Chapter 11: The Witness
Lian froze as if the world had stuttered. He was a scholar — quiet, precise, blessed with a memory that kept itself like an archive. The face had lodged in him the way a splinter lodges beneath the skin: sudden, raw, impossible to ignore. It was the man from the paper teacup. The man on the bench. The one with the quiet, sorrowful eyes. The fragments slid together with a terrible clarity: the black line, the missing hours, the hollowed feeling after talking with friends. All of it radiated from this single, wounded face.
Terror bloomed in Lian's chest. He had no training for this. He was not a hero. He was a witness. His hands trembled at the thought of what to do — run, shout, find help? The options scattered and died in the small, stunned space where his courage should have been. He could only stand and watch, powerless and aware.
Kairo felt the gaze like a blade. The shock of being seen cut through the fog that the threads usually afforded him. For a sliver of a moment the façade trembled; exposure was a raw, acidic thing. He had choices: flee the Academy, abandon the plan and live, or act. Truth anchored the hunter to the world — a witness would become a tether, a map, a way to follow him. He could not let that happen. The calculus tightened in his chest like a vise.
He looked at the boy — at the shock, the recognition, the inevitable fear — and something like sorrow uncoiled inside him. This was the price of what he had made. He had remade memories and lives to build a shape that people would fear. He had traded fragments of his past for a power that could erase a staff, a name, a history. Now a piece of that bargain showed up in a human face, and the bargain looked monstrous.
He raised his hand with no flourish, no dramatics. His voice — when it came — was small and flat, like cold wind through a ruined hall. "Forgive me," he breathed. "Some truths are not meant to be held."
Pain lanced through Lian — not heat, not physical bruise, but a sharp, sicking wrench inside his head. Memory unspooled like thread being cut. A white flash. The black line. The pale face with the scar. The bleeding nose. The recognition. Each image blinked away and left behind a perfect blank: an empty, humming void where knowledge once lived. Disorientation followed, a hollow feeling that something vital had been taken and could not be named.
He stood in the corridor with an absence in his chest and no word for it. Lian was still himself — still scholar, still small and ordinary — but something that had anchored his world was gone. He could feel the shape of loss but not the map of its terrain. Panic trembled at the edges of his thought; the memory had been excised so cleanly that only the echo remained.
Far across the campus, in the emptied tower and the quiet of Dorm 0, Solas felt the tremor as if it were an animal that had fled a trap. The myth-layer whispered the same soft note: a mind touched, a truth unmade. Her lips curved. Satisfied, predatory. The man was no god — merely a wounded human who could be seen and hurt.
She held the golden thread in her fingers. It hummed, bright and small, a thing spun from blunt, relentless belief. It had done exactly what it was meant to do: find a weak filament and pull. She tied the thread to the doorknob of Dorm 0 as if marking territory. The tower that had been a monument to rumor was now a battlefield stake.
Solas's smile was a promise. She had seen the man's vulnerability. She had watched a witness become blank and knew what that meant: the myth could be pierced. She would not need grand schemes or armies. She would hunt, close, and finish.
The golden thread pulsed in the starlight. The hunt — real and merciless — had begun.