The silence that followed Silas's proclamation was more than a lack of sound; it was a physical weight, a suffocating vacuum that seemed to draw the very heat from the cobblestones. The lean leader of the Jackals, a man whose name Silas now realized—through a nauseating jolt of stolen memory—was Kaelen, stood paralyzed. His daggers, twin slivers of obsidian etched with weeping blue runes, trembled in his grip.
Beside Kaelen, the third hunter, a wiry youth with a nervous tic in his left eye, let out a sound that was half-sob, half-gag. He looked at the husk of Drax, then at Silas, his mind clearly struggling to categorize the monstrosity he was witnessing.
"Drax was a Tier-Two Needle-Master," Kaelen whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment. "You... you shouldn't exist. A Void-Soul is a nullity. A zero. You can't hold a thread, let alone unravel a core."
Silas didn't answer immediately. He couldn't. His internal landscape was currently a battlefield of competing identities. A jagged shard of Drax's consciousness was lodged in his mind like a splinter of bone. He felt the phantom itch of a beard he didn't possess; he tasted the metallic tang of the cheap tobacco Drax had chewed; he felt a sudden, irrational surge of hatred for the color yellow.
It was the "Memory-Bleed," a side effect of the Stitching that the ancient texts—if any still existed—would have warned him about. He wasn't just wearing Drax's strength; he was haunted by his ghost.
"Kill him!" Kaelen suddenly screamed, the paralysis breaking into a fever of desperation. "Rinn, use the Flare-Thread! Now!"
The wiry youth, Rinn, fumbled at a pouch on his belt. He pulled out a spool of glowing red wire—a volatile, single-use Aether-tool designed to cauterize wounds or, in this case, burn through flesh. With a frantic flick of his wrist, Rinn cast the wire. It hissed through the charcoal fog like a burning serpent, seeking Silas's throat.
Under normal circumstances, Silas would have been too slow, too weak to react. But the fragment of Drax's combat instinct flared within him. Duck. Pivot. Reach.
Silas didn't think; he moved. His body, fueled by the stolen vitality pulsing through his veins, felt unnervingly light. He dropped into a low crouch, the Flare-Thread whistling inches above his head, the heat singeing a few strands of his dark hair.
As he pivoted, he felt the dark filaments—the threads of lack—writhing beneath the skin of his palms. They were hungry. They recognized the Aether in the Flare-Thread as a feast.
"My turn," Silas rasped. The double-toned quality of his voice was more pronounced now, a chilling harmony of his own soft tone and Drax's gravelly baritone.
He lashed out with his right hand. The dark filaments didn't fly; they extended, ignoring the laws of physics. They struck the glowing red wire mid-air. There was no explosion, only a sudden, violent dimming. The Flare-Thread, which could cut through a brass pipe like butter, turned gray and brittle in a heartbeat. It unraveled into harmless dust before it even touched the ground.
Rinn stared at the empty spool in his hand, his face pale with a terror so pure it bordered on the religious. "It... it ate the spell. He ate the Aether."
Kaelen, seeing his subordinate's spirit break, lunged forward. He was a professional, his movements honed by a decade of gutter-warfare. He didn't use a flashy cast; he used a "Stitched-Stride," a technique that used a burst of Aether in the soles of his boots to close the distance instantly.
He appeared in Silas's guard, his obsidian daggers blurring in a cross-cut aimed at Silas's chest.
Left-block. Wrist-snap. Break the line.
The stolen memory instructed Silas with cold efficiency. Silas caught Kaelen's wrists. The impact felt like hitting a moving steam-carriage, but the stolen strength held. The reinforced leather of Kaelen's sleeves groaned under the pressure of Silas's grip.
"You speak of heresies and monsters," Silas hissed, his face inches from Kaelen's. He could smell the expensive lavender oil the leader used—another stolen detail from Drax's observations. "But you hunt children for sport and sell their souls to the highest bidder. Tell me, Kaelen, which of us is the monster?"
Kaelen snarled, his eyes flashing with a desperate blue light. He triggered the runes on his daggers. "Die, Leech!"
A shockwave of frost erupted from the obsidian blades. In an instant, Silas's arms were encased in a jagged layer of Aetheric ice. The cold was absolute, designed to shatter bone and freeze blood.
Silas gasped, the pain lancing through his stolen vitality. The ice began to creep toward his chest, toward the Void-Soul.
