Chapter 1: The Name in the Dark
The sun hadn't risen in ten years.
In the Obsidian Wastes, dawn was a rumor—a story slaves told to survive the dark. Kael Draven didn't believe in stories. He believed in pain, hunger, and the sound of chains grinding against bone. He also believed, irrefutably, in the weight of the hammer in his hand. It was the only honest thing in the world.
The air in Mine Shaft 17 was a choking cocktail of sulfur and iron dust. It wasn't the air that killed you here; it was the sheer, crushing monotony of laboring in a tomb carved from the earth's dead heart.
Kael was seventeen, but his body was etched with the lines of fifty years of despair. He was tall, gaunt, and moved with a deadly economy of motion, conserving every calorie. His eyes—a startling, unusual shade of grey, like cooled ash—were not the eyes of a boy, but of an old, wounded predator. They held a quiet, constant fury, a banked flame that refused the oblivion of despair.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
He swung the hammer. Obsidian shrieked against iron.
A guard named Zek, a hulking man whose Threadweaving skill was limited to brute-force Aetheric strengthening of his fists, leaned against the tunnel entrance, idly cracking a whip against the rock.
"Draven," Zek's voice was a gravelly sneer. "Faster. That ore vein won't bleed itself out, you useless sack of skin."
Kael ignored him. He'd learned long ago that reacting only gave the overseers fuel. He didn't swing faster, but he struck harder, aiming a perfect blow that leveraged his entire body weight into the shaft of the tool.
The rock fractured, not shattered. The Obsidian Wastes were named for the endless, razor-sharp veins of pure black rock, but beneath the surface lay a hidden, terrible prize: Aetherium. Not the benign Aetherium crystals used for simple light and heat, but a dense, unstable ore that vibrated with raw creation energy—the perfect conduit for a powerful Threadweaver. It was why the slaver regime, the Crimson Hand, tolerated the expense of this deep mine.
Crrkk.
The fracture spread. Kael pulled back the hammer.
"Did you hear me, beast?" Zek raised the whip, the leather thong already humming with a faint, crimson light—the energy of a low-level Thread Initiate, pulling a meager strand of Aether to empower the blow.
Kael saw it. He always saw it.
He didn't just see the crimson glow. He saw the Aether Thread itself: a thin, nearly invisible filament of shimmering white light, pulled from the air and wrapped tautly around the whip's tip. To others, it was just power. To Kael, it was geometry.
The whip cracked.
Snap!
Kael flinched, but not from the pain. The blow wasn't aimed at him, but at an old, frail slave next to him named Roric, who had stumbled. Roric cried out, a sound Kael had heard a thousand times.
Pain. Survival. That is the Thread.
A terrible, familiar feeling bloomed in Kael's chest—a cold, sickening sensation, like his bones were being scoured clean. It was the price of his cursed clarity.
He felt the essence of Zek's power. The aggressive, simple surge of Aether that translated directly to force and pain. It was a chaotic, brutish pattern on the Loom.
And then, Kael's unique power, the Echo of the Void, activated.
It wasn't a choice; it was a devastating reflex. A fragment of his own, already fractured soul, stretched out and copied Zek's action.
The cost was instant and searing.
Kael gasped, clutching his chest. He felt an invisible, ice-cold tendril burrow into his ribs and pluck a single, minute strand of his own, personal Aether Thread—a thread that held a piece of his endurance, perhaps a sliver of his memory—and unmake it, just as the Fallen God unmade the Sun. The Void-fracture in his soul consumed the fragment as payment.
But in its place, he gained the knowledge. He knew the pattern Zek had woven. He knew how to channel simple force-enhancement. It was useless to him without an external Aether source, but the knowledge, the Echo, was there.
Zek, completely oblivious, laughed. "That's how you move, old man! Now get back—"
Suddenly, the air pressure dropped. A silence fell that was deeper than the mine, a vacuum that sucked the sound out of the vast, hollow chamber.
The wall Kael had struck with his hammer began to whisper.
Not in the common tongue, but in a language of crystalline clicks and deep, subsonic resonance. The obsidian rock, which had absorbed the raw power of the millennia of the Eclipse, was reacting to Kael's unique, Void-marked Aether.
