More threads. Thicker now. The initial hair-thin strands condensed into something brighter - soft filaments of condensed golden light, each one distinct but moving in concert with the others.
Raizen's hand stopped shaking. The golden threads grew.
Raizen felt them more than saw them - a warmth in his palm, a faint tremor in his fingertips, a vibration that traveled up his wrist and into his arm and echoed somewhere deep in his chest. The threads extended outward in slow, deliberate arcs, weaving around each other, layering, condensing. They moved with a will that wasn't entirely his. He wasn't shaping them. He wasn't directing them. They were growing the way roots grow - following paths he couldn't see, toward something he couldn't name.
But Raizen pushed harder.
