By the time the Guild scholars arrived to "follow up" on his situation, Iris had begun flinching at the sound of paper.
Paper meant forms.
Forms meant labels.
Labels meant his life getting worse.
He stood in the square again, arms folded, while a fresh group of robed strangers spilled out of a wagon like overstuffed bookcases. They carried cases, scroll tubes, and an alarming number of delicate-looking instruments.
The wolf sat at his side.
The shadow cat lay draped along the roofline of a nearby shed, perfectly blended into its own shade. Only its pale eyes gave it away, lazily half-lidded as it watched the newcomers with what could only be described as bored contempt.
"Iris," Mara murmured from behind him, "remember: don't antagonize them."
"I exist," he said. "They'll feel antagonized either way."
The same examiner from before stood near the well, now looking slightly more rumpled and significantly more resigned. Beside them was Sera, arms crossed, jaw tight, as the scholars fanned out with the solemn urgency of people who smelled a publication opportunity.
The bearded village scholar looked both excited and offended that higher-ranked academics had shown up.
One of the newcomers, a woman with sharp eyes and ink-stained cuffs, strode directly toward Iris, glancing only once at the wolf, twice at the cat's roof, and then dismissing both with a flick of her gaze.
"Subject: Iris," she said briskly. "Irregular, provisional. Contract anomaly, confirmed. Secondary phenomenon reported: unbound shadow-type familiar manifesting near subject without ritual. Accurate?"
"Your phrasing," Iris said, "makes it sound like I tripped and dropped weird magic everywhere."
"Did you?" she asked.
"No," he said. "I tripped and dropped my lunch. The magic did itself."
She made a small note in a leather booklet. "Self-deprecating humor as coping mechanism," she muttered. "Possibly useful data."
He opened his mouth to argue, then thought about his last three days, closed his mouth again, and decided she had a point he did not like.
Another scholar, older and stooped but with eyes that gleamed like he ate theories for breakfast, unlatched a large case and began laying out tools on a makeshift table: larger resonance rods, crystals etched with more intricate patterns, a ring of metal inscribed with tiny, circling runes.
The bearded village scholar hovered nearby, clearly trying not to look impressed.
"We'll begin with corroborating yesterday's results," the older man said. "Then proceed to testing the alleged second anomaly."
"Alleged?" Iris repeated. "You say that like I've been making this up for fun."
"Anomalies," the woman said, "require verification. Especially when reported by untrained subjects prone to misinterpretation."
"You mean me," he said.
"Yes."
"At least you're honest about it," he muttered.
On the roof, the shadow cat yawned.
He felt it more than saw it, an idle ripple brushing along the edge of his awareness, like a lazy finger trailing patterns in water.
You chose this, the sensation seemed to say.
"I did not," he muttered.
The wolf's ear flicked. Mara shot him a look. "Talking to yourself again?"
"I'm diversifying my options," he said. "Myself, the wolf, the cat. Someone's bound to give good advice eventually. Odds are terrible so far."
"Subject: difficulty maintaining focus," the ink-stained woman murmured, making another note.
He glared.
The older scholar gestured him closer. "Take a seat," he said, pointing at a stool set in the middle of a chalked circle. "We'll repeat the resonance mapping and bond confirmation, then expand parameters."
The circle made Iris pause. "What's that for?" he asked. "Containment? Decoration? Summoning more problems?"
"It stabilizes readings," the man said. "And if something goes wrong, it may also prevent your soul from imploding."
"That feels like something you should have mentioned first," Iris said, sitting down anyway because apparently he was bad at survival on multiple levels.
The tools came out again.
Rod in hand, mana surge, humming in his bones, he winced, jaw tight.
"Response consistent with prior test," the examiner noted. "No self-driven channels. External stimulus wakes the bond."
Crystals flared. Parchment glowed. The ring of runes hummed faintly when placed near his chest.
The ink-stained woman frowned. "Core anchoring remains internal," she said. "No visible seal. No bleed. Structurally unsound, yet… stable." She clicked her tongue. "In violation of three established frameworks."
"Four," the older man corrected. "If you include the Lateral Binding Codex."
"The Codex is outdated," she snapped.
"It's foundational."
"Foundationally wrong."
"You misinterpret chapter six...."
"I didn't misinterpret anything, you...."
Iris rubbed his face. "You know," he said loudly, "if you blow up the world arguing about books, I'm going to be very annoyed in my last moments."
