The city of Calvesset woke like a cathedral remembering its hymn.
No torches, no wires, no clacking generators—only the soft, steady breath of Corvect. Lantern-crystals pulsed along the avenues in patient rhythm, as if the streets themselves had heartbeats. Thin filigrees of etched silver traced doorframes and archways, forming the circuits that were powered from embedded Cores and exhaled light. Dawn came as a low blue glow that rolled from district to district, a tide through stone.
Kaelen stood barefoot on the chalked circle behind Master Iri's workshop, palms open, breathing slow. The circle was scored with a dozen concentric rings and crossing lines—meant for measuring distance and habit, not for summoning. He didn't believe in symbols to bring him power. Bodies were symbols enough.
He drew in air, counted three, and stepped. Weight to the ball of the foot, the knee soft, the hip loose. Elbow tucked, shoulder dropped. He drove a palm heel that stopped an inch short of the training post.
The post shivered anyway.
Not from force—his strike wasn't about force—but from the precise timing of breath and muscle and intent. The shockwave rippled out, visible only in the dust it lifted. The chalk at the base trembled into a crescent.
Good, he thought. Again.
He shifted, turned his back to the post, and snapped a heel that didn't touch wood at all. The air cracked like an invisible sling was loosed, and a dent the size of a coin appeared in the post's far side. He rolled out of the kick with a grin, shaking out his foot.
"Show-off," a voice said.
Kaelen looked up to see Liora perched on the workshop stairs, one knee hugged to her chest, her pack of trinkets leaning against the rail. She was always carrying a market on her back—glittering scraps of core-etched wire, inked maps on thin bark, a prism or three for bargaining. Her hair was bound in a red scarf; her eyes were already cataloguing his mood.
"It's not showing off if no one's here to see it," Kaelen said, then winced. "Except you."
"Except me," she agreed, amused. "Your form's cleaner. Less… angry."
"I was never angry."
"You were always angry," she said gently. "You just hid it in the math."
He chuckled, wiped sweat onto his forearm, then drew a breath that was supposed to be steady and wasn't. The world slipped. Only for a heartbeat—like someone pulled a veil across his vision and let him glimpse the threads behind it. Lines. Not lines, exactly. Paths. The way the post wanted to fall if nudged, the way the stair would creak if Liora shifted her weight, the way a moth's wing beat would intersect the dust he'd kicked up.
Then it was gone, startling him with its cruelty. The backlash came as a needle of pain behind the right eye.
He pressed fingers to his temple.
"Again?" Liora asked, already halfway down the steps.
"It's nothing." He forced a smile. "Maybe I need more water."
"You always need more water," she said, handing him a canteen anyway. "It's the Selection, Kael. Everyone's nerves are singing."
He looked past the courtyard wall toward the city proper. Banners had gone up in the night—deep violet cloth threaded with silver. The old symbol of the First Pulse was stitched at each corner: a ring broken by a single dot. Vendors were dragging handcarts to the central terraces; children were already trying to outrun the priests setting chalk boundaries around the Great Plaza. And all morning, the sky over Calvesset had worn a faint, wrong twilight—as if the sun had misread its instructions.
"The thousandth year," Kaelen said, very quietly.
"And the last day before some poor fool wins the eye lottery," Liora said. "May it be someone who actually wants it."
Kaelen flexed his fingers. The ghost of the threads still hummed under his skin, as if they'd rubbed against him on the way past. He didn't know how to talk about that. He didn't know how to talk about the dreams, either—the ones where the world was a tapestry and his hands were clumsy knives.
Master Iri slid the back door open with a clack. He was small and spare, all sinew and patience, a brace of engraving tools folded into a leather wrap on his belt. "If you two are done savaging my training post," he said, "there's a shipment to sort. And then the Council wants our circuits checked along the southern balconies. Festival strain. They're worried we'll brown out."
"Brown out?" Liora laughed. "What do you call a light that isn't made of fire?"
"Dim," Iri said dryly. "We call it dim."
Kaelen bowed, grabbed his shirt, and slipped it over his head. The chalk circle smudged under his heel as he crossed it. He always felt a little guilty leaving it imperfect, as if he owed the lines their clean geometry. As if lines could be offended.
They spent the next hour sorting the shipment into labeled trays—raw shards for lanterns, polished slivers for fine work, a handful of dangerous pulsing cores that needed dampening before use. Kaelen could feel each one like a faint tone in the chest, the way a singer's pitch hums the bones.
"Easy," Iri said when Kaelen's fingers danced a fraction too close to a hot shard. "Listen first. Touch second."
"I am listening."
"Then you're not wanting to hear."
Kaelen flushed. "Sorry."
Iri paused, watching him in that unsettling way that masters do when they're deciding whether to say something dangerous. "You've been… different," he said at last. "Your rhythm's changed. Your breath falls on off-beats. Your eyes—"
"Are tired," Kaelen said quickly. "Festival work. Late repairs."
Iri's mouth twitched. "You were a child when the last Selection passed. You don't remember the way the city sounded. You will, by nightfall."
