The first thing I remember is silence.
Not the silence of peace, but the suffocating kind, the kind that presses against your skin, whispering that something is wrong. I was seven when I realized I was different.
The other children in the village would boast about the faint silver glow above their wrists. Their Threads, weak but present, swayed like strands of light in the air, twisting and spiraling like living ribbons. Threads connected everything: people, choices, even the world itself. Some called it destiny, others fate, but it was more than words: a visible hum of the Loom, the unseen plane where all lives were stitched together.
Mine? Nothing. Just bare skin.
"Threadless," they called me.A curse. A mistake.The Loom had rejected me before I even had a chance.
By sixteen, I had learned to survive with it. People avoided me as though my lack of Thread could infect them. Employers turned me away without a second glance. Priests muttered prayers under their breath, trying to tie me back to the Loom. And yet, I endured. I stole food when I had to, worked the docks until my hands were raw, laughed when others spat at me, because if I didn't laugh, I would break.
Even among the docks, the world's hidden layers pulsed around me. The Mortal Veil—streets slick with saltwater, the smell of tar and seaweed hanging in the air—was all I could see, but I sensed more. Above it, the Loom whispered through everyone's Threads, weaving their destinies like a spider spinning a web of light. A skilled Spinner could move faster than any man. A Weaver could twist fate to shield an ally or bind a debtor. Below it all, the Abyss festered, a place of frayed and broken Threads: monsters born from discarded possibilities, leaking nightmares into the Mortal Veil when the Loom faltered.
I had none of it. No spinning, no weaving, no severing. Just bare hands, bare instincts, and the gnawing fear that one mistake could be my last.
Yet sometimes, when a crate toppled or a rope frayed in my hands, I felt the Loom tremble, or maybe it was just my imagination. People said the Abyss would take those with broken fate first. Perhaps it was waiting for me.
But fate, it seems, has a cruel sense of humor.
"Brat."
"Hey, Brat."
"I SAID 'HEY, BRAT'!"
A kick slammed into my side. I rolled over, curling into myself as pain lanced through my ribs. I craned my head just enough to see my assailant: Torren Dask, my boss. A hulking man, broad as a doorframe, with a thick beard matted with grime and clothes that smelled faintly of sea rot and sweat. His expression was all scowl and impatience.
He grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet. I stumbled, clutching the bag slung over my shoulder, until I regained my footing. I lifted my arms to stretch, ignoring the mountain of a man looming over me, reaching for my back before he spun me roughly around.
"GET TO WORK, YOU RAT!"
"Alright, alright! I'm up!" I muttered, gritting my teeth.
The briny scent of the docks—fish, salt, and tar—was replaced by the acrid stench of Torren's breath. It burned my nostrils, threatening to make me retch. He turned with a grunt and began to walk off, leaving a trail of sea-soaked mud squelching with every step.
"If your jobs aren't done by dinner, I'm cutting your rations in half," he warned over his shoulder.
I opened my bag. Two hard bread rolls and a single cracker. Breakfast wouldn't be happening today. I didn't care. Every meal I managed to eat was a small victory, a mark that I was still alive.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a group moving down the street. Rolan and his gang. My stomach dropped. I pushed off, trying to slip away unnoticed, but it was too late.
"Where are you going, Fate-Less?"
"To your mother's house. Where else?" I shot back.
Rolan's face twisted into a mask of rage. Satisfied with my insult, I bolted, heart hammering. I whispered frantic prayers to every god I could name, begging them to stop him from chasing me.
"Oh no you don't! You're not going anywhere!"
Ignoring him, I sprinted. Then a string wrapped around my ankle like a serpent, yanking me to the ground. Pain exploded as I hit the bricks face-first. Rolan laughed with his thugs as they hauled me in. I struggled, tugged, bit—but nothing freed me.
When I finally got within striking distance, a punch slammed into my back, knocking me down. I curled into a ball, covering my head as blows rained down.
"Where's all that cheek gone, Fate-Less?" Rolan taunted.
He coiled his massive arms and spun, lifting me briefly from the ground. My vision blurred, blood rushing to my head, before he threw me into a shop window. Shards rained around me, slicing into my arms and legs. Pain flared, but even as I lay in a puddle of glass, I noticed one shard—jagged, sharp, almost calling to me.
I clutched it tightly.
Rolan lunged. My life flashed before my eyes. I could feel it slipping away. And then, with a surge of desperate conviction, I rose.
I drove the shard into his neck.
The surrounding crowd went silent, their faces frozen in shock at what I had done. My legs felt like lead as I stepped back, unable to process my own actions. I raised my bloodied hands to my head, the reality of it weighing down every breath.
Then, a single voice cut through the stunned quiet.
"Guards! Arrest him!" a civilian shouted from the back of the crowd.
Like a chain reaction, more voices joined in, rising in anger and fear. "Catch him!" "He's dangerous!" "Don't let him escape!"
Panic surged through me. I turned and fled—away from the crowd, away from Rolan's corpse, away from everything I had ever known. My legs carried me as if fueled by desperation alone. Hours blurred into one endless run; the cobblestones beneath my feet became a never-ending trail.
Eventually, my lungs burned and my legs gave out. I collapsed in a shadowed alley on the edge of the docks, gasping, shaking, and utterly alone. The smell of salt, fish, and decay mixed with the metallic tang of blood in my mouth. My heart pounded like a drum in my chest as the reality of what I had done pressed down on me like a weight too heavy to bear.