"Silence, please," the older man said. "We're working."
"Some of us are trying to live," Iris muttered.
The wolf lay just outside the circle, calm but alert, eyes tracking every movement toward Iris. Every time a rod came too close, its tail twitched in warning.
The shadow cat remained a smear of dark along the roofline.
Watching.
Occasionally, he felt the lightest pressure at the edge of his thoughts, a brush-and-retreat, like someone repeatedly poking a bruise to see if it still hurt.
Stop that, he thought at whatever it was.
The sensation pulsed once.
No.
"Great," he mumbled. "Now I'm being heckled telepathically."
"Subject?" the ink-stained woman asked sharply.
"Nothing," he said. "Just narrating my suffering."
They shifted to the "second anomaly."
"The cat," Sera said, nodding toward the roof.
Half the scholars followed her gaze.
Half kept writing.
One squinted. "I see only ambient shadow distortion," he said. "No solid form."
"It's there," Iris said. "You're looking wrong."
"Wrong?" the man repeated, offended.
"Yes," Iris said. "You're looking like humans do. It hides where you don't notice." He gestured vaguely. "Shift your eyes. Pretend you're tired and not paying attention."
"That's not how observation works," the ink-stained woman said.
"It's how mine works," he replied.
The older man picked up a lens rimmed with runes and peered through it at the roof. "I detect faint pattern interference," he said slowly. "Minor spatial distortion. Not enough to confirm a discrete entity."
"It ate two bowls of my food," Iris said. "Discreetly."
"Evidence?" she asked.
"I'm still alive," he said. "Meaning I'm apparently not good enough to be eaten. That's pretty compelling."
The older man adjusted the lens. "If it's an oracle-type shadow beast," he said, "it will resist direct probing. We may need to lure it into revealing its essence."
"How do you lure something that knows more than you?" Iris asked. "Because from experience, that's hard."
"Food, perhaps," the village scholar suggested. "Or a manifested thread…"
"You are not dangling my soul like bait," Iris said.
"No one suggested that," the older man said.
"So you thought it very loudly," Iris replied.
From the roof, the cat's presence curled around his awareness again. Amusement, this time. Dry. Sharp.
They cannot see, it seemed to say. Their methods are loud.
"Yeah, well," Iris thought back at it, "their loud methods are aimed at me. So maybe don't enjoy this too much."
The cat flicked its tail in the corner of his vision.
One of the new scholars, carrying a device like a metal frame threaded with crystal wires, stepped forward. "We will try wide-field resonance capture," he said. "If there's an oracle-type nearby, its sight-lines should distort the reading."
He set the frame on a stand, angled it toward the general area of the shed roofs, and activated the crystals.
The device hummed, threads lighting up in sequence.
Then, without warning, three of the crystals flared white and exploded with a small, offended pop.
Everyone flinched.
The frame went dark.
Iris blinked. "Well," he said. "That was impressive."
The scholar stared at the smoking ruin. "That… has never happened before."
"In your defense," Iris said, "I think that's what you get for pointing complicated magic at something that already hates complicated magic."
The ink-stained woman shot him a look. "Beasts do not hate complexity."
The presence on the roof shifted.
They resent attempts to measure what you cannot touch.
For a heartbeat, the voice brushed his mind again. Clear. Cold. Certain.
He swallowed. "Some of them do."
The older man picked up one of the fried crystals, eyebrows knitting. "The feedback pattern is… strange," he said. "Not a simple overload. It's like something reached in, took a look, and put it back down harder than necessary."
"So," Iris said, "like every encounter I've had with authority."
Mara coughed into her fist.
They moved on to a different device, a ring of metal that projected faint lines of light into the air, like a crude web. When they aligned it toward the wolf, the lines bent, dipping toward its core. When they turned it toward Iris, the web shimmered, some strands snapping entirely.
"Unhelpful," the ink-stained woman muttered.
"Comforting," Iris said. "We agree on something."
When they turned it toward the roof, nothing happened.
No bend. No shimmer. No visible reaction.
"I don't see anything," one of the junior scholars said.
"Exactly," Iris said. "That's the problem, isn't it?"
The presence from above pulsed once. Approving, maybe.
The older man frowned at the unresponsive web. "Either the instrument is faulty," he said, "or the entity's interaction with causality is…"
He trailed off, searching for a word.
"Awkward?" Iris supplied. "Inconvenient? Mocking?"
