Days had bled into one another since the Celestial Weave, blurring into a stagnant haze.
Those who had received the sky's favor were quickly swept up into the elite orientation program run by GRID—Upper Iris's premier defense division. The organization was a predatory machine, always scouting for fresh Arkan-bearers, and anyone with a lingering sheen on their skin was a potential asset to be claimed. Now, walking the neighborhood streets, you could see the lucky students wearing their newly issued GRID badges like military trophies. They were small, polished silver plates pinned proudly to their school uniforms—a blinding, daily proof that they had been chosen by destiny.
Yinoh had been entirely gone for three days.
He had been sequestered at GRID's local headquarters, a monolithic, concrete complex perched aggressively just beyond the northern edge of the district. It was an intimidating fortress of fortified training halls, high-voltage fences, and massive satellite dishes aimed at the stars. It looked like a place built specifically to watch the heavens—and to keep the rest of us firmly locked on the outside.
Meanwhile... I had barely left the house.
The weekends felt infinitely heavier than the weekdays. At least at the academy, the ambient noise of crowded hallways and lectures drowned out the quiet, rotting parts of my mind. But here, in the stillness of my bedroom, the silence pressed down on my chest like a weighted blanket I couldn't kick off. By the time evening approached, I realized I hadn't spoken a single word out loud all day. My throat felt rusted shut.
CREAK.
The heavy, familiar groan of our front door echoed up the hallway stairs. Then came the sound of it clicking shut—final, firm, and deliberate. I stayed frozen on the edge of my mattress as the footsteps began. They were rhythmic and steady, growing louder and more confident as they approached my door.
Knock. Knock.
"Can I come in?"
Yinoh's voice cut through the dark. I forced myself to stand, moving lazily across the floorboards to turn the brass lock and pull the door open.
He stood in the hallway, grinning broadly as if we hadn't just skipped a single beat of our entire lives. "Hey, Hashy. Missed me?"
"Not even a little bit," I replied, a small, involuntary smirk tugging at my lips.
"Oh, come on," he grinned, pushing past my shoulder into the room. "I know you missed me. That's exactly why I brought snacks."
He triumphantly raised two bulging, crinkling convenience store bags. Through the plastic, I could spy a chaotic mountain of chips, corn curls, chocolate bread, and neon-colored fizzy juice. It looked like he had explicitly scanned the aisles and bought everything loud, crunchy, and aggressively bad for your health.
"You raided a store," I said flatly.
"I liberated it," he countered, a look of pure, unadulterated triumph on his face.
He marched into my room like he still owned the place and dumped the bags onto my cluttered desk, the plastic crinkling loudly as he immediately tore into a pack of corn curls.
I leaned against the wall, watching him. "You wanna boot up the monitor? Watch something? Or maybe play a few rounds of games?"
Yinoh shook his head, popping a handful of curls into his mouth. "Nah. I'm here for you."
Without waiting for an invite, he flopped heavily onto the edge of my unmade bed, letting his legs dangle off the side just like he had done a thousand times before. And then, he just started talking.
He spilled everything about the orientation. He complained about the GRID instructors having entirely too many medals on their chests, described the arena-sized training halls that smelled like ozone, and whispered about the heart of the facility—a raw mana crystal so massive and volatile that it pulsed against your teeth like a second sun.
"I even got to test my Arkan affinity today," he said between bites, his voice muffled by the food. "Turns out—it's wind."
I blinked, taking a second to process the image. "Wind?"
"Yup," he said, sounding almost profoundly disappointed as he crunched down on another handful. He momentarily stopped munching, the bag crinkling into silence, and we just stared at each other for a solid, unbroken beat.
Then, the absurdity of it hit us at the same time, and we both cracked up.
"The heaven literally gave you wind just to spite your future skewer stall," I laughed, the sound loud and foreign in the quiet room.
"I know, right? It's a cosmic joke," he groaned, throwing his hands up. "How am I supposed to grill anything when the sky itself is trying to blow my business permit?"
"Forget the permit," I teased, stepping over to grab a bag of chips from the pile. "You're going to scatter the coals across the street every single time you sneeze."
He shook his head in mock despair. "Great. Just great. Someone's going to bite into raw chicken at my cart just because I accidentally summoned a localized tornado over the counter."
We laughed again, the sound echoing off my small bedroom walls. And for a fleeting, beautiful moment... I forgot. I forgot about the lack of light on my skin. I forgot about the suffocating silence of the house. This was real. This was the old rhythm, untouched by the heavens.
Yinoh leaned back on his elbows, staring up at my ceiling as he slowly finished chewing.
"I really missed this," he said softly, the humor draining out of his voice, leaving something raw behind. "GRID is... It's too loud, Hashy. Everyone there is trying to prove something to the scouts. No one really... listens to anyone else. It's just constant mana bursts and exhausting egos."
