Morning came slow and gray. The kind of morning where the air felt heavier than usual, where the wind carried more ash than wind, and where Cradle's End seemed even quieter, like it was waiting for something to break.
Quinn rose from his makeshift bedding in a crumbling loft, every joint stiff from another night of restless half-sleep. The old human camp stretched out beneath him, a wreckage of half-standing walls, broken carts, and streets swallowed by dirt and creeping vines. He pressed his palm against the cold stone window frame, looking out across the skeletal remains of a life-long dead.
No smoke from any distant fires. No birds. Just ash and wind.
He grabbed his pack, a patchwork of scavenged straps and torn cloth and made his way down the narrow steps, feet barely making a sound. His instincts had sharpened these last few weeks, heightened by the strange pressure curling in his chest where the Codex now lingered, broken but alive.
He wasn't heading toward the old food stores or the market ruin.
He was heading east, toward the forgotten archive, buried beneath what remained of Cradle's End's town hall.
It was there, several nights ago, that Quinn saw it. A fire that burned through everything in its path except for one thing. A leather-bound book that refused to catch flame, sitting stubbornly atop a pile of ash where the old world's knowledge had been reduced to dust.
The Codex pulsed when he thought about it, threads pressing behind his eyes like something unfinished.
He reached the fractured plaza, rubble crunching beneath his boots, and took the long way around the open street—too exposed. Always too exposed.
Today, he would claim the book properly.
Today, he would find out why it survived.
And maybe, why he did, too.
The entrance to the old archive had caved in years ago, but Quinn had found a narrow gap near the collapsed watchtower. He slid through, ignoring the scrape of stone against his shoulders, ignoring the ghosts of the past whispering from broken walls.
Inside, it was colder. The air tasted like iron and something older was something wrong.
His boots crunched over glass, past burnt shelves and collapsed beams, until he reached it.
At the far end of the chamber, beneath what remained of a blackened rafter, the book sat untouched. Leather-bound, its dark surface cracked but whole, its corners lined with strange symbols that refused to peel or fade.
Every instinct screamed to leave it.
The Codex pulsed, demanding he pick it up.
Quinn approached slowly, crouching down. His fingers hovered above the cover, feeling the faint heat radiating from the strange glyphs stitched into the leather. He'd never seen writing like this in the colony, not in the broken schools, not in the scavenged books they hoarded before everything fell apart.
The Codex shifted in his chest.
Thread Recognition: Incomplete.
He didn't know what it meant not fully but he understood one thing:
This book wasn't supposed to be here.
Or, it wasn't supposed to survive.
And yet, so had he.
His hand closed over the binding.
A faint glow danced beneath his skin, shadows flaring around the edges of his fingertips. The glyphs responded, threads realigning, something unlocking that he couldn't see but could feel pulling on him like a hook buried in his ribs.
Quinn swallowed hard.
There were no answers in the colony.
There were no answers in the ruins.
But here, in this cursed, forgotten book, there might be something worth risking everything for.
Quinn pressed the book against his chest and turned back toward the exit. His boots moved with practiced care, weaving between cracked pillars and broken walls. The hairs on the back of his neck stayed raised. He didn't like lingering there longer than he had to.
Then, the Codex pulsed again, stronger this time.
Proximity Alert: Hostile Threads Detected.
Quinn froze in place, ducking behind a collapsed bookshelf. His ears strained against the silence, filtering past the groans of shifting wood and the steady thump of his heart.
A faint scuffle of boots against stone.
Too clean. Too organized.
Not beasts.
Not scavengers.
Quinn peeked through a narrow gap in the rubble. Three figures moved through the eastern breach dressed in patchwork armor, weapons drawn, one carrying a hooked chain that dragged along the floor.
Raiders.
Pale Sons by the look of their twisted tattoos and the snarling wolf insignias on their ragged cloaks. Quinn clenched his jaw, fingers curling tighter around the book.
He wasn't ready for a direct fight.
Not yet.
Not without understanding the power pressing inside him, not without unlocking the rest of the Codex.
But he wasn't helpless either.
Slowly, he inched back toward the collapsed tunnel, stepping where the rubble was stable, where debris wouldn't give him away. The Codex's pulse guided him like a silent map, showing him every loose rock, every creaking plank to avoid.
Escape first.
Then the answers.
Then power.
He slid through the exit, back into the cold gray morning, shadows trailing faintly from his fingertips.
The Pale Sons wouldn't catch him today.
But one day, Quinn promised himself he would be the one hunting them.
Quinn didn't stop until he reached the northern ridge overlooking Cradle's End. The ruined streets stretched beneath him like a broken spine, smoke from distant fires rising where other survivors scraped by, unaware of what stirred beneath their feet.
He knelt by a fallen monument, its surface worn smooth by years of wind and rain, and carefully opened the book.
Pages turned, strange glyphs pulsing faintly beneath his touch. And mixed among them… names.
Symbols that looked like maps.
Mentions of old places whispered about in half-forgotten bedtime stories. Names his father had once spoken, before the hunger took him: tales of distant paths, of the Chapel of Threads, where men were said to test their fate and rewrite their future.
Quinn's chest tightened. His father had believed in those stories and had planned to leave Cradle's End and seek them out, but he never got the chance.
Now, maybe Quinn would.
Maybe there were answers beyond the ruin.
Maybe this book was more than just an ember that refused to burn.
Quinn closed it gently, feeling the Codex stabilize inside him.
First, he'd escape the Pale Sons.
Then, he'd follow the fragments of his father's forgotten path.
And maybe he'd finally understand why fate hadn't let him die.
The sharp crack of steel against the bone snapped Quinn's head up.
From behind, where the Pale Sons had been closing in through the ruins, came the unmistakable sound of death, quick, brutal, efficient.
Quinn barely had time to turn before a shadow moved through the alley, the blade gleaming in the ash-dim light. A raider's corpse hit the ground with a dull thud, blood spilling across the fractured stone.
A tall figure stepped over it, dark cloak trailing behind, movements calm but lethal.
The stranger's voice was quiet, but it cut through the wind like a blade. "You're making too much noise."
Quinn rose slowly, fingers still clenched around the book. "I wasn't planning on company."
The stranger's sharp eyes landed on the Codex glyphs faintly pulsing along Quinn's wrist, then on the old book nestled against his chest.
"Then consider yourself lucky," the man said, sliding his sword back into its scabbard. "Because you have just found the only man in these parts who know how to survive the bloodpath."
Quinn frowned. "Who are you?"
The stranger turned.
"Arthur."