#Aiden
I woke with a scream caught in my throat like I'd been torn open and sewn back wrong. Everything felt dislocated — my memories, my muscles, my voice.
I didn't know where I was.
For a moment it felt as though everything that had happened was a dream.
A ceiling above me. Smoke hung too heavy, refusing to rise, coiling close to the floorboards like it preferred to crawl. And somewhere beyond the walls, sirens wailed — not the old mechanical kind, but long, resonant notes that trembled in the bones before they reached the ear.
And next to me — someone humming.
"Mum," I rasped.
Her face turned. Alive.
She didn't speak. Just watched me with that look again — the same one from the square. Sad. Resolute.
"You saw him die," I choked. "You watched him die, and you said nothing—"
I lunged. My fingers grabbed her wrist, too hard.
She didn't flinch. Didn't even pull away.
Just said, "You need to breathe."
I couldn't.
My whole body was trembling. The world felt tilted. Like I was walking uphill inside my own head.
And the words kept ringing:
Revenge.
Your grief hums true.
I'll remember your song.
I looked a my mum again and I could see the golden threads again changing shape rapidly in her stomach. It unerved me so much that I pushed myself back
"What did he do to me?" I whispered even though I knew what I had become. We had been taught this all our life.
Mum looked past me, to the window. "You're awake now."
That was it.
No comfort. No answers.
She stood and went to the table.
A watch lay there. Dad's. Black-gold face, etched with twelve notches around the dial instead of fifteen.
"I'm not supposed to have this," I said quietly.
She nodded. "Which is why you'll run."
"Mum—"
But she didn't stop. She took my hand, placed the watch in it, and wrapped my fingers shut.
Then she looked me in the eyes. The way you look at something you know you'll never see again.
"You will go where they can't find you," she said.
---
We didn't go home.
We moved like ghosts across the city — avoiding major streets, skipping known routes, never staying long enough to gather shadow. The sky grew darker the farther we moved from the square, like the city itself wanted to forget.
Every step was calculation. Corners weren't corners, they were probabilities. Who might be waiting. What line of sight they had. How many seconds it would take to vanish if they shouted.
That's when I saw him.
A butcher's boy, maybe fourteen, swaggered down an alley with a slab of meat under one arm and a boning knife hanging lazy from his belt.
The things I was seeing inide people was fairly easy to understand. It was mana. If ti didn't have a colour and wasn't moving the person didn't have any power and the boy was in this group.
My brain started ticking.
A knife equaled leverage.
If someone corners us, a blade would me time no matter how small for my mum to save me. Three seconds could be the difference between survival and being a body in the gutter.
His eyes were on the dripping blood, not the street. One hand occupied.
I didn't tell Mum. She didn't need to know.
I slowed just enough to let him pass closer, brushed his shoulder like it was an accident. My fingers found the knife handle — rough leather grip, sweat-stained. I shifted pressure on my palm to match his stride so the motion blended. Then, a quick roll of my wrist.
My hand trembled around the grip for moments. I tucked it under my coat before his next step.
Hesitation will get you killed, stupid boy. Stop trying to act like your father. He's dead.
I spun around trying to find who had said that.
Crowds. Baskets. Dust. No one was looking at me.
My eyes caught the butter boy's back disappearing into the press of bodies.
I ran. Shoved past the clutter and noise until I saw her—Mother—just ahead, scarf fluttering.
She glanced at me as we ducked into the next street. Her eyes flicked to the bulge under my coat, then back to the shadows. She didn't comment. But her silence was heavy, like she was adding it to some invisible ledger only she kept.
We slipped past a burned-out chapel, where candles guttered in warped pools of wax. Their flames leaned sideways, licking along the walls instead of rising, as if gravity itself had given up on them. The faces of saints were blackened, their eyes gouged hollow by smoke
I gripped the knife tighter. If saint paintings couldn't survive this city, what chance did I have?
Finally, two blocks later, turning by the next corner, we climbed with a railing so small that my hands pressed against the ragged slab of stone. From the rooftop, the city spread below—chimneys bleeding smoke, streets twisted in shadow. And far off, bells rang.
Mum knelt beside me.
"Use the telescope,"
I fumbled with it. The thing was cheap — street-market glass and a dial that didn't want to move — but it worked. Mostly. I pressed it to my eye and at it struggling with the dial until one building enlarged. Calling it a mansion would be an understatment. My classmates had not for one day belived I lived here.
Three men moved inside. Roughly eighteen were outside.
They didn't have the sigils of the ten houses so I doubted they were soliders but their strides where confident. They seemed kind of men who only came when everything was already decided.
One of them walked out with something heavy, wrapped in cloth like a relic.
"That's Dad's..." My throat closed on the words.
One of the men shifted the bundle, cloth falling back just enough for a streetlight in the compound to kiss the spine.
For a second, I wasn't on the rooftop anymore. I was ten again, standing on a stool in his study, reaching for shelves I wasn't supposed to touch. My hand brushing that same spine. With the wordings "posession" nailed into it.. His voice was calm he was telling me to put down a book I already read ten times.
The memory hit like a punch. My stomach twisted. Bitter bile rose in my throat. Dad hadn't just studied this — he'd guarded it. And now it was in their hands, wrapped like stolen relics.
"That's Dad's," I said again, sharper this time, my chest burning. "It's worth—"
I didn't finish.
One of the men stopped.
Turned.
Looked up. Right at us. Straight through the glass.
His gaze pinned me — eyes like frost, unblinking.
Then his wrist shifted in the light, and I saw a watch that looked just like mine.
Before I could take a closer look mum's hand caught the back of my head and yanked me down hard. I hit the rooftop with a grunt. Her fingers on my collar, firm, nearly too tight—
"Aiden—"
She stopped and just looked at my shoulders trembling and released me slowly. Her hand moved from collar to shoulder in circles
One breath. Then another.
