Chapter 33

  Ren still dreamed of fangs.

  Not every night. Not always. But often enough that he woke with sweat slicking his back and phantom pain lancing through an arm he no longer had. Each time, he told himself it was getting better. Each time, it was a little more true.

  But not easy.

  There were no medals for surviving something the world didn’t even believe you could walk away from. No rewards for crawling out of a cave soaked in your own blood. The Order didn’t applaud. They gave you work. Assignments. Supervision.

  And, in Ren’s case, a mage.

  He sat on the worn steps behind the training hall, sleeve pinned neatly at the shoulder, as the Grand Scribe’s message played again in his mind.

  “You’ve survived something few ever touch. So now, you’ll learn to make use of it. Control it. We’ll assign you someone versed in the Aether - someone who can teach you to keep from accidentally unraveling yourself or others. You begin tomorrow.”

  “You’re Ren?” the boy had said, practically vibrating with excitement. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

  Leo wasn’t what Ren expected. Young—maybe seventeen. Messy brown hair, ink-stained gloves, and a grin like he’d just been given the keys to the forbidden archive. Ren had expected an older mage, fin fact that was what he was supposed to get.

  Instead, Leo had arrived with a note from Raven, his mentor : “If the Order insists on wasting resources babysitting strays, they can do it without me. Leo will suffice.”

  Not exactly a warm welcome.

  Still, Leo had turned out to be... competent. If chaotic. And surprisingly earnest.

  “You’re not useless,” Leo said now, crouching in the grass beside Ren with a small bundle of rune-sketched parchment. “Just catastrophically undereducated. That’s not your fault. Mostly.”

  Ren shot him a flat look.

  Leo waved a hand. “Hey, I’m not insulting you. I mean it. You touched Aether, right? Survived exposure? That’s not normal. That’s—okay, borderline historical. I’ve heard of two other people doing the same and lets just say they weren't in the best bodily condition after that, if you could call the mush a body.”

  Ren raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean that as a compliment.”

  “…Thanks?”

  “Lets start with what you call Threads. You’ve been using it instinctively, but it’s a mess. Like trying to paint with your teeth. Effective in a way, but not elegant.”

  Leo said it with a tone of absolute certainty, as though he were discussing a badly tied knot rather than a mystical power that defied explanation.

  Ren squinted at the faint shimmer he’d coaxed from his palm—barely visible, a flicker of a Thread trying its best to behave like a whip or a tendril. “I’m not trying to be elegant,” he muttered. “I’m trying not to die by letting this u know energy out of control after discovering how dangerous it is!”

  Leo made a face like Ren had just kicked a puppy. “That’s the most pedestrian mindset ever. Everyone tries not to die. That’s baseline. What you should be doing is trying to understand. Aether doesn’t reward fear. It rewards precision.”

  He tossed a pebble at Ren’s knee. “Here. Catch.”

  Ren’s hand twitched, but the pebble bounced harmlessly off his shin.

  “Good,” Leo said, grinning. “Now catch the next one. Using the thread.”

  “You want me to lasso a rock out of the air.”

  “I want you to get out of survival mode,” Leo said. “Because right now, you’re still in that cave, aren’t you?”

  Ren froze.

  The words hit harder than he expected. Not like a slap, but a pin sliding between armor plates. Small, silent, deep.

  Leo didn’t say anything else. He just picked up another pebble, tossed it in the air, and waited.

  Ren didn’t move.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. But his mind had already filled in the scent of blood-soaked earth. The weight of a wolf’s breath. The pain—white-hot, numbing—of his right arm being torn away. And the way it hadn’t ended there. The way the mana had watched him. Responded.

  No one had told him what that meant.

  Not even the Order.

  He’d overheard things, though. Enough to piece together that most people who brushed against raw Aether didn’t walk away. Not intact. Not sane.

  Ren had. Sort of.

  But now the magic clung to him like static—present, insistent, a phantom limb of its own.

  Leo’s second pebble hit him in the chest.

  “Good,” Leo said again, annoyingly cheerful. “That proves my point.”

  Ren stared at him. “What point?”

  “You’re not thinking. You’re reacting. Same way you did in the cave. It saved your life. Great. But if you keep flinching every time you feel the threads, you’ll never be able to use them properly.”

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  He picked up another stone.

  Ren glared. “If you throw that one—”

  Leo shrugged. “I’m just saying. This isn’t like normal magic. You’re not channeling a spell. You’re coaxing the most powerful thing known to any species in this planet. And right now? You’re asking it like a beggar.”

  Ren clenched his jaw.

  “Fine,” he said. “Again.”

  Leo tossed the stone.

  This time, Ren focused—not on the stone, but on the Thread curling just beneath his skin. He visualized it extending outward, brushing the air like a feeler. And just as the pebble began to arc down—

  It jerked in midair. Wobbled. Then fell an inch short of his remaining hand.

  “Closer!” Leo said. “Less begging, more asking politely with confidence.”

  “You’re insufferable.”

  “I’m an excellent teacher.”

  Ren tried again. Then again. Each time, he caught more of the pebble’s motion, tugged harder on the thread without snapping it, guided its shimmer more cleanly. It felt like learning to use a muscle that didn’t quite belong to him—but the more he used it, the more natural it became.

  By the time the sun dipped behind the trees, he was sweating and exhausted and smiling faintly despite himself.

  Leo flopped back onto the grass, arms spread. “Progress! We made real, actual, textbook progress. I’m writing this down.”

