Chapter 10: The Unraveling
The old tower breathed dust. Night pooled in its corners like ink. Solas Thorne moved through the silence as a blade moves through air — precise, inevitable. Her armor took the weak starlight and made it mean nothing. The harpoon in her hand felt right: heavy at the haft, balanced at the tip, a thing built to finish stories. Her golden eyes did more than see; they read the history of the place. Threads trembled under their gaze.
She paused at the threshold. No fear rose in her — only the scent of worthy prey, the clean tang of a myth at its most fragile. The floor's dust lay undisturbed, but the myth-layer screamed beneath it: a presence composed of absence, a wound in the weave of belief.
She stepped inside. Her boots made no sound. Her gaze caught the silhouette on the wall — the familiar man-shaped weave of black threads, stitched from rumor and hung like a flag. Solas allowed herself a thin smile; the hunt was a confirmation of all she'd been taught. She had found the myth. She had found the Ghost.
Somewhere beneath the world of lamps and corridors, Kairo sat in the library's forgotten sublevel. He did not watch with eyes; his vision was the network of black threads he had left like nerves across the campus. They were his sight, his fingers, his pulse. He felt Solas enter the tower. He watched the way her gold cut through the dark. He felt a shiver — not of fear, but of recognition: a hunter who read threads as if they were open books.
On the wall, the silhouette was not mere display. It was a projection of his craft, a deliberate lie planted to pull them like moths. He had expected curiosity, investigation, bluster. He had not expected a hunter who attacked pattern rather than flesh.
Solas did not aim at the shape. She aimed at the weave.
She raised the harpoon. There was no theatrical arc, no flying spear. Instead, the haft remained steady in her grip while from its tip uncoiled a single filament of light — a golden thread spun from unambiguous belief. It shot through space like a radiance and found a black filament, thin and almost invisible: the first thread he had left intentionally as a breadcrumb.
She pulled.
The golden strand cinched around the black, and the myth-layer answered with a sound like paper ripped from the world: an unmaking that tasted of cold iron and salt. Knots came undone. Small, steadfast lies unspooled. Somewhere in that spool, a hinge of his design tore.
Kairo's hand flew to his head. A searing pain braided through him — not physical, but raw and intimate: the ache of a story being plucked out of existence. The threads around him wavered; his construction hiccupped. Blood welled at his lip. For a breath, the calm architecture he had worn like a cloak quivered and a glimpse of the man beneath flashed through.
And a young librarian named Lian, walking his usual route among the stacks, looked up at that precise instant. He caught the flicker — a face not meant to be seen: a scar along a cheek, hollows under tired eyes, the terrible tenderness of someone who had traded everything for a shape of power. The sight struck Lian like a small, cold stone. Recognition flared, immediate and inexplicable. It was not the name that came to him, only the sense of having looked directly into a wound.
He stopped. The air around him tightened. A dread settled in his chest he could not name. The myth was no longer only a wall-made silhouette or a whisper on lips. The Ghost was flesh and blood, and for the first time he could imagine the man behind the rumor — imperfect, hurting, bleeding.
In the tower the golden thread tightened further. The black filaments thinned, then snapped with a final, terrible whisper. Somewhere else, Kairo's control fractured like ice underfoot. The library, which had been his sanctuary of quiet calculation, felt suddenly exposed.
Solas did not lower the harpoon. She watched the wall until the silhouette stuttered and slumped inward, as if someone had pushed the fabric of the image through a seam. Behind her, the night of the tower seemed to hold its breath.
Lian stood rooted between shelves, the truth lodged at the back of his teeth. He had seen a face he had no right to see. He had seen the man who had erased things. He had seen the ghost in pain.
Far below the tower, in a maze of shadows and books, Kairo's breath hitched. He tasted unraveling on his tongue. The hunt had found its mark — only now he understood what that meant.
He was not merely threatened. He was being unmade.