The rooftop was quiet—except for the hum of the wind and the whisper of her bowstrings.
Leah crouched at the ledge, one knee tucked beneath her, fingers ghosting over the obsidian shaft notched in her bow. Below, the city pulsed in midnight rhythms: cars crawling, lives unfolding, people completely unaware that the world was already burning.She closed one eye, drew the string back—And didn’t fire.
She hadn’t missed in over a year. Not once. But the shot tonight wasn’t for practice. It was a ritual. A focus. One she repeated every night since the gloves found her. Since she heard the voice.
"There are twelve. One by one, they will rise—and someone will watch them fall."
Leah had heard it—not as a warning to her, but as if she’d been standing too close to someone else's prophecy.
A voice not meant for her.
A voice not like Richard’s.
Older. Softer. Sharper.
Leah hadn’t known if it was a dream, a warning, or a curse. But the gauntlets hadn’t lied. The moment she slipped them on, something clicked in her. Like part of her had always been reaching for them—and finally closed the circuit.
Now her body moved faster than thought. Her arrows bent around corners. Her eyes saw into lies.
She exhaled slowly. Her breath clouded in the cold air. And then—
A tremor.
Not in the ground.
In her bones.
Her hands twitched, bowstring humming. The arrow shuddered in her grip."What the hell—"She dropped to a knee, clutching her chest. Something in the distance had just lit up. A flash of power so wild and raw it didn’t ripple—it screamed through the weave. Elemental. Erratic. A force of nature too loud to ignore.
"One of them woke up," she whispered.
A name rose to her lips like it had always been there:
"Mike."
She didn’t know who he was. Had never met him. But the name struck true. The way an arrow finds the mark before it even leaves the string.
She rose slowly, turned from the ledge, and tapped her comm.
"Jessie, Jason. We need to talk."
Static crackled, then Jason’s voice cut through, sharp and low. "You felt it too.
"Jessie chimed in next. "Whole damn sky jumped. What was that?"
"Another Holder," Leah said. She turned toward the stairwell, bow still in hand, gauntlets faintly glowing at her wrists. "And he just painted a target on his back."
They met under the red warning lights of a rooftop service door, the city humming low beneath them.
Jessie leaned against a rusted air unit, her arms crossed, one boot pressed to the wall behind her. Jason stood a few feet away, hands in his jacket pockets, his expression all unreadable calm—but Leah could feel the sharpness behind his eyes.
"You sure it’s a Holder?" Jessie asked, pushing off the wall. "Could’ve been a rift. Or a flare. We’ve seen spikes before."
"Not like that," Leah said. "It wasn’t just a ripple. It screamed. Something primal. It felt like it wanted to tear everything apart."Jason nodded slowly. "It felt… alive.""So what do we do about it?" Jessie snapped. "Wait for them to burn a hole through the city? Or go find them first?""We don’t even know where they are yet," Jason replied."We will." Leah looked between them. "Soon."
Silence stretched.
"We’re not all going to agree," Jessie said finally.
"No," Leah agreed. "We’re not."
The world was quiet.
Then the pain hit.
A scream echoed in a canyon no one had walked in generations.
The next Holder had awakened.
Her name was Cassie.
The wind howled around her as she rose to one knee, hands clenched in dry red dust. Her chest heaved. Her skin steamed. Her breath tore from her throat like she'd been drowning in silence for years.
Something heavy glinted in the dust beside her—A glaive.
Six feet of elegant death, the silver blade kissed with scorched etchings that pulsed like veins. It didn’t look like a weapon. It looked like a dance waiting to happen.And her hands remembered it before her mind did.
Cassie stood slowly, shoulders flexing, eyes unfocused and wide. Her gauntlets shimmered into view on her forearms, ancient metal crawling across her skin like it had always belonged.
The air shifted.
Then she moved.
One sweep. One twist. The glaive cut the space around her in a perfect circle of motion—destructive, fluid, beautiful. The canyon echoed with the hum of her movements, like the earth itself had paused to watch her.
She didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know who she was.
But the glaive did.
And that was enough.
Lin sat in a hospital lobby that smelled like bleach and stale coffee, her arms wrapped around herself like armor.
The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed in that sterile, uncaring way. Across the room, a uniformed officer leaned against the front desk—relaxed, but watchful. Between them and the hallway that led to Mike’s room.
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She hadn't been allowed to see him. Not since the fire and the screaming and the sight of him collapsing like a puppet with its strings severed.
And now... now she felt it.
It wasn’t Mike.
Another wave. Another awakening.
It rolled through her, sharp and unfamiliar. Not elemental. Not like Will. This one felt like weight and steel and elegance wrapped in destruction. A weapon’s heartbeat.
Lin looked up, startled, eyes searching as if she might see the new presence through walls and states and miles of sky.
Her phone buzzed against her thigh.
< Incoming Call: Jake >
She answered.
"Jake?"
"I’ve got you on speaker," came Jake's voice—steady, but tight.
"Hey, Lin," said a smaller, softer voice—Sarah.
"Sarah?"
"I'm with him," Sarah said. "We felt it too. Something just happened, didn’t it?"
"Yeah," Lin said softly. "Another one woke up. I felt it. Strong. Different."
"You felt her, then," Jake added.
"Her?"
"Cassie," Sarah answered. "We don’t know where yet. But... it shook something loose. It felt like thunder hiding in silk."
"That's exactly what it felt like."
Silence lingered.
And somewhere behind the hospital hum... fate shifted again.
Sarah sat cross-legged on a plush leather couch in the guest lounge of one of her family’s high-rise apartments, absently twirling a pen between her fingers.
Jake paced in the background, eyes fixed on the window, hands clenched in the pockets of his hoodie.
The phone still sat between them, call still active, Lin’s voice now silent but heavy in the air.
Sarah tilted her head. "So what do we do about him?"
Jake stopped. Turned. "Mike?"
Sarah nodded. "They won’t let Lin near him. He’s locked up under observation. We don’t know what kind of containment protocols they’ve activated. We don’t even know if he’s—"
"Don’t," Jake cut her off gently. "He’s alive. That’s all that matters."
Sarah looked down at her gauntlets, which shimmered faintly under the sleeves of her sweater.
"He’s more than alive. He’s loud. Lin’s tied to him. The others are feeling it too."
Jake sat beside her, elbows on knees. "If we move now, we draw attention. If we wait too long, we lose our shot.
"Sarah glanced at the phone again.
"Then we need to be ready to run the moment we know where he’s being kept. If Lin gets through first... we follow."
Jake didn’t answer right away.
Then: "She won’t wait.
"Sarah smiled faintly.
"Neither would I."
The hospital parking garage was too quiet.
Leah’s boots made soft clicks on the concrete as she and Jason stepped out of the service stairwell. Fluorescent lights flickered above them, casting pale halos across the empty rows of parked cars.
She adjusted the bow strapped across her back, tension twisting in her gut.
"This place creeps me out," she muttered.
Jason didn’t answer. He stopped beside her, eyes narrowing at something in the distance.
"There," he said.
They moved quickly—silent, swift.
Behind the security checkpoint booth near the service elevators, a figure slumped in a chair, body awkwardly twisted, arm hanging limp.
Jason reached him first.
"He’s alive," he said, kneeling. "But... frozen.
"Leah crouched beside him. The guard's skin was rimmed with frost. Not snow, not ice. Something colder. Sharper.
Jason looked up. "Lin."
They both turned.
Across the garage, a wheelchair emerged from the shadow between pillars. Lin, eyes blazing with something just shy of desperation, was pushing Mike—still unconscious, still comatose—toward an unmarked van.
Leah blinked. "You’ve got to be kidding me.
"Jason stepped forward. "Lin! What the hell are you doing?!"
