Chapter 15: The Counter-Myth
Kairo felt the challenge like a cold wire pulled taut between two minds. Solas's intent was precise and patient — the kind of calculation that devoured bluster and left only a surgical result. For a long time he had dressed himself in absence and shadow; now the hunter's confidence had forced him into a different shape. If he could not remain invisible, he would remake the light itself.
He watched Joric — bright, obvious, a living beacon — and tasted the bitter truth: a visible god was the opposite of everything he had built. Joric's existence concentrated attention into a spearpoint that could be aimed. To survive he must turn that spear into mist. He could not simply erase the boy; that would birth a new, louder reality. He needed to invert the altar into a rumor, a question, a thing people could doubt.
A grim smile threaded Kairo's face. This was the work he had always loved: not the smash of power but the architecture of belief. If Solas forged truth with gold, he would answer with shadow. He moved like a seamstress in the cathedral of the Academy, slipping through corridors, touching nothing, leaving only intention.
He found a statue — a small, overlooked relic tucked in the library wing, half-forgotten and moss-soft with time. It depicted some dead god from a dead parable: a face worn away, a pedestal spoked with tiny cracks. Perfect. Perfect because no one cared for it anymore. Perfect because myths grow fastest in hollows.
He did not speak. He did not touch. Presence was enough. A hair-thin black thread unfurled from a place inside him and settled on the statue like a question. It was thinner than a breath, darker than absence, a single stitch in the weave. The thread did not shout; it insinuated. It asked: What if the god on this plinth never died? What if he only walked away? What if the story you hold is the false one?
Solas felt it as a whisper across the myth-layer. She had been patient, but patience was not passivity; it was a net. The new tremor was not the bright gong of a revelation but the small, corrosive susurration of a rumor budded into being. Her lips tightened. This was the kind of twist she had been trained to hunt: a subtle seed that turned certainty into doubt.
She allowed herself a thin, calculating smile. Kairo's maneuver was clever — elegant, even — but it was a mirror. He answered light with shadow the way a thief answers guard with a reflected gleam. She liked that. It made the chase honest. It meant he was still human, still reachable.
Meanwhile Joric, the living anchor, felt the thread tug at him with a force that was neither command nor accident but compulsion. The golden lines that scorched his skin thrummed at a question he could not have phrased: Find him. Unmake the line. His jaw set. Purpose congealed into motion. The shrine of the forgotten god called to him like a summons.
He moved toward the statue as if pulled by a rope. Students turned and watched: some with awe, others with dread. Selan's eyes narrowed; she read patterns quicker than most and saw the danger in Kairo's soft filament. Where Kairo meant to blur a light into rumor, Solas would parse the rumor into shape. Where Solas would seek and strike, others would rush in boisterous ignorance. The board was rearranging under their feet.
Kairo watched them all: the hunter, the pawn, the crowd. He felt the old ache of consequence, the knowledge that myths once loosed spin in ways even their maker cannot fully steer. He threaded a second whisper into the statue's shadow — a small, plausible contradiction to the golden narrative — and exhaled. The counter-myth would not erase the beacon. It would bury doubt around it until the light felt less like truth and more like spectacle.
In the library alcoves and on the rooftops, minds tilted toward the new question. The hunt sharpened. The rumor multiplied. Kairo, who had once wanted only to be forgotten, realized with a cold clarity that to survive he would have to become what he despised: the author of a legend, the spinner of its rules.
The first counter-thread had been thrown. The game that began as whispers had become a duel of storytellers — and the campus, hungry and naive, would be the jury.