Chapter 13: The New Pawn
The light did not die so much as fold into Joric. It receded from the world and settled in him like a second skin. When the brilliance waned, lines of faint, molten gold webbed across his forearms, along his throat, coiling up into his eyes until brown had become something else — an ethereal, distant gold. He flexed his fingers and felt nothing of the old clumsy hunger. The noise inside him had stilled; insecurity had been burned away and a single, ruthless clarity took root.
Around him the crowd had not howled in panic but in a stunned kind of worship. Students pushed forward on trembling feet, mouths open at the sight of a living impossibility. A rumor had birthed a miracle: the golden thread had turned a boy into a myth. The air smelled of awe and fear braided together.
Solas Thorne felt the change as a taut note on the myth-layer. The golden anchor had done more than mark a hunt — it had made a thing visible. It had lit a bonfire. Her lips lifted in a thin, satisfied curve. She had not intended to fashion a living beacon, yet opportunity was a hunter's currency. A pawn could be useful if handled well.
She watched Joric through the distance of rumor and thought in the cold, exact language of a predator. This was not a loss. It was leverage. A tool that would draw eyes, break patterns, force enemies into motion. She would keep him lit until he served a purpose — then she would cut him down, quick and clean.
Somewhere else, within the stapled quiet of vents and stacks, Kairo felt the shift like a hand closing on his throat. The new living rumor screamed through the myth-layer, bright and direct and wrong for everything he had built. He had wanted shadows, not spotlight. He had cultivated absence so people would fill it with terror — never this. A visible god was an exposed god; a visible god could be tracked, named, understood.
His fingers trembled against the duct's cold metal. For a moment, the long architecture of his plans unspooled in his head and a dizzying list of consequences unfurled: followers who now looked for the wrong thing, instructors who would seize on any lead, hunters who smelled blood. He felt the old, familiar sorrow — the price of what he had become. He had made myths out of memories; now a myth had made a man of someone else.
But sorrow gave way to calculation. Panic would be a luxury he could not afford. He had to move faster, think sharper. Joric's blaze was a problem — and problems were solvable. He tore a clean strip of paper from his sleeve and, with a deliberate hand, wrote a single word meant to split Solas's gaze and scatter the hunt: a rumor forged to steer hunters away, to turn the light into misdirection.
Across the courtyard, Joric rose as if from prayer. The golden lines along his skin thrummed with steady light. His chest expanded; every breath seemed to draw destiny in. He looked at the thread that had birthed him and felt something like devotion — a blunt, unquestioning loyalty that sank into bone. Where once his ambition had been raw and noisy, it had become a quiet instrument.
He spoke without ceremony. "I will find him," he said, voice smooth and certain. "I will find the man who made the black line. I will find the one who took what does not return." The words landed like a command even to himself. On impulse or design, he bowed his head to the golden thread — to the hunter who had created him, to the rumor that had made him whole.
Around him, the crowd folded into murmured prophecies. Selan Myris watched, eyes narrowed, measuring the new variable. Some saw a savior; others saw a puppet. None could read the small, scared child behind the gold: a boy who had been frightened and now was hollowed into purpose.
Kairo's smile, when it formed, was small and brittle. He was no stranger to improvisation. He had turned absence into influence before. He could turn Joric into a diversion — or a shield — or bait. He could bend the living rumor back on those who would use it against him. But each choice frayed him, pulled threads from places he could not afford to unravel.
Solas did not approach the transformed boy. She stood back in the notch of a shadow, hands folded, eyes like polished coins sizing up a quarry. Her war was larger than one child's elevation. The golden pawn would be useful so long as he served the fate she had chosen; when he did not, she would end him without hesitation. Predators do not grow sentimental.
For the first time since the rumor began, the hunt had become painfully personal. The myth that had been Kairo's instrument had made its own life and demanded responses he had not baked into his plans. Legends, once set loose, have a stubborn will of their own. They make men of those who touch them, shape loyalties, fracture myths.
Joric rose, eyes fixed outward as if he could already see the path. The golden lines along his skin hummed. He was ready to be the instrument the world wanted. He was a beacon, a promise, a bright new rumor with a pulse.
And somewhere in the library, where threads crossed and plans lived, Kairo readied his next move. The pawn had been born. The board had changed. The game was only just beginning.