Chapter 17: The First Command
Joric stood before the statue like a lit altar. The light that had taken him in the courtyard now lived under his skin — faint filigree of gold tracing his veins, eyes turned to a distant, unblinking hue. He was no longer merely a boy with dreams; he had been made into something the crowd could point to and believe in. Purpose had settled in him like armor.
He looked up at the black filament above the plinth and felt a loyalty he could not name. The compulsion was complete: find the maker of the line, find the man who bled, unmake the absence that had hollowed so many minds. His resolve tightened into action; his movements were precise, as if some other will had taught his limbs to obey.
Lian arrived breathless and hollowed by the need that had pulled him from his room. He was the scholar who cataloged facts and stored memory as if it were treasure; now something essential had been stolen from him, a piece with no label. The sight of Joric — the living rumor — flared that ache into a clean, sharp fear. Recognition pressed at the edges of his vision without a name. He felt wrongness settle over everything.
Where Joric felt command, Lian felt duty. The fragment of a face — the scar, the sad eyes — lingered like a phantom limb. He could not remember the memory, but he remembered the harm. He stepped forward, not with the swagger of a hero but with the trembling resolve of someone who needs to protect what he half-senses is true. The statue's thread hummed between them like a fault line.
Around the plinth the crowd tightened, breath held. Instructors barked disjointed orders that no longer fit the scene. Discipline bent under the weight of myth. The campus had become an altar of competing stories: gold against void, noise against silence. Each narrative tugged at the other; each pull risked tearing everything loose.
Kairo watched from his lattice of vents and ducts, a pale outline within the shadowed arteries of the Academy. He felt the clash like a series of strikes against glass. This was the moment he had feared and, in the worst perversity of his craft, had already prepared for: a visible god drawing a line through the soft edges he'd labored to create. If Joric completed his command, attention would harden into a map and hunters would have longitude and latitude to work with.
For a long, nearly unbearable beat he did nothing. He could have fled. He could have burned the school and vanished into the world's cracks. But every choice had a cost, and truth — once named — became an anchor. He thought of all the things he had sacrificed to become what he was, of the faces he'd erased and the nights that had cost him his sleep. He could not let the witness turn into a thread that tied him down.
Kairo acted.
He sent a surge through the myth-layer: a direct, sharp injection of his craft into the black filament itself. It was not violence; it was conversation — a command threaded backwards. The black thread answered with a faint recoil, like a string plucked in the dark. In the instant that followed, Lian convulsed with the same wrench he had felt before: the white-flash of stolen memory, the black line, the scarred face, the bleeding. Each image popped into being like a glass shard and then fell away until nothing remained but a blank ache.
Lian's scream bled out into nothing. The remembered images dissolved as if someone had smoothed them from a pane. He staggered, palms pressed to his temples, the hollow where a truth had been yawning wider. He was left with loss but not the map to find it — a witness without a story.
The crowd reeled; whispers sharpened into panic. Joric's hand hovered in the air where he had meant to act. The golden filigree along his skin thrummed, expecting obedience, expecting blood and movement. He had the certainty of command but not yet the means to carry it through. Something unseen had altered the terms of his purpose.
From inside Lian's head — or from the thin, humming place between belief and fact — a voice crept, soft as winter air and colder than any blade. It carried the cadence of the man Lian had once seen: low, intimate, and unmistakable.
"Touch the thread."
The words slid into Lian's mind like a hand guiding him toward a trap and a truth all at once.