Kael Draven didn't believe in stories. But when the mine walls began to whisper his name, he knew the darkness had finally come for him.
The whispers focused, sharp and terrifyingly clear, directly into his mind.
...Kael. The Unmade Thread. You have waited...
Zek frowned. "What's that noise? Draven, what did you hit?"
Before Kael could formulate a denial, the fracture he had created with the hammer widened. A brilliant, impossible color—a deep, shimmering emerald—poured out. It was not light; it was an emanation of pure, solidified Law. It illuminated the shaft, forcing all the slaves to shield their eyes.
It was a piece of the First Sun. A Law of Creation.
It was an Eclipsed Shard.
The Shard was no bigger than Kael's fist, pulsating with a terrifying, rhythmic beat. Kael recognized the deep, unyielding green from the fragments of creation he saw in the Aether, but this was amplified a million-fold. This Shard felt like Time itself: slow, relentless, and unforgiving.
As the raw, unadulterated divine essence flooded the chamber, Zek, the Thread Initiate, screamed. His crude Aether Threads, which had been loosely woven around his body, were instantly overloaded and torn apart. The Shard's Law of Time imposed itself on him, and Zek aged not years, but centuries, in the space of a single breath. His crimson-lit whip turned to dust, his skin flaked away like dry clay, and he collapsed, a husk of desiccated bone and armor. He was reduced to the dust of a forgotten age.
The other slaves, Thread Initiates or less, cowered, their simple Aether Threads instinctively recoiling from the divine shockwave.
Kael did not recoil. The Void-fracture in his own soul did something else.
It stabilized.
The immense, overwhelming energy of the Shard—the very energy that annihilated Zek—was drawn to the negative space of the Void in Kael's soul.
He felt not pain, but an awful, profound Recognition.
The Shard's essence—the Law of Time—did not consume him. It rushed toward him, seeking the home of the unmade. It hammered against his chest, right where the Echo of the Void had just consumed a fragment of his soul.
Accept the Law. Accept the Echo. Accept the Truth.
Kael's grey eyes widened, filled with the devastating emerald light. He reached out a trembling hand, not out of greed, but out of a raw, primal need to stop the terror.
His fingers closed around the Eclipsed Shard.
The Obsidian Wastes mine exploded, not in fire, but in a blast of pure, crystalline Silence.
The Law Imprinted
Kael fell back, his entire being alight with excruciating agony. His Aether Thread was not severed; it was rewoven.
He should have died the moment he touched it.
Instead, the Shard embedded itself, not in his flesh, but in the Void-fracture of his soul, a terrible, demanding passenger.
When Kael finally opened his eyes, the emerald light had faded. He stood in the wreckage, surrounded by stunned, terrified slaves. The air was still, heavy with the scent of unmade matter.
He raised his hand. It looked normal, but it felt monstrously wrong.
Then, he looked at Roric, the old slave Zek had whipped. Roric's wound, a deep laceration across his back, was still bleeding.
Kael focused, not with his eyes, but with the terrifying, imprinted knowledge of the Law of Time. He did not use his own Aether; he was channeling the endless reservoir of the Shard.
He stretched out his hand towards Roric's wound and performed his first, terrifying act of true Threadweaving.
He didn't heal. He didn't stitch.
He simply pulled the Aether Thread that defined the wound's existence and forced it backward along the Loom.
Roric gasped. The laceration visibly retreated, the torn skin un-tearing, the blood flowing backward into the tissue, until his back was smooth, unblemished skin again.
Kael had not mastered healing. He had mastered Regression.
But the price was paid instantly. The Eclipsed Shard in his soul pulsed. Kael felt a profound exhaustion, an ancient weariness. The power of the Shard was his to command, but it was anchored to the Void-fracture, and every use, however minor, consumed a tiny, irreplaceable piece of his own life-force.
He was not blessed; he was cursed to survive.
The slave-master Zek was dust, the tunnel was a ruin, and Kael Draven, the Ashborn Slave, was now a carrier of the Law of Time, bound to a divine fragment of the Sun.
His destiny—the one foretold by the Shard—had begun.