She exhaled through her nose.
She crouched low beside me. I watched her jaw tighten, the tendons working like she was biting back words.
"Aiden…" she started, then stopped. The wind tugged her shawl, carried the smoke of the city across her face.
When she spoke again, it was quieter. Careful. "You awakened… back at the execution, didn't you?"
She didn't look at me when she said it. Just kept her eyes fixed through her glass, like the rooftops were safer to face than my answer.
I froze. My mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Her gaze flicked once — down to my chest, to the scorched fabric where the symbols had burned themselves into me — then back to the distance. No accusation. No comfort. Just the truth, acknowledged in silence.
I swallowed. "How do you—"
"I just do," she said quickly, almost too quickly, cutting me off before the words could settle.
Then her hands reached down for the dry sand and I felt that familiar feeling that every human could relate to.
Mana pulsing.
Then dust shifting.
From the cracks — water. Drops, slow and shy, pulled upward.
She wove it. Carefully. Like something sacred.
A thread.
A ribbon.
A veil.
It split into two spheres, each hovering like it had always belonged there.
One floated to her.
One to me.
It didn't feel wet — just cool. Like breath from glass. It wrapped around my face, adapting.
Form.
I gasped.
She changed.
Her cheekbones shifted. Skin tone darkened by a shade. Her eyes became someone else's. The veil transformed her down to the muscle memory of her stride.
She adjusted her coat. Rolled her shoulders.
Even her smile changed — a crooked version, the one she'd use when lying about bad odds.
"The burns make you look like a beggar," she said. "More convincing. For anyone who knows Aiden Holt."
I laughed. A real one. Despite everything. The sound startled me — it had been so long since my chest carried anything but fire. Maybe since before Dad.
"What now?"
She stood. Lifted the satchel from the dust. For a moment her hand brushed my cheek, lingering just long enough for me to feel the tremor in her fingers. Not fear. Not weakness. Just the cost of holding steady for both of us.
Her eyes searched mine, and for half a breath I thought she might say more. Something final. Something I could carry.
Instead she only drew the veil tighter, her new face hardening in the shadow.
I smelled that metallic tang again, hand brushing the knife.
"Now," she said, voice low, "we disappear."
Interlude I : The Historian's Fragment
The following is translated from the Seventh Archive of Aegis. The scribe's name is lost, the ink stained with fire and water damage. It is widely accepted to be one of the clearest surviving accounts of the Ald War.
---
"I am M'bara Kithule, scholar of the Southern Mountains of Africa, serving under King Oba Daran of the High Plateau, allied with the The Unified Sovereign States
I was sent forth with a company of A-ranked adventurers—men and women honed in blade, spell, and courage—to chart the dark forest that gnaws at our border.
All are dead.
Their bones feed the roots around me even as I write. I sit bleeding. My ink is blackened with my own blood. By dawn I will be carrion.
The page blurs. My hands shake. I cannot hold the quill steady, but I must. Someone must read this.
Before I fall, I leave this fragment. Let it reach every nation that yet lives, and above all let it reach the Astral Dominion of Te. I have written to them many times, warning, pleading, and yet no answer has come. They strut with the strongest armies, the keenest towers, the brightest mages in this shattered world. If any are fit to challenge what festers in these woods, it is them.
Let them come. For if they do not, the dark that killed us will crawl from these trees into the heartlands.
And let them not forget: this darkness was born of the Ald War.
---
"There are many wars. But ask any man, in any country, and he will answer the same when you say the War:
The Ald War.
The war that unmade the world.
The war of wars.
It began as all great conflicts do—quietly, with pride and engines and signatures of ink on paper.
It ended with physics itself in chains.
I was a boy when the electrons began to die. First the lights dimmed. Then the planes fell out of the sky like swatted flies. One could hear the thunder of their descent for hours. We thought it was sabotage, or weather. Only later did we understand: the very particles that carried our progress were slipping into stillness.
Machines that ruled cities crumbled into silence. Cars remained, but not the factories that built them. Telephones screamed with static, then hushed forever. Hospitals bled patients by the thousands—not for lack of medicine, but because the drugs themselves no longer worked as intended. Chemistry was rewritten. Biology followed. Each law bent. Each cure mocked. A cut from one blade lingered for weeks, while another healed in hours.
And monsters—yes, we had monsters before the Ald War. The wild things of mountain and swamp, the crawling horrors of the seas. But the War gave them mind. A mutation the survivors call the Wildstrand flickered to life in their blood. Some beasts grew cunning. Others developed strange quirks, unpredictable as dice thrown in the dark. One breathed flame only when frightened. Another mimicked human voices—always the voices of the dead. Entire kingdoms fell not to armies, but to their own forests turned traitor.
And it was not only beasts. Some whispered it touched us, too. I saw men whose shadows moved before their bodies did. A woman who wept fire instead of tears. Whole towns vanished, their inhabitants… changed. I dare not put the rest to page."
---
We scholars are left not with certainty, but with fragments. We can measure mana, but not why it surges where electrons wither. We can map the new chemistries, but not predict them. Every experiment must be repeated ten times, and even then the results mock us.
The Ald War was not merely a conflict of nations. It was a betrayal of the universe itself. We broke the contract of creation. And creation, in turn, broke us.
If these words reach you—heed the forest. Heed the cracks in the laws of life. Do not send more children to die as I have.
The war is not over.
It only—
[the line trails into a smear of ink, followed by drops of darker red across the parchment. In the margin, pressed faintly into the soaked fibers, are fingerprints as if the scribe clutched the page before collapsing. The fragment ends here.]