Eleanor sat alone in one of the practice chambers, her knees pressed against the cold stone floor. The chamber was silent except for the faint hum of her resonance compass. Every Laceliner was required to carry one. It was a circular device, forged with a disc of etched crystal, its surface inscribed with the wielder's own Multisigil. The device served one purpose: to detect threads within the Interlace. Without it, a Laceliner would be blind, unable to know which direction led to a stable crossing.
She placed her palm over the compass and let her Multisigil stir. The markings across her collarbone flared faintly, and the compass responded at once. The central needle vibrated, shifting with a low whir as if straining against invisible current. The vibration was slow and steady, pulsing at even intervals. Eleanor exhaled, recognizing what her professors had explained many times. Slow pulses indicated a safe thread stable enough to be crossed without risk of collapse. Erratic surges, however, meant instability. Such instability was dangerous, because instability in resonance always attracted Nulliths.
Eleanor shifted her weight and slipped her Anchor Ring from her pocket. The band was silver, cool to the touch, and carried a faint etching of her Multisigil along the inside. Anchor Rings were necessary because threads were fragile. The Interlace did not open like a door. It bent and strained, like stretched fabric, and could tear if not stabilized. The Anchor Ring locked a Laceliner to their chosen thread, creating balance between body, Multisigil, and compass reading. Without it, any attempt to cross would dissolve before it began.
She slid the ring onto her finger. Other skilled laceliners skipped that part and instead carried anchoring tokens—small fragments from their home universe etched with their Multisigil. Burning the token can force a thread back to their origin, back to your universe.
The compass needle quivered more sharply as resonance linked between the band and her Multisigil. She had done this sequence in lectures and demonstrations many times, but never without someone standing over her shoulder. Alone, the act felt heavier.
Her professors had drilled the process into her. Activate the compass. Read the vibration. Align resonance with the thread. Stabilize with the Anchor Ring. Then begin the mantra. Any mistake along the chain would cause the stitching to fail.
The door creaked as it opened. Eleanor stopped her mantra mid-way. Her multisigil and compass halted, as if caught by sudden surprise. A man stepped inside, his frame lean, his posture casual but upright. He had midlength brown hair streaked with hazel that caught the chamber's dim light, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses resting firmly on the bridge of his nose. His uniform was neat, the cuffs straight. His eyes swept across the room until they landed on Eleanor standing by the Anchor Core.
"What are you doing here? The Chambers are closed already."
Eleanor froze. She had thought no one did nightly rounds in this wing of the University. The man standing in the doorway was Mr. Croft's assistant. She always noticed him in the Resonance Chambers, usually monitoring or adjusting instruments, rarely in the open halls where most graduate students spent their hours.
She pushed herself to her feet and brushed the dust from her palms. "Yes, I know. But I was thinking if you could allow me to use the Chambers for a few minutes."
"Absolutely not." His refusal came fast. He lifted his hand and shook the ring of keys. The clattering echoed in the chamber. "You can go home now."
"I just needed a few minutes—"
"I know what you are trying to do," he stepped forward slowly to her place. "It is dangerous. You are unsupervised, and you failed your First Stitching. That means you are not qualified to attempt a second Stitching. Regulation requires that only those who have crossed successfully can try again, and always in the presence of instructors."
The words hit her. So everyone knew. Everyone at Lumenrift University knew that Elizabeth Kostova's daughter had failed her First Stitching. She had told herself she could keep it quiet, that her silence could shield her from whispers. She was wrong. Every action of hers was magnified because of her mother. Elizabeth Kostova had left this University as the most celebrated Laceliner in history. People still told stories about her perfect Stitchings, her record expeditions, her discovery of nullmasking. Eleanor had hoped to inherit even a shadow of that brilliance. Instead, she had inherited failure.
Eleanor clenched her fists. "I did enter the Interlace."
She was not sure why she said it. Maybe because she needed someone, anyone, to acknowledge that she had done more than nothing. Her mother had already decided her fate. But Eleanor wanted to insist that her First Stitching was not entirely empty.
The man shook his head. "Every recorded Stitching follows the same sequence. First the thinning of the veil. Then distortion of light. Then disappearance. You did not reach disappearance. That means your Stitching was incomplete."