The ink-stained woman rolled her eyes. "Irregular," she said. "Like him."
The word sat in the air like a nail.
Iris exhaled slowly. "One of us is enough," he said. "We don't need a matching set."
"You didn't ask it to come," the examiner pointed out.
"Correct," Iris said. "I didn't ask either of them to come. Yet here we are."
"Can you communicate with it?" Sera asked suddenly, eyes keen. "Directly?"
He hesitated.
The cat's gaze sharpened.
"Not… exactly," he said. "It pokes my head sometimes and says unsettling things. I respond by panicking internally. It's a very healthy relationship."
"What kind of things?" the older man asked, too quickly.
He remembered the moment in the yard, the threads of light, the blur where his own should have been.
You are… strangely empty of fate.
"I don't understand them yet," he said. "And I'm not sure I want to."
"That," the ink-stained woman said, "is not reassuring."
"Nothing about my life is reassuring," he said. "You're late to that realization."
They argued in low, sharp voices, throwing around phrases like "oracle vector," "fate line interpretation," and "non-binding observational entities." It all washed over him like rain on already-soaked clothes.
At some point, someone suggested bringing the cat down.
"How do you propose we do that?" Mara asked dryly. "Ask nicely?"
"That would be a start," Iris said. "I recommend also offering it a better life and a strong exit strategy."
"We can bait it," one of the junior scholars said. "Use a lure..."
The shadow cat vanished.
One blink, and the patch of roof where it had been lounging was just a patch of roof.
Iris felt it slip... like a presence stepping sideways into somewhere his thoughts couldn't follow.
The scholars grumbled.
"See?" the ink-stained woman said. "No confirmed entity. We're chasing phantom impressions."
"You talked too much," Iris said to the air. "It got bored."
"Or it never existed," she shot back.
The wolf's gaze slid up to the roof, then back down to Iris with a flat look that said very clearly, You know better.
He did.
He just didn't want to.
The tests went on.
More devices. More readings. More muttering about theory when reality refused to behave.
Two different instruments sparked and died when angled even vaguely toward where the cat had been, and once when pointed at nothing at all.
"Stop aiming things at the air," Iris suggested. "The air is going to get offended next and then we're all in trouble."
"Subject attempts to deflect with humor," someone noted.
"Subject is trying not to scream," Iris replied. "Please include that in your notes."
Eventually, the older man set down the last of the smoked tools and rubbed his temples. "We can't measure it directly," he admitted. "Not with what we brought."
"So we have no proof," the ink-stained woman said.
"We have his report," Sera said. "And the examiner's sense. And the wolf's reactions."
"And failed instruments," the examiner added. "Twice now. Feedback doesn't come from nowhere."
"It could be the Irregular," one of the junior scholars offered. "His resonance interfering more broadly as it stabilizes."
Iris stared. "I'm not exploding your toys on purpose. If I could control strange things happening around me, none of this would be happening around me."
The older man considered Iris for a long moment. "There is another way," he said at last. "If we can't get the entity to reveal itself to instruments, we can see whether it reveals itself to him."
Silence fell.
"No," Iris said immediately. "No more glowing in my head. Hard pass."
"You're already a bonded anomaly," the ink-stained woman said. "At this point, incremental risk...."
"Is still risk," he cut in. "Incremental or not."
"It would not require forming a bond," the older man said. "Only… acknowledging one, if it exists. If the entity chooses to interact, it may respond to a direct invitation."
He looked up at the empty roof, then at Iris. "Call it."
"Like a dog?" Iris said. "It's a shadow oracle cat. It'll walk away out of spite."
"If it is what we suspect," Sera said quietly, "it's already watching."
He knew that.
He'd felt it.
He'd felt it last night, too, hovering just beyond his dreams, seeing something he couldn't and choosing not to share.
He swallowed.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. We'll ask the incredibly unsettling, possibly prophetic, definitely judgmental shadow beast to show itself. Because that's normal now."
He stepped out of the circle, ignoring the way several scholars hissed under their breath about "contamination," and walked to the center of the square.
The wolf paced with him, a silent flank of muscle and loyalty.
He tilted his head upward.
"You can hear me," he said, not shouting, but pitching his voice like he did when talking to the wolf in the forest. As if the words were less important than the intention behind them. "You keep following me. Watching me. Eating my food and my peace of mind. If this is just a hobby for you, fine. But they're going to keep trying to measure you until something breaks. Probably me."
