The kid was dying, and Eneji's hands were shaking again.
Not the good kind of shaking. Not the focused tremor that came when Starweave flowed through his fingers like warm honey. This was the useless kind. The kind that made him drop things and fumble with herb pouches while a seven-year-old girl burned up from the inside.
"Breathe, Eneji." Master Thane's voice cut through the dawn gloom of the hut, calm as always. "The fever will break."
Will it? Eneji thought, but didn't say it out loud. Instead, he pressed the cool cloth against the girl's forehead and tried not to think about how her skin felt like touching a fucking furnace. The marshy light filtering through the thatched walls made everything look sickly green, which wasn't helping his nerves.
The child. Mira, her name was Mira, he had to remember that because she wasn't just another patient, she was a person. Mira whimpered and twisted under the thin blanket. Her mother sat in the corner, hands clasped so tight her knuckles had gone white.
"The willow bark tea," Thane said, not looking up from where he was grinding something that smelled like dirt and regret. "Has it cooled enough?"
Eneji tested the clay cup with his finger. Still warm, but not scalding. "Yeah."
"Good. Help her drink."
Easier said than done. Mira's lips were cracked and her eyes kept rolling back, showing too much white. Eneji lifted her head. Christ, she was so light. He tipped the cup carefully. Most of it ran down her chin.
"Fuck," he muttered.
"Language, apprentice."
"Sorry, Master Thane." But he wasn't, not really. Sometimes the situation called for profanity, and a dying kid definitely qualified.
He tried again, slower this time. A few drops made it past her lips. Then a few more. Her throat worked weakly, swallowing.
That's when he felt it. That faint tingle in his fingertips. Starweave. Weak as piss and probably useless, but it was there. The burn scar on his palm, the one shaped like a fucking star that he'd had since he was twelve, started to warm.
Don't think about how you got that scar, he told himself. Not now.
But of course, thinking about not thinking about something was the fastest way to think about it.
Blood on his hands, his mother's blood, and the Covenant enforcer standing over her with that mechanical gauntlet still smoking. Then his father, consumed by that writhing shadow-thing, an Anomaly that left nothing but echoes and regret.
Eneji shook his head hard enough to make his vision blur. Focus. The kid. Mira.
He let the Starweave flow, what little he could manage. It wasn't much. Couldn't heal a papercut, let alone whatever plague was eating this girl alive. But it eased pain. Took the sharp edges off suffering. Made dying a little less terrible.
Which was something, at least.
Mira's breathing evened out. Not better, but not worse either.
"There," Thane said, like he'd been watching the whole time. Which he probably had. The old bastard saw everything. "You see? The Tapestry provides, even in small ways."
"The Tapestry." Eneji set the cup down and flexed his fingers, working out the last of the Starweave tingle. "Right."
"You doubt."
It wasn't a question. Thane had this way of stating things that made arguing feel pointless. But Eneji was nineteen and stupid enough to try anyway.
"I doubt that some cosmic... lattice... gives a shit about one sick kid in a mudhole village." He gestured vaguely at the hut's walls, where jars of dried herbs cast weird shadows in the morning light. "If the Tapestry was so great, why is everything so completely fucked up?"
"Language."
"You know what I mean."
Thane finally looked up from his grinding. His face was weathered as old leather, white hair hanging in strings around his shoulders. The Starweave focus hanging from his neck, just a chunk of cloudy crystal, nothing fancy, caught the light and threw it around the room in lazy patterns.
"The Tapestry is not a god, Eneji. It does not grant wishes or prevent suffering." He went back to his grinding, the pestle making soft scraping sounds against stone. "It simply is. The underlying structure of everything. The threads that hold reality together."
"Then why..."
"Why did the Great Fracture happen? Why are there Anomalies stalking the marshes? Why did your parents die?"
Eneji's jaw clenched. "Don't."
"The Tapestry was wounded, boy. Torn. Some say by the First Light's sacrifice, others claim it was simple hubris. But wounded things heal slowly, and sometimes they heal wrong." Thane's voice was gentle, which somehow made it worse. "Your gift, that faint touch of Starweave, it comes from those torn threads. You're feeling the Tapestry trying to mend itself."
"My gift." Eneji laughed, but there wasn't any humor in it. "You mean this pathetic trickle that barely counts as magic?"
"I mean the potential I see in you. The resonance."
Before Eneji could ask what the hell that meant, the hut's door banged open. Lira stumbled in, all wild chestnut hair and quick movements, her clothes damp with marsh mist.
"Covenant patrol," she said, breathing hard. "Three blocks over and heading this way."
Eneji's blood went cold. "How many?"
"Six. Maybe seven. One of them has those fucking clockwork armor pieces." Lira's hand went to the locket at her throat. Their mother's locket, the only thing they'd managed to keep. For just a second, Eneji could swear the thing flickered with its own light. "They're asking about Anomaly sightings."
"Anomalies," Thane repeated slowly. "Here? In Duskholme?"
"That's what they said." Lira glanced at Mira, still unconscious on the cot. "How's she doing?"
"Alive," Eneji said. Which was about the best he could manage.
"Good. We might need to move her if..."
She never finished the sentence.
A sound cut through the morning air. Low and resonant, like the world's largest church bell had been struck with a hammer made of lightning. It came from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating through the floorboards and the walls and straight into Eneji's bones.
The Starfall Rift.
He'd never heard it make that sound before.
His scar, the burn on his palm, suddenly flared white-hot. Not painful, exactly, but *intense*. Like someone had pressed a live coal against his skin. The Starweave in the air around him shivered, responding to something he couldn't see.
"What the fuck was that?" Lira whispered.
Thane was already moving, faster than Eneji had seen him move in years. He crossed to the single window and peered out through the cloudy glass, toward the village center where the Rift hung in the sky like a wound in reality.
"The Rift is... active." Thane's voice was tight. "More active than it's been since the Great Fracture."
Another pulse. Stronger this time. Eneji felt it in his teeth, in his skull, in the marrow of his bones. His scar throbbed in rhythm with it, and the Starweave around him responded like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Mira stirred on the cot, mumbling something incoherent.
"Eneji," Thane said, still looking out the window. "That girl. Check her fever."
He pressed the back of his hand to Mira's forehead and nearly jerked it away in surprise. Cool. Not cold, but normal. Her breathing was steady, her color better than it had been in days.
"She's... better," he said stupidly.
"The Rift pulse," Thane murmured. "It's affecting the Starweave. Amplifying it."
From somewhere in the distance came the sound of Covenant horns. Harsh brass notes that meant trouble was coming. But all Eneji could focus on was his scar, still burning with that strange not-quite-pain, and the way the air around him seemed to shimmer with possibilities he didn't understand.
What the hell is happening to me?
He didn't know it yet, but everything was about to change. The life he'd built in Duskholme, tending sick kids, grinding herbs, pretending his parents' deaths hadn't completely fucked him up inside, was about to end.
The horns sounded again, closer now.
Time to find out what came next.