I pressed my back against the cold brick of the alley, shivering despite the night's humid air. My hands were still slick with blood, sticky and warm, and every time I dared to look down, I saw it—Rolan's life, stolen by my own trembling fingers. I tried to pull them away, tried to scrub the red from my skin, but it clung. It would not wash off.
The city around me was alive with distant shouts and the clatter of boots on cobblestones, but here in the alley, it was as if the world had gone silent. The echoes of my heartbeat filled the space, loud and irregular, like some monstrous drum of doom. I curled into myself, rocking slightly, and let the panic rise.
Why? Why had I done it? Just a shard of glass, just a moment of panic—and yet the life had slipped from Rolan as if the world had simply pulled a thread and unraveled him. My mind refused to stop. Every memory, every slight, every mocking word from his posse crawled into my head like a thousand tiny knives.
I remembered the other children, glowing Threads above their wrists, laughing as if life were simple and cruel only to amuse them. I had watched them, always apart, always the "Threadless one." The priest who spat prayers in my path, muttering that the Loom had abandoned me. The employers who refused to give me work, claiming it was a bad omen to have me touch anything in their shops. My hands had been raw, my stomach empty, and my heart heavy.
And yet I had survived. Somehow, I had clawed my way through every day like a rat in the dark, scrabbling for scraps while the world around me carried on, indifferent. I had thought myself strong—clever, resilient—until tonight.
I had thought running, hiding, laughing at the cruelty of others, would be enough. But it was not. Tonight, I had crossed a line I didn't even know existed. I had felt the panic swell, the fear of death and humiliation, and it had driven me to something monstrous. Rolan's blood was on my hands, yes, but so was something else: a terrible, intoxicating power. Something I had never understood before, something I hadn't asked for.
I shivered, not from the cold, but from the realization that the world I had known—the docks, the cobbled streets, even the cruel jibes—had been a surface, a thin veil over a deeper, darker place. Threads, the Loom, the Abyss. I had seen their effects all my life: the Spinner who outran any man, the Weaver who tied destinies to protect a noble's coin, the stories of those who had severed fate itself. I had never been one of them. Never. Threadless. Always watching, always left behind.
But tonight… tonight something had shifted. I had stolen a life in desperation, and maybe, somehow, something inside me had shifted with it. I wasn't just a boy who survived. I was something else. Something dangerous. Something that no one had seen coming.
Tears stung my eyes, and I hated myself for letting them fall. My mind raced with all the small cruelties I had endured, all the nights spent cold and hungry, all the days spent hiding from people who would sooner spit than help. And now this—murder, blood, the certainty that no alley, no dock, no hiding place would ever feel safe again.
I thought of my mother, long gone, swallowed by the city's indifference when I was too small to fight for her. I thought of the village priest, who had whispered that I was cursed, a mistake. I thought of Rolan's sneer, and the mocking laughter of his crew. Every thread of my past—every hurt, every rejection, every moment of fear—wound itself around me, tightening like a rope.
I pressed my palms against my face, trying to shut it all out, but the images kept coming. My life flashed before me in fragments: the hunger, the cold, the loneliness, the silent resentment I had carried in every step. And in the shadows of the alley, I realized something terrifying: I had nowhere left to go. Not really. The world I had struggled to survive in had collapsed into this—fear, blood, and the undeniable awareness that I had changed forever.
My breath came in ragged gasps, my body trembling as the weight of it all threatened to crush me. I had always believed survival was enough. But survival was meaningless now. I had felt the brush of the Abyss tonight in a way I had never known before—a pulse beneath the world, dark and hungry, watching me, waiting. And in that instant, I understood with sickening clarity: it had noticed me.
I whimpered, not from pain, but from sheer, raw despair.
For the first time in my life, I wanted the world to swallow me whole.
The alley seemed to grow darker as I huddled in the shadows, the stink of fish and rot thick in my nostrils. My chest heaved, lungs burning, hands still slick with blood, and the echo of my sobs seemed to bounce off the brick walls like mocking laughter. I had expected nothing but silence, but something stirred.
A shiver ran down my spine as I noticed it: the shadows themselves twisting, writhing. At first, I thought it was a trick of my mind, a panic-induced hallucination. But then came the smell—not of the docks, not of sea or tar, but something acrid, like iron and decay mixed with the faint tang of smoke.
I froze.
A shape emerged from the darkness. It was tall, impossibly thin, moving in jerks that were unnatural, limbs bending where they should not, head tilting at impossible angles. Its eyes were holes of black light, and from its body hung frayed threads that shimmered in corrupted silver, writhing like snakes. The Abyss had come for me.
My legs locked, my stomach twisting, as the creature surged forward. The air around it pulsed with malice, and a tug ran through me—not physical, but deeper, pulling at the emptiness inside me where my Thread should have been. Panic gripped my chest, and my vision blurred.
I tried to dodge, tried to scramble away, but it was too fast. Its claws slashed through the alley, tearing at walls and wood, and then they tore into me. Pain, sharp and burning, exploded across my body. My legs buckled, my arms went slack, and the world began to spin.
Everything went black.
And in the void of nothing, a single thought shimmered before my eyes, glowing faintly against the darkness:
[Do you want to live?][Yes / No]
Instinct screamed, and I chose....
Yes.