The morning fog clung to Sunspire's terraces like breath that refused to fade. Wenrel Augast moved quietly through the half-empty streets, his thoughts heavier than the echo-anchor pressed to his chest. Markets were reopening, the scent of spice and metal drifting through the air, but the city didn't feel alive anymore. It felt like it was listening.
He could sense the threads beneath the stones — faint hums of resonance, deliberate, patient. Kael's apprentice had been careful. Each pulse left behind wasn't just residue; it was a message.
Elaris walked beside him, her cloak drawn tight against the wind. Her eyes kept tracing the rooftops, the alley mouths, the angles where light bent wrong. "He's testing you," she said. "Every pattern you touch, every reaction — he's studying your limits."
Wenrel gave a humorless smile. "That's exactly what Kael would do. His apprentices are reflections, not students."
They turned into a narrow street where the air felt thicker, threads knotting in strange rhythms. Wenrel stopped mid-step. The shadows ahead had gathered unnaturally — not deepened, but collected, as though pulled by unseen hands.
Something drifted out from between them. It wasn't a creature so much as an outline of one — a being made of translucent filaments that shimmered with their own quiet intelligence. Each strand moved as if alive, weaving and unweaving in a slow, breathing rhythm.
It hovered above the cobblestones, watching him with eyes that weren't eyes at all — shifting mirrors of thought and memory. Wenrel felt its awareness brush against his mind: cautious, inquisitive, far too precise.
He reached out with his perception, not his hand, letting the threads within him mirror its rhythm. For a moment, the creature's lattice pulsed in time with his own resonance. In that flicker of connection, Wenrel caught glimpses — flashes of landscapes that shouldn't exist, architectures bending through impossible geometries.
Then it recoiled, curling into itself like a tide withdrawing.
Elaris' voice was low, steady. "Don't push it. That's not one of ours. It's older than the threads."
Wenrel nodded slowly. "It wasn't hostile."
"Not yet," she said.
The air shifted. Behind them, a ripple ran through the threads beneath the street — a delayed echo, faint but familiar. Kael's mark. He had been here, or close enough to leave a trace. Wenrel closed his eyes, letting the pattern unfold: Kael's precision was unmistakable — layered, recursive, filled with meanings hidden between frequencies.
Tavren's boots sounded against the stone as he approached, his face drawn tight with unease. "I saw the shadows move from three streets away," he said. "Tell me that was just the fog."
"It wasn't," Wenrel said quietly.
Tavren exhaled through his teeth. "Then tell me what it was."
"I don't know," Wenrel admitted. "But it looked at me the way Kael does. Like I'm a question it already knows the answer to."
The words hung there, heavy and uncomfortably true.
Above them, the first light broke through the mist, scattering across the city's spires. For a heartbeat, the glow caught the creature's fading outline. Then it was gone — as if Sunspire itself had drawn it back into its pulse.
Elaris adjusted her cloak and started walking again. "Whatever that was," she said, "Kael wanted you to see it."
Wenrel followed, his thoughts knotting around the idea like the threads themselves — every connection, every echo, leading deeper into something he was only beginning to understand.