Liora made a face. "You and your ominous phrasing. By nightfall, what? The sky will break? The priests will declare a beer shortage? I'll run out of good rumors?"
"The city will choose quiet," Iri said. "For a moment. All at once. Even the air will listen."
He said it like he was remembering the way silence could be a stranger.
By midday the terraces were bright with color. Processions wound through the colonnades, each guild in its own shade. The healers wore moss green and carried crystal bowls in which tiny cores hummed like sleeping bees; the smiths wore aprons polished by heat; the priests of the Pillar Realms walked in white with their hands pressed to their hearts, fingers splayed—the sign for balance. At each crossroads, children had drawn new circles in chalk to play selection-games with bottle caps and promises. Liora traded gossip for candied persimmon and passed Kaelen two pieces without looking at him.
"You'll come tonight?" she asked.
"To the Plaza?" He hesitated. "Crowds aren't my favorite thing."
"They're not crowds tonight. They're a city being the closest thing it knows to a single person."
"That's worse," he said, but he smiled.
They finished the balcony checks just as the sun touched the rim of the western towers and stalled. It didn't set so much as hang, snagged on some invisible tooth. Shadows lengthened and refused to move.
"The first bell," Iri murmured. His eyes had gone distant. "Go on, then. I'll meet you by the eastern steps."
Kaelen and Liora joined the tide of bodies flowing toward the Plaza. The Great Plaza of Calvesset was not a single open space but a cascade of linked terraces that formed a bowl around a central dais. High above, the largest known natural Core hung suspended in a ring of stone fingers—a star captured and persuaded to pulse slowly instead of exploding. The ring's filigree glowed faint silver. The Core answered with rhythm.
The priests fanned out along the terraces, drawing circles at measured intervals and directing people to stand in them. Children whispered rules to one another: Don't step out when the silence comes. Don't look away when the light changes. Don't speak a name until the name speaks you.
"What if it doesn't choose anyone?" someone asked behind Kaelen.
"It always chooses," someone else whispered. "Even when it shouldn't."
Kaelen found himself between Liora and a man whose forearms were webbed with old burns. The man nodded once, as if Kaelen had said something brave. He hadn't.
The second bell sounded—not a bell, exactly, but a tone from the suspended Core that sank into the stones. The conversations frayed and fell. The Plaza exhaled. Somewhere, a child giggled and was shushed. The sky went the wrong color, losing its blue and taking on a chalky dark that wasn't cloud. A hush rolled out from the dais, and when it reached Kaelen, he understood what Iri had meant.
The city chose quiet.
It was not the absence of sound. It was the presence of listening. As if everything that could hear had agreed to do it at the same time.
The priests lifted their hands. The Core flared once and then dimmed, settling into a heartbeat-thrum. Each thrum tugged at the lines in Kaelen's head—the threads he'd glimpsed all morning. Only now they didn't hide behind things. They poured through them. The terrace steps had a curve in their intention. The banners wanted to drift left. Liora's pulse wanted to quicken and then steady. A gnat drifting between lanterns carried its own tiny insistence. The world was a network of almosts.
Kaelen's mouth went dry. He took Liora's hand without thinking.
"You're all right," she whispered.
He wasn't sure. His right eye burned like someone had pressed a heated coin to the socket. He blinked, and the Plaza split. Not physically. In the heart. As if two versions of it had been laid one on top the other: one that was solid and one that was made of the possibilities that made the solid.
On the dais, a figure stepped out of the shadow of the priests.
It wasn't robed. It wasn't armored. It was simply there, a human shape rendered in white so absolute that it looked like blankness given posture. Its eyes were the only dark on it, glossy and endless. It didn't glow; the air around it retreated. Not from fear—air had no fear—but because presence has weight. Because some things erase by existiing.
It seemed like no one else could see that white figure except kaelen. Kaelen wanted to ask Liora about the figure but he couldn't not because he was scared but because the creature's presence was too strong.
The figure looked across the terraces, as if searching the lanes of a library shelf. Its gaze moved like a blade through water. It was not hurried. Why would it be? Time bent its neck for this thing.
When its eyes passed over Kaelen, the threads in the world convulsed.
They tightened into a single rope and lashed through him. He felt the cut with a whole self. Not pain. But change. His breath forgot how to be breath and became a sound he didn't recognize as his own. He was aware of the coldness of the stone under his feet, aware of sweat running down his back, aware of Liora saying his name as if calling him up from a well.
The white figure tilted its head a fraction. The tiniest acknowledgment.
Choice, Kaelen thought without knowing why he thought it.
The Core above the Plaza hammered a note that was also light. The priests spoke in unison, words old enough to have worn grooves into the air: "By law older than memory and memory older than law, the Selection begins."
The white figure did not raise its hands. It did not speak. It looked at the ring of stone fingers and then at the crowd, and the Core obeyed whatever it hadn't said. The heartbeat-thrum narrowed to a thin, insistent string. It plucked itself across the terraces—one circle after another, one person in each ring feeling a tug at the bone and then letting go.
Kaelen felt nothing. And then everything.
