Chapter 14: The Living Beacon
When the light ebbed, it did not leave the world — it nested within Joric. The brilliance folded into his skin like water into stone, tracing filigree of molten gold that crawled along his veins. Brown eyes turned to something else: a distant, uncanny gold that watched the world with terrible calm. His hands felt new; his thoughts, inexplicably sharp. The noise that had always lived behind his ribs — doubt, clumsy hunger, shame — fell away until nothing remained but a single, unshakable point of purpose.
Around him the students did not flee so much as worship. Screams braided with whispers: miracle, blessing, power. Where fear had once sharpened minds, awe dulled them. The rumor of the golden thread exploded outward and multiplied; a private mark had birthed a public god.
The instructors arrived in a flock of controlled panic. Elder Tianrue stared as if at sacrilege — the golden anchor had not merely marked a hunt; it had given its power to flesh. The thread that had hummed at the doorknob was now a silent relic at Joric's feet, its glow transferred and quenched. For a master of the void, such substitution felt like a theft of the world's grammar: an unmaking that rewrote the rules by whispering a new one.
"What did you do?" Lorien demanded, all precision braided into fear.
Joric regarded her with an absence behind his gaze. There was no malice, no triumph, no human panic — only a crystalline certainty. He knelt, body steady as a statue, and the golden traces along his skin pulsed in answer. Loyalty settled on him like armor; purpose filled the hollows that had always defined him. The world had given him a role, and he accepted it without argument.
He spoke then, voice flat and certain as iron. "I will find him," he declared. "I will find the man who made the black line. I will find the one who bled for it. I will end him."
Kairo felt the proclamation as a rip through the myth-layer. A living rumor was worse than silence; it was a lamp in a dark room. The careful architecture of his absence — the soft edges, the unanswered questions — buckled under the weight of a visible god. Everything he had pried apart to form a phantom threatened to congeal into a focus that hunters, historians, and fanatics could point at, name, and destroy.
He pressed his palms to cold metal and breathed through the tightening in his chest. He had never wanted an altar built in his name. He had wanted shadows. Joric's sudden radiance demanded responses he had not written. He would have to adapt — to be faster, odder, cleverer. He would have to turn this beacon into a liability for those who held it dear.
Solas, watching from some distant notch of campus, felt the shift and smiled without warmth. The golden pawn was not a misstep; it was bait that could unmask lines of alliance, extract secrets, and churn the hunt into motion. Opportunity looked different on her face: not surprise, but calculation. The child's transformation had granted her a new instrument. She would play him. She would keep him lit so that the predators around him showed themselves.
She turned her gaze to the empty place where the void staff had been, to the abandoned tower that had become a monument of rumor, and to the luminous figure at its shadowed edge. The hunt now had a drumbeat. There were names to be drawn, routes to be traced, and a man somewhere bleeding through a scar no rumor could perfectly hide.
The golden lines along Joric's skin flickered as if answering an unseen conductor. Behind the calm, the campus hummed with new danger: priests and fools, zealots and tacticians, each eager to claim a piece of the story. Legends did not remain obedient; they multiplied loyalties and fractured intentions. The living beacon had lit more than a path — it had lit a war.
Solas's mouth curved into a thin, predatory smile. The world had given her a pawn and a signal. She tightened her grip on the hunt. The beacon shone, the board shifted, and the chase — bright, methodical, merciless — began.