The urge was primal, an instinct he never knew he possessed. James's mind, untethered from the physical world, latched onto that single, frayed thread. It glowed with a sickly, weak light, a stark contrast to the brilliant, healthy Threads of the tapestry around it. It felt… wrong. An error.
He didn't know what it was connected to. He didn't care. With a surge of desperate energy, he mentally grasped the loose end and pulled.
There was no sound, no great explosion. There was only a quiet snap inside his head, like a string breaking under too much tension.
The small candle flickering on the bedside table vanished.
It didn't go out. The flame wasn't snuffed. The wick didn't stop burning. The entire object—the wax, the wick, the flame, and the little pool of melted liquid—ceased to be. The space it had occupied was now just empty air. The light it cast was gone, plunging that corner of the room into shadow.
James gasped, stumbling back as his vision returned to normal. The world was solid again. The tapestry was gone. But the candle was still missing. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and a dull ache throbbed behind his eyes. In the spot where the candle had been, the air felt strangely thin and cold.
"What... what was that?" he whispered to the empty room.
It wasn't a spell. Weaving was an act of creation, of bringing Threads together to build something new. This was the opposite. This was deletion. Unmaking.
Trembling, James scanned the small apartment, trying to trigger the strange vision again. He closed his eyes, concentrating not on magic, but on that feeling of wrongness. The tapestry flickered back into view, faint and hazy. He focused on a simple clay cup resting on their small table.
At first, it looked perfect, a solid weave of countless Threads. But as he stared, he saw it. Not a frayed end this time, but a tiny, tangled knot in the Pattern that defined its position. The Thread of [Stasis]. He tentatively reached out with his mind, not to pull, but to nudge the knot.
The cup on the table slid an inch to the left, scraping silently against the wood.
James's eyes flew open. His heart hammered against his ribs. He had done that. Without touching it, without weaving a single Thread, he had moved an object. He was not powerless. He was not a dud.
A wild, frantic hope, more powerful than any fear, surged through him.
Sophia.
He scrambled to his sister's bedside. She was still asleep, her breathing shallow. He gently held his hand over her stone-grey arm, closing his eyes and focusing with all his might.
The magical tapestry around her appeared instantly, and it was horrifying.
Where her arm should have been a vibrant, complex weave of [Life], [Flesh], and [Warmth], there was a hideous corruption. Thick, ugly, unmoving Threads of [Stone] had wrapped themselves around her own, choking them out. It was a cancerous knot, a tangled mess of magic so dense it made his head spin. This wasn't a single frayed thread; it was a fortress.
He could see the curse. For the first time, he could actually see the enemy that was killing his sister.
I can unravel it, he thought, a desperate fire lighting in his chest. I can pull it apart.
He found what looked like a loose end on one of the encroaching stone Threads and pulled.
The resistance was immense. It was like trying to pull a single root from a massive tree. The Thread held fast, and a searing pain shot through James's skull. The entire knot of the curse flared with a dull, angry light.
Sophia whimpered in her sleep, her brow furrowing in pain.
James immediately let go, collapsing back onto the floor, panting. A trickle of blood ran from his nose. The curse was too strong, too deeply woven into her own life-threads. Trying to rip it out like that could destroy her. He couldn't just pull. He would have to learn to be a surgeon, to carefully untangle this mess one thread at a time. But the hope remained. It was possible. He now had a weapon.
He was so focused on Sophia that he didn't feel the ripple he had sent out into the world. He didn't know that every broken or pulled Thread sent a shudder of dissonance through the Great Pattern of Luminar.
Miles away, in the central spire of the city, an old man meditating in a circular chamber opened his eyes. He was Warden Caius, guardian of the city's core Harmonics. His job was to listen to the song of Luminar's magic, ensuring its stability.
Just now, he had heard a wrong note.
It was tiny, barely a flicker of discordance. But it was ugly, unnatural. An echo of something being unmade. He focused his senses, following the ripple back to its source. It was faint, but the direction was clear. The Outer Annulus. The poorest district.
"Regulators," he spoke into the quiet air.
Two figures in grey, featureless masks emerged from the shadows.
"A Class-Three Dissonant Event has occurred at these coordinates," Caius said, his voice calm and cold. "Secure the source. Use null-weavers if you must. I want to know what caused it."
The figures bowed and vanished in a shimmer of silent magic.
Back in the small apartment, James wiped the blood from his lip, his mind racing with the possibilities of his new power. He was exhausted, but for the first time in years, he felt a spark of a future. He would get stronger. He would practice. He would save Sophia.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he almost didn't hear the heavy, rhythmic footsteps stopping outside his door.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
A loud, metallic knock echoed through the tiny room, making him jump.
A voice, amplified by a touch of magic, cut through the wood of the door. It was cold, flat, and held absolute authority.
"By order of the Master Weavers, open this door. A dissonant event has been traced to this residence."
James froze. His blood turned to ice. They knew. Someone had felt what he'd done.
He looked from the locked door to his sleeping, vulnerable sister. There was nowhere to run.