I learned the Rule of Sixteen before I learned how to braid my hair.
In Asterwynd or people called Wyne, everyone knows it the way they know prayers and bedtime stories: you're born with a Sigil, you train so you don't break, and you bloom at sixteen like you're supposed to. Simple. Clean. Safe.
That's what they say.
My Sigil sits under my skin like pale ink caught in moonlight. Most people's marks look alive—flames, frost-branches, leaf-veins, star-knots. Mine is two circles, one inside the other, split by a thin crack.
Like an eye sewn shut.
The healers called it Dormant. Rare, but not unheard of. They said I was just late. I would bloom when the time came.
The nobles did not like the word "late." Late meant unpredictable. Late meant inconvenient.
I didn't have a good word for it at all. I only had the feeling that my body was keeping a secret from me.
So I trained.
Veilwork, they called it—controlled practice, small movements of power that were supposed to teach restraint, no reaching too far, no drawing too much, no letting the Gift surge like a wild thing.
Because before sixteen, a Gift is only half-awake.
And a half-awake Gift is dangerous in the stupidest ways.
It can flare when you're tired, It can crack when you're scared, It can misfire when you're angry and leave you with bleeding hands and a teacher's sharp voice saying, again, control.
And there are stories, the ones they pretend aren't real. Stories about Gifts that can be stolen. About children who wake up one day and feel empty, like the moonlight in their skin has been scraped away.
I never asked too many questions about that.
I was afraid someone would answer.
At Sableglass Academy, they kept us busy so we wouldn't think too hard. Drills at dawn. Lessons until our eyes stung. Tests that measured everything except what I actually wanted to know: what am I?
Whenever someone asked what Gift I thought I'd bloom into, I smiled like it didn't matter. I told jokes. I changed the subject. I pretended I didn't care.
But at night, when the halls went quiet, I pressed my fingers to my collarbone and counted my breaths.
Sometimes my Sigil felt warm. Sometimes it felt like nothing at all.
And sometimes—only sometimes—it felt like there was another heartbeat underneath it. Not mine.
Patient.
Waiting.
I told myself it was imagination. Stress. The pressure of an approaching Sixteenth Breath. The way everyone talked about the Rite like it was both a celebration and a funeral.
When you bloom, you don't just get your Gift.
You get your orders.
After the Bloom, you owe Wyne three years of service. The kingdom decides where you go and what you become. Soldier. Healer. Sentinel. Scholar. Hunter. Spy. The list is long, but the message is always the same: you are useful now.
I could live with service. I could live with duty.
What I couldn't live with was the thought that I would step into the Bloomwell and the water would show nothing.
That I would turn sixteen and remain unfinished.
Or worse—finished into something the kingdom didn't want to name.
Because lately, in that thin space between sleep and waking, I kept hearing a sound that didn't belong in my room.
Not footsteps.
Not wind.
More like thread being pulled through cloth—slow, careful, and close enough to make my skin prickle.
As if the world had a seam.
As if something on the other side had fingers.
As if it had been waiting for me to be old enough to pull it open.