Lin didn’t answer. She didn’t even look back.
She just kept pushing.
Then—Crack-CRACK!
Two gunshots echoed off the concrete walls, loud enough to set off a car alarm across the lot.
Leah spun instinctively as Jessie emerged from behind a column, pistols drawn, longcoat flaring behind her like a gunslinger stepped out of time and rewired for now.
"That’s far enough!" Jessie barked.
The bullets hadn’t hit, but they weren’t meant to.
One passed close enough to part a lock of Lin’s hair.
The other clipped the pavement just in front of the wheelchair’s front wheels.
Lin froze.
Then the temperature dropped.
A veil of white frost swept across the floor like breath turned solid. The air shimmered.
And with a sound like thunder being swallowed, a jagged wall of crystalline ice exploded up between Lin and the Skill team—tall, curved, and opaque.
The wheelchair—and Mike with it—was behind it, sealed off by the sudden frozen barrier.
Leah raised her bow. Jason pulled his sidearm. Jessie stepped forward, boots crunching frost.
"She’s gone," Leah muttered.
They couldn’t see her.
But they all felt the cold she left behind.
Jason stepped closer to the wall of ice, inspecting the surface. "That wasn’t just defense. That was a warning.
"Jessie blew out a slow breath, lowering one of her pistols but keeping the other ready. "She’s desperate. That makes her dangerous.
"Leah’s fingers tightened around her bowstring. "She's not the only one. We can’t let her take him."
"And do what, exactly?" Jason asked. "Storm the wall? Shoot her in front of the boy she’s trying to save? That’s not a win. That’s a declaration.
"Jessie snorted. "It’s already been declared. She just drew the line in frost."
The three of them stood in a loose triangle, staring at the barrier.
Leah lowered her bow, her voice low. "Then we move. We find another way around."
"And if there isn't one?" Jason asked.
Leah’s eyes narrowed.
"Then we make one."
The roar of the van’s engine masked the sound of her heartbeat hammering in her ears.
Lin kept her foot heavy on the gas as the van sped out of the garage, the frozen wall buying her only seconds. She didn’t dare look back—Mike was still slumped in the backseat, strapped in, unmoving, but alive.
The ice would melt. The shots would come.
And they did.
A bullet pinged off the passenger mirror
, shattering it in a spray of glass.
Another slammed into the back panel with a metallic thud that shook the frame.
Lin didn’t flinch.
She gritted her teeth and took a hard turn into the alley, tires screeching. The van fishtailed, but she corrected fast.
This wasn’t precision. This was desperation in motion.
"Hang on, Mike," she whispered. "I’m not losing you again."
Behind her, sirens were starting to rise.
And ahead... fate waited, quiet and watching.
Richard
In the dim light of the forgotten place between places, Richard sat cross-legged before the Loom.
Threads glowed faintly across the air before him—twisting, weaving, writhing in slow-motion chaos.
Some were jagged. Some smooth. A few shimmered gold. One burned.
His fingers danced over them—not touching, not pulling, just tracing.
"You’re pushing them," a voice said behind him.
Richard didn’t turn.
The voice came again, softer this time.
"You’re not the only one who sees the weave."
He exhaled slowly, eyes still locked on the golden thread that had just begun to fray.
"You don’t belong here," he said, not quite a whisper, not quite a curse.
Silence stretched.
"And yet," the voice replied, warm and patient, "I’m here."
Richard’s jaw clenched. The thread between his fingers pulsed, flickering red for a heartbeat.
"I don’t answer to you."
"You don’t have to. You’ve already answered the call."
The Loom shimmered.
Somewhere, far above them, Cassie’s glaive spun through open air.
Richard finally looked up—not at the voice, but beyond it.
"Let the game begin."
???If you felt the weave stir… thank you for reading.
Chapter 3 is coming soon. Until then, come sit with us by the fire in the Discord:
Every ember, every whisper, every thread...We forge them together.
—Azrael Drayven
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