"They think I'm a ghost in this house. A stain. A thread that doesn't belong.But what if I'm the first to notice the seams?"
The thought lingered, like dust in the back of his throat.
Darian lay still in his narrow cot beneath the sloped ceiling of the servants' tower. Thin moonlight pressed through the frostbitten glass of the window above him. Outside, the wind clawed at the shutters like a beggar too long denied.
He hadn't slept.
Not truly.
His body had shut down for an hour or two, but the mind—his mind—had remained lit, humming quietly in the dark, repeating the image over and over again: the thread. The shimmer. The silence that wasn't.
And that voice inside.Look closely. Threads are patient.
He didn't know if it had been in the book. Or the thread itself. Or just a dream folded into memory.
He sat up slowly, the blanket falling from his shoulders like dry leaves. The cold clung to his skin, sharp and immediate. But even that physical discomfort felt distant—as though his senses were slightly misaligned, like poorly sewn seams pulling in opposite directions.
Something had changed.
He could feel it.
He dressed quietly, pulling his collar tight and wrapping his scarf twice around his neck. He checked his fingers again—half-expecting to still see the faint silver sheen.
Nothing.
But the sensation hadn't left.
He glanced at the corner of the room where a mirror once hung, long since shattered. For a moment, he imagined a thread swaying there too—just beyond vision, just waiting to be seen.
He descended the servant's stairwell, narrow and spiraling, until he reached the main floor. A few early workers passed by without words. One of the cooks grunted in vague acknowledgement. The halls smelled of wood smoke, oil, and old metal.
Darian headed not toward the great kitchen, nor the stables, but deeper into the east wing—the part of the estate that remained half-abandoned, even in the daylight.
He didn't plan to return to the room. Not yet.
But he needed… something. A confirmation. A sign.
He stepped into the narrow library annex, where old records were kept. Shelves of curling documents, broken tomes, half-eaten maps. This part of the house was rarely catalogued. Even the scribes avoided it.
He found the registry ledgers—bound volumes of all births and deaths of noble lineage connected to House Raventhal.
He flipped through the pages.
Line after line of names written in calligraphy sharper than knives. He searched not for his own, but for hers.
His mother.
There. Seren Merelith.
Born of one of the Eight Great Houses.
Marked as married to Lord Andros Raventhal—though there were no celebration records, no dowry entries. Just a thin black line under her name:
"Deceased. Circumstances unrecorded."
No date. No cause.
Darian stared at the ink until it blurred.
A noble House. One of the Eight. And yet… nothing remained of her but silence.
Even in the records, she was a shadow.
He turned the page, and his breath caught.
At the bottom corner, almost faded into the texture of the paper, someone had scribbled a symbol.
A spiral of thread around a black needle.
His hand reached out, but he didn't touch it.
Something in him tightened again. Like before. Like with the thread.
A pressure. A pause.
He let the book close.
He left the annex in silence, but didn't head back toward his cot.
His feet moved without plan. Instinct, again. Or something even quieter.
He wandered toward the back gardens—the overgrown ones. No one maintained them anymore. Thornbushes reigned where roses once bloomed. The statues were pockmarked and moss-covered. A fountain dribbled a thin stream of brown water.
There, in the far corner, sat an old caretaker's shed.
He had not been here in years.
He didn't know why he entered. The door creaked on half-broken hinges. Inside: shelves of tools, rusted shears, coils of wire, lengths of forgotten rope.
And on the workbench, beneath a film of dust—
—a pair of small scissors, polished silver, too delicate for garden work.
They were resting on a folded cloth.
His breath slowed.
He reached down.
Beneath the cloth: a needle.
Black. Unblemished. Unnaturally smooth.
Not rusted. Not dulled by time.
He shouldn't have taken it.
He took it anyway.
The moment his fingers touched it, a whisper curled at the back of his skull—not words, not sound, just shape.
A pull.
Not toward danger.
Toward understanding.
He slid it into the inner lining of his coat.
Back inside the manor, Darian passed by one of his half-brothers—Merrin. A year older, flanked by two attendants, laughing at something whispered in his ear.
He saw Darian and stopped.
"Still playing errand boy for ghosts?" Merrin smirked, voice sharp like broken glass.
Darian didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
For the first time in his life, he didn't flinch.
Merrin's smile twitched. "Watch yourself, bastard."
Then he moved on.
That evening, Darian returned to the servants' tower, and for the first time in a long while, he lit the candle himself.
He sat at his desk—small, warped, barely able to hold his weight—and unfolded a scrap of parchment.
He didn't know what he meant to write.
But he did know he couldn't ignore it anymore.
He drew the symbol.
The spiral thread. The black needle.
And as he finished the final curve…
…the candle flickered.
No wind. No breath. Just movement.
He looked up.
And there, just above the desk——just for a second——a thread.
Thin. Pale. Waiting.
"I don't know what I saw.I don't know what this means.But the seams are real.And they're starting to pull."