The chamber was a graveyard of bad repairs.
Mismatched masonry was layered over crumbling foundations, and the walls were scarred with carvings that had been etched over and over until the original symbols were nothing more than a blurred memory. It wasn't neglect that had ruined this place; it was desperation. In the center of the room, the summoning circle pulsed with an erratic, sickly light, its runes strained as if the very floor was trying to reject the magic being forced through it.
Aren stepped into the light last.
The air was heavy and tasted of ozone and old copper—the sharp, bitter tang of a ritual pushed far past its breaking point. He could feel it in the back of his throat with every breath.
Where eight pedestals had once stood, only six figures remained. The two empty spots were dark, the stone there blackened and cracked. Those stones hadn't been smashed; they had simply burned out, hollowed by the sheer weight of what they were asked to carry. It was a quiet kind of failure, the sort that people overlook until it's too late.
Maelor stood at the heart of it all.
His ceremonial robes were heavy with gold thread and centuries of tradition, but they seemed to be swallowing him whole. He kept his hands clasped tight in front of him, though he couldn't quite hide the tremor in his fingers. He wouldn't look at Aren at first. His eyes were fixed on the broken pedestals, his lips moving in a silent, frantic prayer—or perhaps an apology.
When he finally looked up, the fear in his eyes was naked.
Then, the light surged.
It didn't feel like a flash of brightness; it felt like a physical intrusion, a door in the back of Aren's mind being kicked open without his consent. The world didn't slow down, but his mind seemed to expand to fill the gaps.
Suddenly, he saw the threads. He didn't see numbers or data, but he felt the cost of everything in the room. He understood that Maelor wasn't a villain, just a man who had let his terror drive him to fracture the world. He saw the other figures in the circle not as heroes, but as weights being balanced on a scale that was about to snap.
And then there was himself. He didn't fit the scale. He was the gravity that would make it collapse.
"The ritual..." Maelor started, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and tried again, reaching for his lost dignity. "The ritual has accepted you."
The way he hesitated told Aren everything he needed to know.
They ushered him out with a cold, brisk efficiency. There were no cheers for him, no symbolic gestures or welcoming songs. For the others, there had been a spectacle. For Aren, there was only a sense of being an inconvenient mistake.
He was led into a side hall lined with ancient scrolls and dim crystal slates. At the end of the room sat a woman who didn't need a crown to look like she owned the city.
Serath didn't bother standing up. She looked at Aren the way a carpenter looks at a piece of wood with a hidden rot.
"Nothing," she said, her voice flat. "No spark. No trace of the gift. He doesn't even trigger the sensors."
She didn't sound angry, just bored. To her, he was a tool that had come out of the box broken.
"He's useless to us," she added.
"Then why am I here?" Aren asked.
He didn't flinch. For a second, her mask slipped, and she looked at him with something that wasn't quite surprise, but a sharp, new curiosity. She didn't give him an answer.
The shift happened when he saw her.
In the corner of the room, half-hidden by the long shadows of the library, stood a girl. She was so still, so easy to overlook, that the others seemed to walk right past her without seeing her at all. Usually, Aren's new, unwanted sense of "knowing" would have told him exactly who she was and what she cost, but when he looked at her, his mind went quiet.
The threads of consequence simply stopped at her feet.
"Who is she?" Aren asked.
Serath glanced over, frowning. "A leftover," she said dismissively. "A ghost from a previous cycle that didn't quite fade away. Forget her."
But the girl was looking at him. It wasn't a look of destiny or some grand fate; it was the look of two people who had both been discarded by the same machine.
The end came all at once.
The runes on the floor didn't just fade—they screamed. The stone floor buckled as centuries of bottled-up pressure finally tore through the containment lines. Jagged pillars of white light shot toward the ceiling, and the sound of the world tearing apart drowned out the late-arriving alarms.
Maelor was shouting, but his voice was lost in the roar.
Aren't mind didn't give him a plan; it gave him a vision of the end. He saw exactly how the failsafes would trigger. He saw that the "heroes" would be protected by the temple's magic, but the girl in the shadows would be erased—not out of malice, but because the system didn't recognize she was there.
He didn't think. He just moved.
"Run," he told her, his voice low and sharp.
She didn't hesitate. She took his hand.
They bolted as the chamber began to implode, the very walls turning to dust behind them. As they reached the doors, Aren saw Maelor watching them go. The old man looked heartbroken, but he didn't try to stop them. He just turned back to the fire.
The night air was cold and smelled of distant wood-smoke.
They stopped only when the temple was a silhouette against the orange glow of the fire. The city beyond was a mess of flickering wards and panicked bells. Aren's lungs felt like they were on fire, and his head throbbed with the weight of everything he could now see.
The girl watched him, her expression calm despite the chaos behind them.
"You saw the way out before it even happened," she said. It wasn't a question; she just sounded relieved that someone else finally understood.
Aren nodded slowly. "I can't unsee it now."
She gave him a small, weary smile. "I'm Lyra."
Behind them, the temple continued to burn. Ahead of them was a world that had been broken long before they were born, built on choices they never got to make.
The weight of his new sight pressed down on him again. It wasn't a gift of power, and it wasn't a map to a happy ending. It was a burden. He had been chosen to see the strings—and now, he had to decide which ones to cut.