Weaver stood in the wreckage like it had arranged itself for him.
Dust hung in the lanternlight in slow layers, turning the aisle into a pale fog. Torn pages drifted down and landed without sound, as if even paper had learned restraint. Books lay open in the debris like wounded birds, spines split, gilded edges dulled by ash-grey powder.
Jonah was on all fours in front of the smashed wall, coughing until his ribs shook. Blood glistened at his mouth and dotted the stone beneath him in dark petals.
The white-robed attendant hovered a step away, hands half-raised, caught between training and panic.
And Kiron—still trapped beneath Cecilus's poised fingers—stared across the aisle with the stiff disbelief of a man who had watched policy become irrelevant.
Weaver's eyes moved once, slow and unhurried, taking them all in.
He didn't speak immediately.
He let the silence settle.
Let the air remember who had last rewritten it.
Strange, Weaver thought.
His mouth twitched.
He felt euphoric. The kind that didn't feel like joy so much as clarity given teeth.
Was this a result of him risking death to win?
He wondered, absurdly, whether this was what old soldiers felt in the days before guns—men with iron in their hands and mud on their boots, standing in lines and knowing the next ten seconds would decide whether they lived or died.
Weaver had survived.
Did they feel the world sharpen like this?
Was that why they wrote songs about war?
Not because it was noble—
Because it was loud enough to drown everything else.
The entire aisle seemed paused around Weaver's entrance.
Even Jonah's coughing came in restrained, careful bursts, like the building was listening and didn't want to interrupt.
Weaver moved.
Slowly.
He walked toward Jonah with the same unhurried pace he'd used to circle him a measured curve turned into a straight line.
Jonah's Echo was gone.
Not fading. Not weakening. Gone, like a hand that had been gripping the room and suddenly released it. The air felt lighter by comparison, but the lightness wasn't comfort.
It was exposure.
Weaver's boots crunched on splinters. A torn page clung to his ankle and then fell away.
He stopped two steps from Jonah.
Close enough that Jonah could feel him without looking.
Weaver's voice came calm, almost conversational.
"Tell me, Jonah." A pause. "What do you believe I am now?"
Jonah's head stayed bowed.
He stared at the blood on the stone as if it might teach him how to breathe again.
Inside his mind, a loop tightened.
Don't look.
Don't look.
Don't look.
The words ran in circles like prayer. Like a child's superstition. Like the only thin thread between him and something he could not afford to understand.
If he looked, the world might change again.
If he looked, he might see something his mind couldn't hold.
If he looked, he might die.
Weaver waited.
The calm was worse than threat.
Jonah's hands trembled against the floor. His ribs hurt when he inhaled; he could feel something grinding wrong inside him. He tried to swallow and tasted copper and ash.
How, Jonah thought. How.
He couldn't make the question into a sentence because sentences required assumptions.
A man in his Echo without one of his own should not move.
A man in his Echo should not strike.
A man in his Echo should not turn air into a weapon and use it to throw a Resonant cultivator through shelves like a child tossing a doll.
And yet it had happened.
Jonah's mind replayed the moment his confidence had snapped: Weaver slowing, his own mistake—charging because he assumed fatigue, because he assumed the other man was human—
—and then that single blow.
Not an Aspect. Not a named technique. Just convergence gathered and released with contemptuous simplicity.
A punch to his stomach.
A punch.
Jonah had never been struck like that.
Not in training, not in contests, not by elders punishing arrogance. It wasn't pain that made him afraid, it was scale. The sense that his ribs had ceased being separate bones and become one shattered structure.
The only reason he was still conscious was fear.
Fear of what would happen if he let his eyes close.
Fear that if he stopped looking down, the world would remember it was allowed to erase him.
Weaver spoke again.
Soft.
Patient.
"What do you see?"
Jonah's throat worked. He breathed in raggedly, and the air scraped. Blood bubbled in his lungs.
He shook his head once, tiny.
Weaver didn't move.
The silence pressed.