"Sounds miserable," I said, my eyes involuntarily wandering toward the window, watching the distant neon grid of Upper Iris flicker to life.
"It is."
Then, the room dropped into a quieter, heavier frequency.
"You doing okay?" Yinoh asked. His gaze shifted from the ceiling, searching mine, his bright eyes trying to read the text I always hid behind my teeth.
I hesitated, my fingers tracing the crinkled plastic of the chip bag in my lap. "Hmmm… still figuring it out, I guess."
Yinoh nodded slowly. He didn't press. He didn't offer a shallow, optimistic speech about how things would get better. Like always, he knew that was enough.
We didn't need any more words to fill the space. We just sat there in the fading light, the comforting sound of curls crunching and the dusty old desk speaker humming a low, forgotten radio song.
But beneath the laughter, and beneath the warmth of the junk food, something still itched violently inside my chest. A dark, intrusive thought that I hadn't dared to say out loud to my father, or to the sky, or even to the boy sitting on my bed.
Something much darker.
----------
Hours passed in the gentle, familiar dark.
As the speaker's music faded to a low, barely perceptible hum, my eyelids grew heavy. The tall streetlamp outside my window cut through the glass, washing the bedroom in a pale, dim glow. Beside me on the mattress, Yinoh's breathing gradually settled into the steady, rhythmic cadence of someone finally at peace. For the first time in days, the heavy silence of the house didn't feel like it was actively swallowing me alive.
Then, the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to stretch.
I rubbed my eyes, blaming the sudden prickle of goosebumps on sheer exhaustion, even though I hadn't done anything to earn it today. But when I closed them, something faint whispered at the very edge of my hearing. It wasn't words—it was a magnetic pull. A sudden, soft warmth crept across the back of my neck, mimicking the phantom sensation of someone standing right behind me, leaning over my shoulder.
I let my eyes close fully. The mattress dipped slightly. A scent drifted into my nose—not the clean ozone of Yinoh's wind or the grease of convenience store food, but something infinitely older. Something safe.
Laundry soap. Warm rice. Crisp early mornings.
Mom.
I sank rapidly, falling into a deep layer of sleep I didn't choose. A gentle voice brushed against the walls of my mind, and then—darkness.
"Son, wake up. You'll be late."
I surfaced from the dream like a drowning man breaking through the ice for air. She was standing right by my bedroom door, casually brushing dust from her cotton apron just like she used to do every single school morning before the world fractured.
"Mom?" I whispered, my throat tight.
She turned, her face soft, smiling warmly. "Aren't you going? You still haven't figured out your Arkan, son."
But... I don't have one, I tried to scream. The words jammed behind my teeth. The sky looked at me and found nothing. I reached out for her, but she was already stepping backward, turning into the dark hallway, fading like mist.
"Wait—Mom!"
I jolted upright in bed, gasping for breath. The room was dark. My room. My heart was racing at a frantic, erratic tempo against my ribs, and my skin was entirely cold with a sudden sweat. I realized my hands were shaking, clutching the bedsheets so hard my knuckles turned white.
"Hashy?"
Yinoh's voice was instantly close, sharp with worry in the gloom. He leaned over from his side of the bed, his bright eyes frantically searching mine. "You okay? You were violently shaking, man. Hang on, I'll go downstairs and get you some water—"
"No, it's okay." I reached out and blindly grabbed his wrist. My grip was much tighter, much more desperate than I had intended, my fingers digging into his skin.
He froze, looking down at my hand. "You sure?"
"Yeah," I breathed, forcing my heart rate down by sheer force of will. "Calm down. Now."
Yinoh raised an eyebrow, the heavy tension in the room breaking just a fraction. "You should probably say that to yourself."
A short, ragged breath escaped both of us—not a genuine laugh, but the brief, comforting shadow of one. Yinoh sat back down on the edge of the bed, moving a few inches closer this time. He didn't push for answers. No more words were spoken, just a quiet that didn't feel crushing anymore. It was the kind of solid, unyielding silence that meant someone was choosing to stay.
But the dream didn't fade. It didn't feel like a phantom memory dredged up by my subconscious. It felt like a message. A cold draft that lingered in the room, smelling of things lost to the earth.
Yinoh didn't ask about it, but he must have felt the lingering chill. He watched me for another second, then abruptly stood up on the carpet and started playfully twirling his right hand in the empty air. A sloppy, lopsided spiral of localized wind began to whistle faintly between his fingers, looking more like a dying, unbalanced ceiling fan than a magnificent feat of magitech divinity. He was trying entirely too hard to distract me from whatever nightmare had just played out behind my eyes.
"Look at this," he whispered, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in deep, exaggerated concentration. "Pure, raw, unbridled talent. GRID doesn't know what's hitting them."
I was actively trying not to laugh at how utterly ridiculous he looked—this newly Threaded prodigy concentrating all his might on a tiny, pathetic breeze—when a sharp, rhythmic knock hit the wood of my bedroom door.
