The blare of the Causal Violation alarms was immediate, deafening, and perfectly geometric. It was a rhythmic, pulsing sound, and it burrowed into Elias's mind, competing with the raw psychic scream of the threads. For eight years, that alarm had meant someone else's irreversible mistake. Now, it meant his execution.
He didn't think about his future, his career, or the cosmic implications. He only registered one thing: the speed of the approaching threat. The Watchmen, the Registry's silent, obsidian-armored enforcers, operated on the shortest possible distance to a failure point. They were coming now.
Elias's body moved before his mind could process the logic. The glowing Cipher on his chest felt like a hole burned through his sternum, cold and demanding.
He looked at the tapestry of threads—the Silver, Obsidian, and Crimson—and saw the path the Watchmen would take: a perfectly straight Silver Thread of absolute, inevitable pursuit, leading directly to his cubicle.
His gut—that part of him he'd always suppressed in favor of data—screamed at him to break the thread.
He lunged toward the wall of his cubicle. His hand, still tingling from the painful surge of the first chaotic severance, reached for the Silver Thread that represented the fastest path of the pursuit. The thread felt cold, slick, and incredibly resilient—like trying to snap a rope made of pressurized ice.
He grabbed the thread, pulling with a desperate, animal strength. His knuckles flashed white, and the raw power of the Cipher surged, trying to obey his panicked will.
The thread didn't break. It stretched, taut and humming, refusing to yield the predetermined causality.
Control. I need control, a fragment of his archivist mind insisted. He couldn't just use chaotic will; he needed Intent.
Elias focused his sight, channeling the intense, cold logic that had always defined him. He didn't want the Watchmen destroyed; he wanted their path erased.
Intent: Nullify the Immediate Causality of Capture.
With that cold command, the power flowed differently. He felt his mind lock onto the structural flaw in the Silver Thread itself—the tiny, permissible margin of error the Registry allowed for friction. He pushed his borrowed power directly into that flaw.
The thread did not snap. It frayed, violently unraveling a few meters back down the corridor. The precise, perfect path of the Watchmen dissolved into a confused, messy tangle of loose ends.
The screaming alarms immediately stuttered, their rhythm momentarily broken.
Elias didn't wait to watch the resulting confusion. He scrambled out of the cubicle, ignoring the gasps and frozen stares of the remaining Scribes.
He had bought himself perhaps ten seconds.
He ran for the nearest maintenance exit—a heavy, fire-rated door marked with a small, innocuous Obsidian Thread that denoted its function and history of use.
The Scribes—products of the Registry—were too paralyzed by the violation of their routine to move, except for one. The woman who had shouted the alarm, a severe-looking Scribe named Lyra, was now composing herself. She was reaching for the emergency Binding Weave console—the device that would lock down the entire floor and send his precise psychic signature to the Auditor.
Elias couldn't let her finish the sequence.
He spun, his breath tearing in his lungs. He needed to stop her, but he couldn't afford another massive thread severance that would draw attention from miles away. He needed a precise, personal theft.
He saw the thick Silver Thread connecting her hand to the emergency console—the thread of her duty, her perfect adherence to the Ledger.
He executed a micro-theft—a surgical Weave of Subtraction. He didn't aim to hurt her; he aimed to rob her of her intent.
Intent: Steal the Causality of this Action.
The surge was quick, sharp, and brutally focused. Elias pulled the Silver Thread of her specific action right out of the tapestry.
The Scribe froze, her hand hovering a millimeter from the console button. Her eyes went blank, and then filled with sudden, profound confusion. She looked down at her hand, then at the console, then back at Elias.
"Why... why am I here?" she mumbled, her programming temporarily wiped clean. "The filing... I must return to the filing."
She turned from the console, her sense of duty replaced by a blank slate, and stumbled back to her desk, completely forgetting the Anomaly, the Cipher, and the massive, blaring alarms.
Elias felt the stolen Silver Thread enter his own core, and the power felt chillingly cold, heavy with the oppressive weight of enforced fate. He now carried the potential of her canceled action.
He slammed the maintenance door open and plunged into the darkened stairwell.
The stairwell was loud with the clang of his frantic boots on the metal risers. He flew down the steps, three at a time, forcing his mind to process the threads around him.
The Cipher was constantly demanding more input, more power. It was an engine, running hot and hungry.
He was losing the initial burst of energy from the first chaotic theft. He needed a new Anchor—something to root his frantic mind and organize the power the Cipher was constantly drawing.
He hit the ground floor. The alarms were now a city-wide chorus. He saw the shimmering, distorted reflection of his glowing chest in a polished floor tile.
"An Anchor," he whispered, desperation tightening his throat. "I need Control. Not the chaos I stole, but real, lasting control."
He spotted a small, dark figure huddled beneath a heavy industrial fuse box in a forgotten corner. It was an old man, dressed in frayed clothes, muttering to himself, holding a rusted metallic cylinder.
This wasn't a Registry official; this was someone unwoven.
"They're coming for me," Elias warned, rushing toward the old man. "You need to run."
The old man looked up, his face lined and ancient, but his eyes were sharp. He didn't seem surprised by the alarms or the sight of the glowing Cipher.
"The Watch tracks disruption, boy," the old man rasped, his voice dry as parchment. "But their threads break when they chase a thread that shouldn't exist."
The old man extended the rusted cylinder. It was humming faintly, radiating a subtle, complex web of interwoven Obsidian and Crimson energy.
"My name is Silas," the old man said. "I see your Cipher. It woke you up, but it won't keep you alive. You need a tutor, Anomaly."
Silas didn't give Elias a choice. He pressed the cold, rusted cylinder into Elias's hand.
"That cylinder," Silas explained quickly, the sound of the Watchmen's footsteps getting louder in the corridors outside, "is a salvaged Authority Anchor. It was a prototype the Archons discarded—designed to bind chaotic energy to rigid, unyielding Intent."
Elias felt the immense, foreign power of the cylinder surge into his own hand, fusing with the power of the Cipher. The psychic noise in his head—the chaotic roar of the threads—did not stop, but it suddenly gained a focus.
The scattered, stolen energies of Crimson and Silver coalesced around the cylinder's influence. Elias felt his mind snap back to the intense, cold certainty he had possessed as an archivist, only magnified a thousand times.
He was still terrified, still running, but his mind was no longer a panicked victim. It was an engine of cold, absolute logic.
I will not be captured. I will use the system's own rules to achieve my escape.
Silas smiled, a thin, knowing twist of his lips. "Good. You understand the fundamental truth: the Ledger needs a better librarian."
The heavy steel doors leading into the corridor outside the maintenance room began to groan—the Watchmen were about to breach the lock.
"They'll use a Silver Binding Weave to paralyze you the moment the door opens," Silas warned. "You have to counter it instantly, with a stolen Crimson thread strong enough to disrupt their local causality. Do you understand the Weave?"
"Yes," Elias said, his voice flat, his gaze fixed on the glowing door. The Authority Anchor had taken root. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but his mind was clear, clean, and terrifyingly ready. He felt the weight of every thread around him, and for the first time, he knew exactly how to cheat them.
He raised his hand toward the door, preparing to perform his first intentional, life-saving act of theft and binding.