Jonah realized, with a sudden cold clarity, that the silence was permission.
He could refuse.
He could disobey.
He could die.
His fingers curled into the stone.
Slowly, like lifting a weight that shouldn't be liftable, Jonah raised his head.
His eyes found Weaver.
And reality went wrong.
Not like illusion. Not like trick.
Like interpretation collapsing.
The information Jonah's eyes delivered did not match what his mind was willing to accept.
Weaver stood there in torn sleeve and dust and lanternlight, tall, long hair falling, face too calm, posture too controlled. And yet Jonah couldn't hold him as a man.
Black threads crawled at the edge of Jonah's vision, like ink in water, obscuring and revealing at once. The lanternlight felt colder. The room felt like it had tilted. Those starburst eyes held their colour—silver, clean, judging—too bright against everything else in Jonah's sight.
Not human eyes.
Not eyes you could bargain with.
Weaver didn't look angry.
He looked…
As if the entire world was a table and Jonah was something spilled on it.
Jonah's voice ripped out of him, raw and panicked.
"You're the devil!"
He retched up more blood immediately, the shout tearing his ribs. His hands slipped. His body folded. He hit the floor and didn't rise.
Weaver watched him collapse with no satisfaction and no pity.
"I see," Weaver said, as if Jonah had answered a question in a lesson.
He didn't sound offended.
He didn't sound pleased.
He sounded like a man correcting a child.
"You are wrong," Weaver said. "I am a god."
He let the claim land.
Then he added, almost gently, as if giving Jonah one last chance to be accurate before unconsciousness stole him:
"God of the Red Swan."
Kiron's breath hitched.
He had been trying to keep his anger alive, trying to keep it hot enough to stand in the same room as what he'd just witnessed.
But anger required certainty.
And the air was full of doubt.
"Blasphemy," Kiron spat, voice hoarse. "You're— you're not—"
Weaver turned his head toward the attendant, ignoring Kiron as if Kiron were a chair making noise.
The attendant stiffened. White robe. Hands trembling. Eyes lowered so far it looked painful.
"You," Weaver said.
The attendant flinched.
"My—my lord?" he managed, and the honorific came out on instinct, the safest sound his mouth could find.
Weaver nodded once, as if accepting the correction of reality.
"Use a Pearl," Weaver said. "Notify your patriarch."
The attendant swallowed hard. "I don't have the authority to directly speak to the patriarch—"
Weaver's gaze didn't change.
The words died in the attendant's throat.
Weaver remembered the broadcast again, clean and fatal:
Not by being chosen. Not by kneeling until the heavens grow bored and point.
A world built on a lie mortals told themselves: that godhood was a reward, that the heavens chose.
Weaver knew the truth.
Mortals who came too close were culled.
Not because they were evil.
Because they were proof.
And proof was intolerable.
Still—lies were tools.
And Paper Fox survived by story.
So Weaver gave them one.
"Tell them," Weaver said, "that a candidate has been marked."
A pause, deliberate, theatrical. The kind of pause that made people remember.
"Tell them," Weaver continued, "Darro of the Paper Fox Sect has been chosen."
Cecilus flinched so hard it almost broke his posture.
Kiron's eyes widened, then narrowed, confusion fighting terror.
The attendant's hands shook.
"Yes, my lord," he whispered.
He turned and ran—not sprinting, not chaotic, but fast enough that terror had finally overridden training.
Kiron forced his voice back into anger, because anger was the only thing that felt like control.
"But—" he started, "no one is chosen before the sixth—before Crown—"
Weaver finally looked at him.
"Wrong," Weaver said.
One word.
Flat.
Unarguable.
Kiron's jaw clenched. His body trembled against Cecilus's control, but he didn't move. He couldn't. The humiliating truth remained: Cecilus's fingers were not even touching his throat.
Cecilus didn't need contact to kill him.
He only needed permission.
Weaver's voice stayed calm.
"Which is why," he continued, "you will not repeat this mistake again."