The square listened.
"So," he continued, "if you want them to leave you alone, you might have to show them something. Or maybe you'd like to watch more tools explode. Could be entertaining. Up to you."
One of the scholars muttered something about "anthropomorphizing."
He ignored them.
"Also," he added, "for the record, I am not a good investment. Whatever you're observing, my contribution is mostly panic and poor life choices."
The air near the shed shivered.
Not like heat.
Like a thought.
The shadow cat stepped down from nowhere.
One heartbeat it simply wasn't.
The next, it was walking out from a crack where the wall met the ground, as if the gap were a door only it could see. Each step left no mark, no sound, but Iris felt the presence with every motion, a cool line drawn slowly across his awareness.
Gasps rippled through the scholars.
Crystals trembled in cases they hadn't even opened.
"There," he said weakly. "Witness. Anomaly. Congratulations."
The cat ignored everyone else.
It walked up to him, tail drifting behind like ink in water, and sat within arm's reach. Its eyes flicked once to the wolf, then back to Iris.
Fine, the presence whispered in his mind. Let them see what they cannot hold.
The older man fumbled for his lens, peering through it with hands that, for the first time, shook. "Core density… low," he murmured. "But… vast spread. Its influence extends beyond its body. Like a net cast over...."
"Don't try to quantify it," Iris muttered. "It hates that."
The cat's ear twitched.
You are not wrong, it said, amusement curling around the words.
The ink-stained woman stepped closer, clutching a crystal that, to its credit, only flickered nervously instead of exploding. "Entity," she said carefully, "do you acknowledge this human?"
The cat looked at her as if she were a particularly uninteresting piece of furniture.
Then it turned back to Iris.
Within him, something… shifted.
Not a new thread, like with the wolf.
More like… a line of sight aligning.
He felt it examine him again, deeper this time, but not in the way the tools did. Not measuring. Not weighing. Mapping.
You are… strangely empty of fate, it repeated, as if confirming an earlier conclusion. Space where there should be threads. Absence where others are knotted.
"I was hoping that was a one-time observation," he said under his breath.
Empty is not nothing, it replied. It is… potential unclaimed.
He did not like the sound of that.
"Entity," the older man tried again, voice shaking slightly, "do you recognize a bond with this human?"
The cat did not answer aloud.
It didn't have to.
The presence in Iris' mind folded in closer and, with quiet, unnerving certainty, settled.
You are mine to watch, it said. And I will be yours to see.
Something clicked behind his eyes.
For an instant, he saw the square differently.
Fear running off some villagers in thin, bright lines. Curiosity thick around the scholars. Mara's resolve braided tight with worry. The wolf's presence a steady pillar beside him.
A faint shimmer around the cat itself, not a line but a tangle he couldn't quite parse. Threads touching many places, most of them far, far beyond the village.
The vision faded as quickly as it came, leaving behind a faint echo and a headache.
He swayed.
The wolf pressed against his leg, steadying him.
The examiner stepped forward. "Iris?"
"I'm fine," he lied. "Just… learning there are more ways to be overwhelmed than I previously thought."
The ink-stained woman's voice shook. "Did it... did it just...?"
"It acknowledged him," the older man said. "Without circle. Without oath. Without any visible structure. That was… a voluntary link."
"Not a full contract," the examiner said quickly. "No seal. No pain response. No core damage. It's… lighter."
"Observation-class," Sera murmured. "Not command-class."
The ink-stained woman stared at Iris as if seeing him for the first time. "Two unstructured bonds," she said. "With a combat-grade beast and an oracle-type shadow entity. Within days. No training. No ritual. No recorded framework that fits."
Someone behind her whispered, "This is impossible."
"That word," Iris said tiredly, "keeps losing meaning around me."
The older man straightened slowly, the enormity of it pulling his shoulders back. "This exceeds Irregular classification," he said. "Single-bond anomalies are one thing. But this…"
He looked at Sera.
She looked at the examiner.
The examiner looked at Iris.
"Don't say it," Iris said.
They said it anyway.
"Multi-Bond Irregular," the examiner announced quietly. "That will be your updated designation."
The title settled over the square like a second shadow.
Iris closed his eyes.
The wolf's presence hummed warm against his core.
The cat's cool awareness traced the edges of his thoughts.
Two completely different weights. Both there.
"I," he said to no one in particular, "would like to formally opt out of being interesting."
No one answered.
The bonds did.