  Ren sat beside him, breathing slowly. The ache in his shoulder was always there now, a dull throb where the arm had once been. But it didn’t feel like a wound tonight.

  More like… a scar. A part of him. Painful, yes. But part of the story.

  “You really think I can control this?” he asked.

  Leo turned his head toward him. “You already are.”

  Ren looked up at the sky. Dusk had painted the clouds in violet and gold, and the stars were starting to peek through.

  He remembered lying under those same stars outside the Ink-Bound chamber. The shaking in his hand. The way it had finally hit him—he was alive. Somehow.

  Now, something in him felt steadier.

  Not whole. But held together by something stronger than fear.

  “I thought I was going to die,” he said softly. “In that cave.”

  Leo didn’t answer right away.

  Then: “I read the report. Well, the bits I was allowed to see. I think you should have died. But I also think maybe the Aether didn’t want you to.”

  Ren blinked. “The Aether. What is it, exactly?”

  Leo hesitated just long enough for Ren to notice. His eyes darted to the side, to the thin threads of mana still drifting through the air like sunlit dust motes. Then he smiled—but it was a scholar’s smile. Polite. Evasive.

  “Well,” Leo said, drawing out the word like a syllable of jazz, “imagine you’re trying to explain the ocean to someone who’s only ever bathed in a sink.”

  Ren raised an eyebrow. “I used to run a world famous restaurant. You can just say ‘I don’t know.’”

  “Oh, I know,” Leo said, tapping his temple. “But knowing and understanding are… cousins. Distant cousins. Who argue a lot. In front of you. At every family reunion.”

  Ren stared at him. “So you’re saying nobody knows.”

  “I’m saying people like to think they know. The scholars say it’s the breath of the world. The Church calls it the lifeblood of the Divine, the god they worship. The Order? We mostly just say, ‘Don’t touch that, it bites.’”

  Ren frowned. “But it’s mana. Isn’t it?”

  Leo nodded. “Yes and no. Mana is like the outer casing of a machine—it fills all worlds and acts as the lifeblood through which they survive. But mana isn’t always magic. On my home world, it was something called Ughuskt.”

  It took a moment for the system’s language translation to activate before Ren heard the word: electricity. He’d almost forgotten that feature even existed.

  Leo continued, his tone shifting. “But there’s something beyond mana. Something older and that's what your Threads are imitating.”

  Ren narrowed his eyes. “Imitating?”

  Leo leaned back on his elbows, gaze tracking a faint, curling strand of mana in the air. “Yeah. Like a shadow trying to remember the shape of the thing that cast it.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It shouldn’t be.” Leo’s voice lost some of its playfulness. “Because the thing you’re reaching for? It isn’t meant to be held by mortals. Not for long.”

  Ren shifted, the grass cool beneath him. “You keep saying ‘mortals’ like there’s something else.”

  Leo was quiet for a moment. Then he sat upright, brushing dirt from his robes.

  “There is,” he said finally. “Or was.”

  Ren raised an eyebrow.

  Leo gave a small shrug. “The Order doesn’t talk about it much. The Church calls it heresy. The scholars treat it like a myth. But there are… records. Barely.”

  “Of what?”

  Leo met his gaze. “Of ascension.”

  The word hit like a dropped stone.

  “To what? A god?”

  “No.” Leo shook his head. “Not like the ‘Divine’ the Church worships. Not divine in that sense. But something… elevated. Something more. Something greater than mere mortality.”

  Ren blinked slowly. “And you think Aether is the key?”

  “I don’t know.” Leo looked away again. “But I think it’s the door. And some people, very rarely, have found the handle.”

  Ren was silent.

  Then, quietly, “You’re not just talking theory, are you?”

  “No,” Leo said. “There’s one name that keeps coming up. Scratched in old records, half-censored from logs. Never officially acknowledged. But if you dig deep enough, you find it.”

  He lowered his voice, like the trees might be listening.

  “Atreus.”

  Ren felt a chill trace his spine.

  Leo went on. “He was an outsider. Like us. Showed up out of nowhere, burned through resources and knowledge and soared through the Levels. Brilliant, unstable, terrifying. And obsessed with experimentation. Especially with Aether and some weird form of alchemy.”

  Ren frowned. “And what happened to him?”

  “No one agrees. Some say he vanished. Others say he ascended. One record claims he found a way back to his homeworld. What theory is true, if any, nobody really knows.”

  Leo picked a loose blade of grass and twisted it between his fingers. “They say Atreus didn’t have a shortage of enemies by the end. Not just mortals—things that sleep under this world. Ancient things.”

  “And you’re saying I touched the same thing he did?”

  Leo gave a noncommittal hum. “Maybe. Maybe it touched you. That cave? The wolf? Your threads? It’s all uncharted territory, at least to me.”

  Ren exhaled slowly. “So what does that make me?”

  Leo’s smile was thin. “It makes you interesting. And very, very dangerous.”

  “Great,” Ren muttered. “I’ve always wanted to be a walking hazard.”

  “Well, cheer up,” Leo said brightly. “You’re still alive. And you’ve got me to babysit your existential crisis.”

  Ren snorted. “She really called it babysitting?”

  Leo nodded. “And she meant it. Raven doesn’t like anomalies. Or wasting time. Which makes me the anomaly-welcoming, time-wasting substitute.”

  He stood and stretched, brushing off his sleeves. “Come on. Training’s not over. We’ve still got a few more exercises before sunset, and I want to see you suffer a bit more.”