slab. He didn't touch this time. He just hovered until his fingertip prickled with cold. The strand vibrated the tiniest bit, like the hush after a plucked string.
'This is real.'
The air ahead rippled. Not wind. An arrival.
A figure stepped out of the seam between one moment and the next. Tall. Robed. Its body was a study in impossible joints: bronze plates suspended with gaps between them, the gaps held by faint lines like the ones around Kai. Sand poured from the seams in a constant thin sheet and vanished before it reached the ground. Where a face should have been, a dark oval plate sat deep as night water, slit by two narrow glowing cuts.
When it spoke, nothing moved. The sound was in the air and inside his head at once, as if his thoughts had spoken to him through another mouth.
"Threadbearer."
His mouth went dry. He swallowed and tasted the bruise again. "What is this place?" The words scraped out smaller than he wanted.
The head tipped half a degree, like it weighed his question one grain at a time.
"You stand at the harbor's edge. Beyond this path, the Colossus. Beyond the Colossus, the gate. Beyond the gate, the world you left behind."
The idea hooked deep. "I can go home?"
A pause. The slits of light dimmed and brightened, the way torchlight breathes in a draft.
"Only if you survive."
The bronze under Kai's feet deepened its hum. Across the water, something answered—a slow subterranean groan like tension easing on a cable the size of a street.
"Survive what?" He couldn't keep his hands from shaking. He curled them, forcing stillness.
"Seven trials guard the harbor. Seven knots to unbind. Each knot tests what you are, not only what you wield."
"Trials." He heard how the word sounded in his own voice: a story told to other people. "I didn't choose this."
"You were pulled. As all who arrive are pulled. The harbor tests. The harbor chooses. The harbor cuts."
The last word landed in the space just below his ribs and sat there cold.
The figure lifted a hand. Between bronze phalanges, thin lines gathered and tangled, not straight but coiled like live things. They twitched as if they knew they were looked at.
"You have been given sight of threads. Use it or be unmade."
"Given," he said, more to the air than to it. He thought of the slab veering away. He thought of Rian's hands. He thought of his own hands closing in return. He did not like how natural the new knowledge felt in him. It didn't feel earned. It felt stamped on.
"How do I—" He stopped. The question was stale before it left his tongue. The answers were already laid out in his head with the same quiet certainty as the lines themselves. Don't yank at thick cords unless you're ready to absorb the recoil. Don't pull hard on the lines tied to warm things unless you want them to notice you. Gravity strands are slow and stubborn; current strands are twitchy; life strands sing. He hadn't learned those sentences. He could feel the shape of them, exactly, as if he'd used them a thousand times.
The figure turned its blank face toward the giant on the horizon. The Colossus held its bright burden up like judgment.
"Pass the knots. The way opens. Fail, and the harbor keeps what it took."
"What if I don't try?" The words surprised him even as he spoke them. "What if I sit down and wait?"
"Then the harbor decides."
"Decides what?"
Silence. Not refusal—absence.
The figure began to loosen. Plates drifted fraction by fraction, the lines between them slackened, the sand streamed faster. The air kept the shape for a heartbeat after the last piece vanished, unwilling to admit the change, then let it go.
"Wait," he said, and heard the crack in his voice. "Just tell me where the first—"
Nothing. Only the hum. Only the breeze that wasn't quite a breeze combing the lines overhead so they shivered like a spider's web when something small lands.
He stood still until the shake in his hands settled. He made himself breathe in for four and out for four. He pushed away the old urge to shrink, to make himself an outline no one noticed. There was no one here to notice except the place itself.
Lines ran everywhere, but some were louder. He could feel that now. A strand thicker than the rest tugged at his attention from the right-hand fork a hundred paces along the causeway. It arced low over the water toward a cluster of damaged archways. The tug wasn't force; it was suggestion, like gravity with ideas.
"Seven knots," he said under his breath, testing the sound.
He took a step and the bronze answered with a soft plate‑click. He took another. The hum pressed into the soles of his feet and rode up his calves.
At the third step he paused out of habit, the same pause he did before leaving any room in the apartment: wait for the call, the hand, the sudden order. None came. The habit passed through him like an old ghost and kept going.
He walked.