But the vacuum didn't fear the cold.
As the ice reached the translucent indentation in his sternum, the Void-Soul reacted with a violent, rhythmic throb. It was like a giant heart beating in reverse. The frost didn't just melt; it was sucked inward. The blue magical energy was stripped from the ice, leaving behind nothing but harmless, frozen water that shattered and fell away.
Silas felt the blue Aether enter his core. It was sharp, biting, and refined—far higher quality than the "Dirty Bit" he had consumed earlier. It tasted of mountain air and ozone.
Kaelen's eyes widened. "Impossible. That was a Grade-Three Frost-Vein..."
"It was delicious," Silas countered.
He didn't wait for Kaelen to recover. He tightened his grip on the man's wrists and allowed the dark filaments to emerge fully. They didn't just stitch into the man's flesh; they burrowed into his armor, seeking the Aether-threads that held the leather together.
"No! Please!" Kaelen's bravado vanished, replaced by the raw, animalistic fear of a man who realized his very existence was about to be harvested.
The unspooling began.
It was faster this time. Silas was becoming a more efficient predator. He felt Kaelen's "Refinement"—the years of training, the mental discipline, the sophisticated weaving techniques—flowing into him. It was like drinking liquid lightning.
Images flooded Silas's mind: Kaelen receiving his daggers from a mysterious patron in a velvet-lined office; Kaelen's secret stash of gold hidden beneath a floorboard in a tavern called The Rusty Loom; the face of a woman Kaelen loved and betrayed.
Silas's soul expanded, forced to accommodate the new "Garment" he was stitching together. The silver-gray scars on his hands grew more intricate, forming patterns that resembled the very runes he was stealing.
Rinn, seeing his leader being drained of life, didn't stay to fight. He turned and fled into the fog, his screams echoing off the brass pipes until they were swallowed by the soot.
Silas let go of Kaelen. The leader fell to his knees, his skin graying, his eyes staring into a distance that was no longer there. He wasn't dead, but his core was a hollow shell. He had been "Unspun"—a fate worse than death in Caelum-Ru, for his mind was now a blank slate, his personality erased by the vacuum.
Silas stood in the rain, gasping for breath. The power surge was intoxicating, but the mental cost was staggering. He felt like he was wearing three different masks at once. He was Silas, the starving ghost; he was Drax, the brutal thug; he was Kaelen, the ambitious hunter.
I need to go, he thought, the thought barely rising above the roar of voices in his head. The Wardens will have felt the resonance of the Frost-Vein. They'll be here in minutes.
In Caelum-Ru, the Wardens were the iron fist of the High Spires. They didn't hunt for profit; they hunted for order. And a "Stitcher" was the ultimate threat to that order.
He turned to leave, but his eyes caught the obsidian daggers lying on the ground. They were dull now, their runes exhausted, but the craftsmanship was undeniable. He scooped them up, tucking them into his belt.
As he moved away from the scene of the slaughter, his movements were a strange hybrid—Drax's heavy-set confidence tempered by Kaelen's lithe grace. He slipped into a narrow maintenance crawlspace, a place the old Silas would have been too weak to climb into.
He traveled through the "Veins" of the city—the labyrinthine network of pipes, steam-tunnels, and discarded vents that ran beneath the Low-Stitch. He didn't have a destination, only the driving need for distance.
Finally, miles away from the exhaust pipe where his life had ended and begun, he found a secluded chamber. It was an old pressure-regulation room, long abandoned and thick with the smell of wet iron and grease.
He collapsed against a pile of burlap sacks, his body finally demanding payment for the adrenaline and stolen Aether.
He looked at his hands in the dim light filtering through a high grate. The stitching scars were glowing faintly with a residual blue light.
I am a thief of lives, he realized, the vocabulary of his new existence settling in. I am a patchwork of men who wanted me dead.
He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he saw the High Spires again. But this time, they didn't look like ivory teeth. They looked like a tapestry. A massive, beautiful, arrogant tapestry that was just waiting for someone to find the loose thread.
Silas Thorne, the boy with the Void-Soul, began to plan. He had the strength of a Jackal and the mind of a hunter. Now, he just needed to find a way to stop the voices in his head from screaming.
Outside, the charcoal rain continued to fall, washing away the evidence of the unspooling in the alleyway. But in the deep veins of the city, a new kind of weaver had begun his work.
And the first stitch had only just been cast.