Chapter 2: The First Thread
The rumor didn't begin with a scream. It began with a whisper. A simple, impossible question no one could answer.
The Entry Courtyard had calmed as the first day's announcements concluded, leaving only a scattering of students and instructors. Among them was Selan Myris, the Heaven Daughter of Frost Lineage, surrounded by her retinue. Her hair, the color of frozen starlight, was pulled into an intricate knot, and her robes were edged with a faint, swirling frost. She moved with an air of practiced indifference, a silent challenge to anyone who dared approach.
A male student, bold with ambition and a minor legacy, approached her. "Daughter Myris, my name is Vaik. My lineage holds the Ember Crucible. Our paths are aligned for greatness."
Selan's eyes, the shade of a winter sky, flickered to his. "My greatness is not a shared road, Vaik." Her words were like shards of ice, cold and precise. He flinched, his bravado freezing on his face.
This was the way of the academy. Every interaction was a power game, a declaration of status. You either had a myth, or you were beneath one.
Kairo Vale observed this from a quiet corner near the academy library's towering entrance. He wasn't looking at the students; he was watching the myth-threads that connected them—thin, shimmering lines of belief and ambition. Selan's thread was a thick, glacial white, anchored in a thousand years of Frost Lineage myth. Vaik's was a flickering, orange spark, barely clinging to a fragile legacy.
Suddenly, Kairo's hand brushed a potted plant as he walked past it. Nothing happened. He then walked a few steps, turned, and brushed against a stone bench. No effect. He paused, his gaze fixed on a small, insignificant rock embedded in the courtyard pavement. He knelt, pretending to tie his boot, and his fingertip brushed the rock.
A ripple. Not in the stone, but in the air itself. A single, black, almost invisible thread manifested. It was the thickness of a strand of hair and pulsed with a faint, silent dread.
The thread didn't attach to anything. It simply existed, an anchor for a story that hadn't been told yet.
A student walking past, a young man from a minor scholarly sect, shivered. He looked around, saw nothing, and moved on, but a question had been planted in his subconscious. Was there something... over there?
Later that evening, in a secluded instructor's lounge, Instructor Lorien and another professor, a stern man named Elder Tianrue, studied a new reading on their myth-layer sensors.
"Look," Lorien said, pointing to a flickering anomaly. "A new thread. It's not a belief echo. It's not a signature. It's... just a thread."
Elder Tianrue, a man whose void staff was said to devour light, frowned. "Impossible. All myth-layer phenomena are born from a source. A bloodline, a legacy, a relic."
"This one isn't," Lorien insisted. "It has no origin point. It's a thread without a loom."
Tianrue's gaze narrowed. "Did the student census turn up anything new? Any names that weren't on the official list?"
Lorien shook her head. "All accounted for. Even the stragglers and lowborns. The system is clean."
The next morning, the scholarly student who had passed Kairo began to sketch. He was in a class on Mythic Etching, attempting to recreate a lost sigil. But his hand kept moving on its own, drawing not the sigil, but a simple, perfect black line. He erased it. His hand drew another.
He looked at his classmates. Did they see it too? He tried to ask, but the words felt wrong on his tongue. He kept trying to sketch the sigil, but his pen kept returning to the same black line, again and again, like a haunted memory.
Later, while speaking to a friend, he mentioned it. "There was something odd yesterday. I felt a chill. Now... I can't stop thinking about a line. A perfectly straight, black line."
His friend laughed. "Must be the pressure. It's just a line."
But later that day, the friend found himself doodling on a piece of parchment. He was practicing a runic chant, but all he could draw was a single, long, black line.
The rumor didn't begin with a scream. It didn't begin with a declaration of power. It began with an unexplained feeling.
A question.
A line that shouldn't exist.
And it spread, one perfect, silent thread at a time.