"I know that."
"It was not as bad as you think," he said. His tone softened. "Mine was worse. I failed my First Stitching too."
She blinked. "You did?"
"Yes. It did not feel good, but I improved."
"What happened?"
"I failed to anchor my thread. I could not align it with any stable point."
She studied him carefully. She could not tell if he was telling the truth or if he was trying to lessen her humiliation by offering a mistake that sounded worse than hers.
"Find your variant self in the target universe. That is how you anchor," Eleanor said. She was repeating words from a lecture she remembered.
He chuckled and nodded, dimples appearing on his cheeks. "Yes, I know. But I failed Onto-Symmetry."
Eleanor almost smiled, though the word stirred memory more than comfort. Onto-Symmetry was one of the core courses every Laceliner had to master. It was the study of correspondence between the self here and the self that existed in another universe. In order to stitch, one had to locate a variant self and use it as an anchor. Without that symmetry, a thread had nowhere to land. The Multisigil could generate resonance and the compass could locate threads, but if the variant was not identified, the Laceliner would drift without orientation.
"All paths begin with the self mirrored," Professor Croft had said, chalk clattering against slate as he sketched intersecting arcs. "Fail to align your own existence, and the Interlace will not hold you." Students who failed Onto-Symmetry were the ones who often misaligned their threads, or worse, anchored to unstable reflections of themselves. Eleanor had always thought of Onto-Symmetry as a tedious study of numbers, identity matrices, and resonance echoes.
Looking at him, she realized his failure was not a small one. If he could not find his own symmetry, then no compass or anchor ring would have saved him.
"I did what you're doing now too," he said. "I practiced many times. Unsupervised. But it didn't help me."
"We're two different people," Eleanor answered firmly. "You failed because you didn't know what to do. I know what I was doing. I just need another chance to do it again."
He studied her face for a long moment. His eyes behind the glasses were sharp, doubtful, yet not unkind. Eleanor held his gaze, unwilling to look away, unwilling to let him think she was fragile. At last, he exhaled slowly, as though conceding against his better judgment. "I will give you thirty minutes. That is all. I will wait by the door."
Eleanor almost thanked him too quickly. She could have embraced him in gratitude, but that felt absurd in the silence of the chamber. She did not even know his name, and she decided it did not matter. Whoever he was, he had given her the one thing she needed—time.
When the door closed, silence spread again through the Resonance Chamber. She turned back to her instruments. The compass, the anchor rings, and the multisigil etched into her skin were waiting for her to continue what she had begun.
She breathed slowly. She had failed in her First Stitching. That was the truth. The Nullith had proved it. Her professors would say the same. Her mother had already said worse. But she could not leave it there. She could not carry failure without testing its edges. She needed to know if she could stand in the Interlace again.
Her hands rose. Her multisigil pulsed. The threads of her pattern began to unfurl. She spoke her mantra. The resonance vibrated through her collarbone, through her ribs, through her skin until it blurred into the air itself.
And then the world bent.
The floor beneath her became both solid and transparent. The walls stretched into endless strands of light. The Chamber dissolved and the Interlace swallowed her whole.
This time, she did not falter immediately. The threads were clearer than before. They arched above her like bridges of glass humming with a universe on its far side. She could almost reach them. She wanted to. She stretched her hand toward a strand that shimmered brighter than the rest.
A sound rose in the distance. A tremor across the threads. The same feeling she remembered from the Nullith.
Her pulse spiked. No professor stood at her side this time. No wardlace shielded her. She had come here alone. If the shadow returned, if it bent its faceless head toward her again—
Her multisigil flickered. She clenched her fist, desperate to hold the thread before it slipped away.
She reached for the brightest thread, forcing her hand steady even as her compass trembled violently in her grip. The device should have aligned her to a variant self. That was the rule. Every crossing required it. But her compass spun without direction. The pulses were frantic like a heartbeat about to fail. Her stomach dropped. The Interlace was telling her there was no variant self available, not in this thread.
Panic clawed at her chest. She knew this from Onto-Symmetry. A Laceliner could not cross without finding their reflection. The compass always confirmed it. No reflection meant no anchor. And no anchor meant disaster.