Kiron swallowed. His anger faltered. Something like fear took its place.
Cecilus's eyes flicked toward Weaver, quick, uncertain.
"My lord," Cecilus said quietly, the words careful, "what would you have me do with him?"
Weaver considered.
Not long. Not theatrically.
Just a pause where his mind weighed the costs and benefits like a man selecting tools.
He could get Cecilus to kill Kiron.
It would be simple. It would be clean.
It would also be evidence.
The death of two cultivators would echo through Paper Fox like a bell.
And Weaver was not here to ring bells yet.
He had come for knowledge.
For leverage.
For leaving alive.
Weaver's gaze dropped to Kiron.
Then away.
"Leave him," Weaver said.
Cecilus's breath loosened, not relief exactly.
"Thank you," Cecilus said, too quietly for anyone else.
Weaver turned as if to leave.
Cecilus followed.
And that was when Kiron made his last mistake.
He lunged at Cecilus with blistering speed, a Paper Fox strike disguised as desperate compliance. His hand came in low and familiar, the same false-friendly touch that ended lives before fear could arrive.
Cecilus didn't have time.
His fingers were still poised. His mind was still processing permission.
Weaver's body moved before his thoughts could finish forming.
An arm snapped out—straight, fast, and shaped like a blade.
There was no flourish.
Just function.
Kiron's hand hit the floor.
Kiron hit one knee, clutching the stump, eyes blown wide in shock, his mouth opening to scream and producing only a wet gasp.
Weaver stood between him and Cecilus without having appeared to move.
Cecilus stared at the severed hand, then at Weaver.
Awe crept into his expression like a leak.
Not worship.
Not love.
The sudden realization of distance.
Weaver's voice was mild, almost reproachful.
"Cecilus," he said, "you really must be more careful."
Cecilus bowed his head, too fast.
"Yes, my lord."
Weaver didn't look at Kiron again.
He spoke to Cecilus as if assigning a chore.
"Go," Weaver said. "Find the compendium. The cultivation book from earlier."
Cecilus hesitated, just a breath, then nodded and moved, stepping over torn pages and splintered wood like he'd been trained to walk through lies.
Weaver crouched beside Kiron.
Kiron recoiled, dragging himself backward on one arm, blood slick on stone.
Weaver's face was calm.
His eyes were not.
"Kiron," Weaver said.
Kiron flinched at being named.
Weaver drew the coin out again.
Cold. Worn. Swan-stamp half-erased by years of touch.
He tilted it so lanternlight caught its edge.
"Heads," Weaver said, "or tails."
Kiron's throat worked.
He looked at his severed hand.
Then at Weaver's face.
"…Tails," Kiron whispered.
Weaver flicked the coin.
It rose.
Spun.
A thin ring of metal sound in the dust.
It struck the stone and rolled in a small circle as if considering whether it wanted to be fate.
Then it settled.
Tails.
Weaver stared at it for a beat.
Then he closed his fingers over it and put it away.
Kiron's breath came out in a ragged rush, like he'd been drowning and someone had finally decided he was allowed to surface.
Weaver rose.
He did not offer mercy as a speech.
He offered it as an absence of further action.
Cecilus returned with the compendium cradled in both hands as if it were a relic. The untitled ivory hardback gleamed faintly under dust, gold inlay catching lanternlight like trapped dawn.
He held it out.
Weaver took it.
For a moment, his fingers lingered on the cover.
No title. No author. No claim.
Just weight.
Just knowledge.
Just the kind of thing sects murdered for and called it order.
Weaver turned toward the exit.
Cecilus followed at his shoulder, quiet, obedient, still trying to keep his breathing from sounding like fear.
Behind them, Jonah lay unconscious in blood and dust, and Kiron knelt with one hand missing, staring at the empty air where his certainty used to be.
Weaver didn't look back.
He didn't need to.
The scholarium had already remembered him.
And in this world, being remembered was the first step toward being owned.
So, he left before the memory could harden into chains.