The pillars along the path were cut with reliefs worn to soft shapes—figures lifting, straining, carrying, holding back waves with their hands. He reached up once and brushed a warm panel with his fingertips. He could feel threads inside the metal like veins beneath skin. One ran knotted under a corner. He could have twitched it and watched the corner lift, watched the seam breathe. He didn't.
A gull-like cry skimmed the air and cut off too cleanly, like a hand had covered a mouth. Rings moved across the green‑gold surface from a point where nothing broke through. He stared and couldn't tell if the rings came from something rising or something settling deeper.
He thought of classrooms and posters and field trips he didn't take. He thought of Rian's smirk when a Wonder broadcast came on in a shop window: "Turn your head, Kai." He thought of all the times he obeyed and felt something inside him fold down even flatter. The old anger rose like heat and ebbed fast, leaving the same ache and a new, thin thread of steadiness.
'You're here.'
A line brushed the back of his mind as if in answer. He blinked. It wasn't in front of him. It was in him. Not a voice. A feeling like a knot tightening. He waited for fear; what arrived was a focus so sharp it made the air cleaner.
He passed a break in the railing where the bronze had torn. The edge curled upward like a peeled can. Inside the bend, fine strands crossed in a tiny lattice. He crouched and hovered a finger over one. The air prickled. He moved his hand away and the prickling stopped. A thought flickered: if he plucked the right two, the metal would relax back flat. He stood and left it, the idea bright and irritating the way an unsolved problem itched.
Up ahead, the causeway split. Left arched low over the water toward broad pylons studded with iron rings. Right climbed a little toward the shattered arch cluster. The thick line tugged him right. The thin hairs on his arms lifted as if the air were carrying a charge.
He stepped onto the right fork.
The hum changed key. Not louder. Just different. It made his chest want to match it, like a song you don't know but can hum along to anyway. The fixed sun slid across the edge of the arch ruins and lit their gaps. Something darted through one gap—a flash like a copper bird. He caught the tail end of it: a blur, a sparkle, a chime at the edge of hearing.
His feet wanted shoes. The bronze was clean but not smooth; tiny burrs bit his skin. He didn't look down. Looking down was for when you could afford to.
As he neared the broken arches, the lines in the air grew thicker and busier, layered on each other like crossed fishing gut. Some ran taut with a hard hum; some hung slack and trembled when the faint breeze combed them. If he stared too hard, the world behind them grayed out and all he saw were routes and pulses and places to touch.
He forced himself to blink and see the actual, not just the pattern: bent bronze, chunks missing, edges polished by nothing he could name. Scratches in weird arcs, as if something with too many joints had scraped by. A rope of verdigris draped like moss. No footprints. No scuffs on the reachable surfaces. As if everything that moved here didn't need the ground.
He put a palm flat on a pillar to steady himself. Warmth bled into his hand. A pulse moved under his skin that wasn't his own.
A new sound rolled across the water from far away—the slow thud of something deep striking something deeper. It arrived late, like thunder after heat lightning. The bronze under him trembled. Lines above him thrummed and then went still.
He straightened and looked back at the giant. The Colossus stood unchanged, arm lifted, face unreadable and too large for eyes to find. He didn't know why he felt watched anyway, but he did.
He looked forward and drew a breath that hurt a little and held it a second to steady himself. He let it out and opened his hands at his sides until his fingers stopped wanting to curl.
He could feel the first knot somewhere ahead the way you can feel a storm in your teeth before the sky agrees. It wasn't a door he could see yet. It was a cluster of pulled lines that made the air dense. It had weight the way a promise has weight.
He stepped once more and stopped at the lip of the broken archway, where the path narrowed into shadows cut by slants of fixed sun. He could either step through or step back. There wasn't a third option that ended with home.
He set his heel on the threshold and froze—not from fear this time, but because the strand he'd been following hummed with a different tone, a warning pitch like a high wire starting to sing.
He slid his foot off the edge and rocked back. Not yet. He wanted to walk in on his feet under him, not stumble into whatever came first.
He turned half away from the opening and let his eyes unfocus a little, the way he'd learned to do in the last ten minutes to see the lines without chasing them. They resolved like a slow reveal. He found the strongest and traced it with his attention to where it ducked into darkness.
He stood like that for a long half minute, just breathing, just learning the shape of what he couldn't see, while the hum under the world kept time and the far giant held up its bright burden and watched.