She tried again, twisting her anchor rings tighter against her multisigil until the metal pinched her skin. She whispered her mantra faster, almost begging. Still nothing. The threads rejected her. Every strand flickered blank. Then the resonance shifted. She felt it before she saw it. The hum of the Interlace sank low and heavy. Her stomach twisted. She knew this presence.
The Nullith appeared.
It rose from distortion like darkness breaking apart the light. Its body stretched tall but bent forward unnaturally. Limbs branched like threads of broken glass, edges sharp, the surface void and consuming. Its faceless head tilted, and the air groaned with resonance that crushed her ears. This was not the distant shadow from her First Stitching. This was bigger. Closer. Hunting her.
Her hands shook. She hated that she could not control them. She hated that her breath broke too fast. She had sworn she would not run again, that she would not return a coward. Her professors thought she was weak. Her mother already believed it. Eleanor wanted to prove them wrong. She wanted to cross, even if it killed her.
The Nullith bent lower. Its hand unfurled into a lattice of jagged dark, reaching directly for her chosen thread. The thread vibrated violently, as if tearing apart.
Tears stung her eyes. She did not want to fail again. She did not want to go back empty. But she did not want to die here either. Her pulse hammered against her ribs. She made her choice.
She pressed her anchor ring hard into her multisigil. The token burned instantly. A searing light raced across the thread and devoured it in fire. The Interlace collapsed inward, snapping shut like glass imploding.
Eleanor fell backward, slammed into her universe, and gasped against the cold floor of the chamber. She was shaking uncontrollably. Sweat ran down her temples. She clutched her chest and tried to slow her breathing. She had survived. She had escaped.
But then the chamber shuddered. The lights overhead flickered violently. The air cracked open with fractures of pale light, thin and jagged, splitting through the space like broken mirrors. A sound bled through them, a resonance that did not belong in this world.
Her body locked. She could not breathe. She could not believe what she was seeing.
From the fractures, the outline forced itself through.
A tall, thin body of shadow woven with shards of white. Limbs too long, bending wrong. A faceless head that tilted toward her, as if it recognized her.
Her worst fear had come true. The Nullith had followed her out.
Eleanor screamed. It ripped out of her before she could stop it, loud and broken, echoing against the chamber walls. She stumbled backward, her hands clawing at the floor, because the Nullith was here, in her world, standing inside her universe. Nothing like it had ever been recorded.
But then she saw it falter.
Its body flickered like a broken projection, shadows tearing at the edges. The limbs that had bent toward her shivered violently, like wires sparking under too much current. Its faceless head jerked sideways, spasming as if something unseen was striking it.
The Nullith staggered, pieces of its form sloughing off in dripping black sheets, melting like ice left in fire. Every fracture in the air around it flared bright, then collapsed, pulling parts of the creature apart with each snap. The flicker grew violent like it was being electrocuted.
Eleanor froze, gasping, hands clutching her multisigil. She could only watch as the predator that had nearly ended her dissolved in front of her eyes. It jerked one final time, limbs seizing like a shattered puppet, and then collapsed inward into a burst of silence.
The chamber was empty again. The fractures were gone. The lights steadied.
Eleanor was shaking too hard to stand. She pressed her forehead to her knees and tried to breathe. Her first thought was relief—it was gone. Her second thought was worse.
And she had brought a Nullith here.
The door of the chamber swung open. Eleanor flinched at the sudden light from the corridor.
The man stood there, a lean frame outlined by the doorway, his hazel-brown hair falling into his glasses. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the room. "I thought I heard you scream," he said. His tone was casual, but his attention was searching the chamber as if expecting to find something else inside.
Eleanor pushed herself upright, her legs unsteady, though she forced her body to appear composed. Her palms still trembled, but she curled them into fists to hide the shake. She met his gaze with as much calm as she could gather. "I need to go home," she said, her voice thin but steady. "Thank you for the time."
He studied her for a moment longer, then nodded slowly, though the suspicion in his eyes did not fade. Eleanor moved past him, her pace too quick, desperate to put distance between herself and the chamber before he asked questions she could not answer.
Behind her, the door closed again, and she felt the sound echo down her spine like a lock sliding into place.