The hinges creaked open, and Dad peeked in, his tired silhouette framed by the warm, inviting yellow light of the hallway. "You two hungry? I cooked."
Yinoh's magnificent "spiral" instantly collapsed into nothingness as his face lit up. "Well, actually, Sir Thiago, I am actively starving."
Dad grinned, the deep lines around his eyes crinkling with genuine affection. "Well, get your behinds downstairs before it gets cold. I made your favorite."
We both said it at the same time, our voices perfectly in sync: "Braised pork?"
Dad just nodded, a knowing, triumphant smirk on his face, before disappearing back down the hallway toward the kitchen staircase.
Yinoh shot up from the bed like a compressed spring. "You cool with just eating the rice and sauce, Hashy? Because I'm eating everything else. The meat, the fat, the garnish—it's all mine."
"You absolute glutton!" I groaned, lunging forward to shove him back onto the mattress. I tried to use the physical momentum to dash past him and leap for the door first, but I stopped dead in midair.
Literally.
A sudden, pressurized breeze wrapped around my waist like an invisible, heavy ribbon, holding my feet a clear inch above the carpet. I kicked my legs out, biting back a gasp, but I was completely pinned in place by the air currents.
"Hey! No fair!"
Yinoh casually strolled right past my suspended body, his hand reaching out to carelessly tousle my hair into a complete mess as he went. He didn't even bother to look back, his stride full of a new, subtly terrifying kind of confidence.
"I call that one the Hashy Hold," he declared loudly over his shoulder. "It's a bit of a placeholder name, but it fits. I'll keep it until the instructors help me think of something more 'elite,' but honestly? It's growing on me."
"You're abusing your power!" I yelled at his back. By the time the wind current dissolved and my feet finally hit the floorboards, the echo of his footsteps was already halfway down the stairs.
When I finally managed to reach the dining room table, Yinoh was already seated like royalty, a white napkin neatly tucked into his collar. "I think Hashy's lost his appetite, Sir Thiago," he said, giving my dad a look of mock sorrow. "A shame, really."
"That so?" Dad chuckled, using a thick cloth to set a steaming, heavy ceramic pot directly onto the center of the wooden table.
"He used unsanctioned magic against me in a domestic residence," I protested, dropping heavily into my seat and aggressively grabbing my chopsticks. "It's a kidnapping."
"Your fault for being slow," Yinoh countered, already eagerly reaching for the large serving spoon.
The thick steam rose from the open pot—savory, sweet, and incredibly rich with the scent of soy, star anise, and caramelized brown sugar. "Braised pork belly," Dad announced proudly. "Just like you two like it."
Yinoh took a massive, reckless bite and froze, his eyes widening to the size of saucers. "Sir Thiago... THIS IS AMAZING!"
Dad's loud, booming laugh filled the kitchen, a comforting sound that seemed to chase away the residual shadows of the house as we all dug in. But as the initial, chaotic frenzy of eating slowly began to taper off, the natural rhythm of the conversation began to drift. Dad leaned forward on his elbows, looking across the table at Yinoh with a deep, genuine curiosity in his eyes.
"So, wind magic, huh? How did the entry ceremony handle the manifestation metrics?"
Yinoh swallowed his mouthful of rice before replying, gesturing with his chopsticks. "They had this massive, metallic device at the center of the stage. We had to place both hands on the scanning plate, and it calibrated our internal resonance to determine our exact affinity. Then, it projected a three-dimensional visual of the wind currents right above it."
"Oh, that must've been the CORE—the Channeling Oscillation Resonator Emitter," Dad said, leaning back in his chair. A sharp, brilliant spark of professional scientific pride flared in his eyes.
"Yeah, that's exactly what the instructors called it!" Yinoh said, leaning in.
Dad chuckled softly, a fond smile gracing his lips. "I invented the baseline matrix for that machine about ten years ago."
Yinoh slammed both hands against the wooden table and shot straight out of his seat, nearly tipping his water glass over in the process. "Really?! Sir Thiago, that is insanely cool!"
They kept talking then.
They talked about the technical layout of the orientation, the specific training drills GRID used to build muscle memory, and the intricate magitech mechanics behind the CORE's resonance scanners. I mostly sat there, my hand frozen over my bowl, listening as the cheerful rhythm of their voices blended with the sharp, rhythmic clink of silverware.
They weren't trying to leave me out on purpose. They loved me. They were just speaking a language that required a light under the skin to translate—a language I simply didn't have the vocabulary for.
The dining table suddenly felt a few inches farther away, stretching out into an impassable gulf. Maybe it was just a lingering, cold draft from Yinoh's wind magic. Or maybe, as I looked at the bright, animated faces of my father and my best friend, I was finally realizing the truth.
My path forward wouldn't be as simple as waiting for a glow beneath the moon. The sky had left me empty—and if I wanted a destiny, I was going to have to build it from the dark.