"No," he said. "Because something is keeping him. Because he was chosen… just as you were."
Rian's stomach twisted, a hot clench that might have been rage or something uglier. He barked a laugh that wasn't humor. "Chosen? That pathetic worm? You think fate picked him?"
"Fate is cruel," the man said, as if reciting a lesson. "It gives gifts to those who don't deserve them. Your brother is about to step into a place where the world itself tests worth. And you―" He lifted his face a fraction. Rian couldn't see the eyes, but he didn't need to; the weight of attention was enough. "―you can follow. You can claim what is yours by nature, not by chance."
Rian's heart thudded faster. His head buzzed in a way that wasn't only drink now. The word nature slid under his skin like a needle, threading him to something he hadn't asked to be tied to but liked the pull of anyway.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
The man opened his free hand slowly, palm up. A glint swung from his sleeve, catching the alley light—a medallion, bronze or something very like it, stamped with a symbol Rian didn't recognize at first glance: a circle cut by three lines like a broken loom, or a sun tangled in wire. It turned and flashed, then stilled.
"You want strength?" the man said. "Dominion? The power to break him, not just with your fists, but with the world itself bending to you?" He let the questions land like blows. "Then step forward. Take the path he took. Claim your trial. Prove to the Colossus that you are not merely his brother, but his master."
Dominion.
Master.
Power.
The words poured over Rian like cheap liquor on flame; everything in him wanted the burn. He saw things when he closed his eyes: Kai on his knees, not because he'd been knocked there, but because he knew he belonged there. People who had looked at Rian like a problem lowering their eyes. Rooms going quiet when he entered because the air understood him.
His hand lifted unbidden, fingers twitching toward the medallion.
He stopped before he touched it. Because this was the part where a leash went onto a collar. Because he didn't do well with collars.
His eyes narrowed. He pulled his hand back slow and deliberate. "And why the fuck would you help me?" he asked. "What do you get?"
The man's smile widened a shade. "Ah. You're not completely blind."
He let the medallion slip back into his coat. The alley seemed to breathe again as the little light went dark against cloth.
"What I get," he said, "is a future. One where men like you understand their role. Where the weak are ruled, and the strong do the ruling." The voice deepened, resonant, smoke curling around Rian's ears, making the words feel like they had weight even after they left the mouth. "Your brother is not your rival. He is your property. And if you want the world to recognize that truth, then follow him. Enter the Colossus. Take what is owed."
Property.
Yes. That was the word. That was the rightness he'd never bothered to speak out loud because it sounded like madness to people with soft hands. The truth he'd built his days on without naming it.
He stepped forward, close enough to smell the man's coat: clean, cold, a hint of old leather. He went shoulder to shoulder instead of taking the offered path like a supplicant, and shoved past hard enough that the man would have to choose between stumbling and flowing. The man flowed. Of course he did.
"I don't need your trinkets," Rian said. He didn't turn his head. He kept moving. "But I'll take the path. And when I find him, I'll prove he was never chosen. I'll prove he was mine to break."
"That is all I ask," the man said behind him, and Rian heard the amusement, the confidence of someone who had set a stone rolling downhill and didn't have to watch to know it would crush what it needed to.
Rian's boots splashed through a shallow puddle that reflected the strip of light between buildings like a cut vein. Something electric ran under his skin, a static building that made the hairs on his arms stand and his teeth feel weird in his mouth. Heat gathered at the base of his skull, a pressure that didn't hurt but wanted to be noticed.
He didn't look back. He didn't notice the alley dimming a fraction. He didn't see the shadows behind him thicken like water left to settle. He didn't hear the metal sign that had been whining in the breeze go silent, as if a hand had steadied it.
He only felt the pull.
It started in his sternum, a tug like a hook behind his breastbone, and it had a direction. He'd felt direction before—the drag of a fight, the gravity that a person with a certain posture made in a room, the way a crowd has a current—but this was cleaner. It was as if the world had a seam and someone had taken his hand and was guiding it toward the rip.
The air in front of him flexed. Light thinned and brightened at once. The street's smell—wet stone, oil, old piss—fell away, replaced by something sharper that tasted like sparks and salt.
He knew the stories. Everyone did, even if they pretended not to. Wonders that had come back as if time had coughed up its teeth. People who went in and came out wrong, or didn't come out at all. He hadn't cared because care was for people who could buy plane tickets and gear and teams. He hadn't cared because caring about things you couldn't touch was for losers.
And now here it was. Not a border fence. Not a TV feed. Here.
He grinned without meaning to. The expression felt like bared teeth, not joy.
The world tore.
Not with a bang, not with a scream. With a neat, terrible elegance, like a seam well cut. The dark ahead of him opened into a slit of color that wasn't any color he could name, and then the slit spread.
Heat kissed his face. The tug became a firm hand between his shoulders.
He stepped.
Something like wind, but not wind, rushed past him in both directions at once. For a second he felt weightless and crushed at the same time. Liquor flipped in his stomach and decided it would stay. Light threaded through him—no, not light, something with the same rude insistence. It crawled along his nerves like ants and then was gone.
He stumbled and caught himself on something that wasn't brick.
The smell hit next. Salt, clean and bright; oil and hot metal; a dry tang like lightning is supposed to have except you can't actually smell lightning, right? He opened his eyes fully because what else was there to do.
He stood on a bronze path.
It hummed under his boots, a low thrum that made his bones feel tuned. In the distance, something enormous loomed, a shadow in the shape of a man standing with his legs braced wide, one arm up, light bleeding around the silhouette. The sky didn't look like a sky should. The water didn't look like water should. He took it all in the way you take in a punch—not with the eyes first, but with the parts of you that know what force feels like.
Rian laughed once, quick and sharp, because of course. Of course his brother would run and the world would answer by making a door. Of course the door would open for Rian too, because doors obey force.
"Well then," he said to the shining path because no one else was there to hear it. "Show me."
He thought of the man in the alley, and it didn't even make him angry that someone else had pointed the way. A map didn't lessen the pleasure of burning a place down.
He rolled his shoulders. They popped, satisfying. He flexed his hands. The knuckles were scabbed in places they always were. The skin of his throat itched where Kai's weak little hands had tried to leave marks. He rubbed the itch away with the back of his wrist and stepped forward onto the bronze properly.
It rang very softly under his weight, not a sound, more a sensation. He liked it. The place felt built, not grown. It felt made by hands, made to test, to judge, to hurt. He respected that in a way he never had for people who pretended softness was virtue.
He took another step.
The path ahead forked, one branch curving low toward something that might have been pillars, the other climbing a fraction toward broken arches. The wrongness in the air was the kind that said rules different from the ones you knew would live here, but rules all the same. He could learn rules. He'd been forced to learn them since he was a kid who didn't understand why adults said please to some kids and not to him.
He thought of Kai again, not as a running figure now, but as a weight at the end of a leash. The image pleased him in the simple way a good meal does after hunger.
Somewhere behind him, a sound like the memory of a cane tap touched the air. He didn't turn. He didn't need to. He knew a watcher when he felt one.
"Property," he said into the warm wind, savoring the way the syllables felt against his teeth. He smiled with no joy. "Let's see if you agree."
And with a grin sharp enough to cut, Rian Holt walked deeper into the First Wonder.