The string didn't tug him. It threaded him. It drew through his right eye and into his mind and out the other side, stitching him to a point he could not see. He was not pulled toward the dais. The dais moved toward him. The whole Plaza bent imperceptibly and then—like a piece of paper eased into a new fold—aligned along a crease with him at its center.
His knees went soft. He caught himself before he made a spectacle of it, and then the pain hit.
White knives through red rooms. A flock of razors beating their wings inside his skull. He felt the shape of lies in the air and hated them for existing, and then hated himself for hating a shape. He tasted metal. He heard the sound a thought makes when it snaps.
"Kael." Liora's voice. "Kaelen, look at me."
He tried, and saw too much. He saw the sorrow behind her joke, the worry she held for strangers so it wouldn't drown in her. He saw the hairline fracture in her left incisor from a childhood fall. He saw the path her life wanted to take if something didn't grab it by the throat tonight.
He tore his gaze away because love deserves privacy, even from eyes that could honor it.
On the dais, the white figure watched him. Not with hunger, not with pity. With the attention a sculptor gives marble. With the patience of a winter.
A voice that was not a voice moved through the Plaza. It did not come from the figure. It came from everywhere that had ever been allowed to be. It was not language and yet it spoke in the first grammar, the one that tells matter to try.
"You are seen."
Kaelen's hands shook. He did not bow. He could not move.
"You are chosen."
The word struck him lightly, like a tap on the sternum, and cracked something anyway. He felt the crack and understood, with a clarity that made him want to be sick, how many other things were cracks pretending to be whole. It would be so easy, a part of him thought with a terror that felt like temptation, to peel.
To peel the lie from the truth. To peel gravity from the step and make it a kindness instead of a law. To peel the memory of a wound from a man and let him walk unburdened. To peel command from a tyrant's voice and make it air.
The knives in his eye turned. He steadied his breath against the urge to scream.
"Kaelen," Liora whispered, and the sound laced him to the world again.
The Plaza didn't cheer. No one was foolish enough to clap while standing inside a god's attention. But the air… relaxed. The priests bowed as one. The white figure inclined its head, the slightest movement, and the Core's thrum widened again into a heartbeat. The sky remembered to have a sun and let it slide another finger's width toward the towers.
Kaelen realized he was still holding Liora's hand and that he would break her fingers if he kept it up. He loosened, flexed his palm, and bit the inside of his cheek until the taste of blood grounded him.
"Is it you?" she asked, not with wonder, but with a kind of fierce refusal to be impressed.
He worked his mouth. "I think the city just answered that for us."
"Then we get you out of here before someone decides they own you," she said, and there it was—the Liora he trusted—the one who packed urgency into every practical sentence.
"Master Iri," Kaelen said, looking for the old man.
"I'll find him. East steps." She tugged him. "Stay with me."
He meant to say yes. He meant to walk down the terrace steps like a person. Instead, the Plaza slid again, the threads he'd tried to ignore all morning snapping taut and singing. He saw, as clearly as he'd ever seen anything, a path across the terraces that didn't exist—stone that would accept his foot if he told it to, air that would behave like a surface if he promised not to insist too hard. He didn't step onto it. He merely understood that he could.
And beyond the terraces, beyond the banners and the Core and the neat circles, something vast shifted. Not the white figure—this other movement was not body. It was will. It was satisfaction that tasted like iron.
He knew without knowing how he knew that it wore a crown older than arguments. He knew that it had designed these laws and placed this Core and taught the priests the right words. He knew it would not touch him with hands.
It didn't need to.
It would send others.
The thought should have broken him. Instead it arranged itself next to the pain behind his eye and made a place there. He could live around it. He had practice.
"Kaelen." Liora again, steady and sure. "Now."
He nodded. The white figure turned its head toward the far horizon as if listening to a wind that hadn't been born yet. The priests began to chant the closing, careful not to speak over the city itself. The first shout of the first vendor after sacred silence cracked the spell; the second restored the Plaza to something like ordinary.
They made it three steps before the first soldier in ash-black livery shouldered through the circle line and reached for Kaelen's arm.
"By order of the—"
Kaelen didn't hit him.
He opened his hand, set his palm an inch from the soldier's wrist, and let the smallest part of the pain behind his eye move outward in a straight line.
Air flexed. The soldier's arm jerked back as if he'd touched a forge door. His eyes flared, then slid aside from Kaelen's face as though something in his training had taught him not to look into that much attention.
"Run," Liora said.
They did not run. They walked quickly, because running is what prey does, and Kaelen had decided, somewhere between the knife behind his eye and the white figure's patience, that he was not prey anymore.
By the time they reached the eastern steps, Master Iri was there, a hand on the rail, breathing harder than he should have been. He took one look at Kaelen's face and didn't bother to ask questions.
"Home," he said. "Now. And quietly. The city is listening for the wrong kinds of footsteps."
Kaelen glanced back once, across the terraces, up at the ring of stone fingers holding the great Core in place. The white figure was gone. The afterimage of it was not. A smear of blankness hung where it had stood, as if even the memory of it erased.
He swallowed.
The Selection had spoken.
And somewhere very far away, something older than the sky tilted one piece on a board you could only see if you were willing to go mad looking at it.