Weaver turned off his phone and let it fall face-down on the desk as if the glass could judge him back.
The screen went dark. His room did not.
City light leaked through the curtains in a sickly grey-blue. The air conditioner breathed with the patience of something that could afford to keep living. On the wall, a framed photograph of his father smiling into a crowd caught the light at the wrong angle and made the smile look like a cut.
Weaver closed his eyes.
Another web novel, another night eaten because night was the only time he was allowed to be hungry for anything that wasn't duty. He could almost hear the narrator voice in his head, the one that promised escape with a sentence:
If only I were a god, then I'd be free to do as I wish.
The thought was childish.
That was why he loved it.
Sleep took him like a hand over the mouth.
—
A figure approached a throne.
No footfall. No breath. Only the slow certainty of a body moving through a room that refused to be fully real—marble, mist, or memory pretending to be stone. Pillars stood where pillars should stand. Banners hung where banners should hang. Gold waited in the air like a taste.
The throne was too large for a person and too intimate for a god.
The figure sat.
For a single blink, the haze thinned—enough to suggest that this was not the first time.
Then everything closed.
—
Weaver was sitting at a desk he did not own.
The wood was black, polished so perfectly it held a reflection like water holds a sky. Papers lay scattered across it—thick sheets inked with characters he couldn't read and yet somehow understood, like he'd studied them until his eyes bled. In the corner of the desk, a sphere hovered a handspan above a brass cradle.
Black glass.
Deep orange swirls turning inside it, slow as embers rotating in a furnace.
It was broadcasting.
The voice that poured from it did not sound like radio or speakers. It sounded like a throat speaking directly into the bones of anyone who could hear.
"People of the Vermillion Reach."
The name hit like a bell: not familiar, but heavy, like a place the world had been built to remember.
"And to the disciples of the Red Swan Sect."
Weaver's skin tightened. He didn't know why that name made him want to stand up straight.
The voice continued—male, older, controlled in the way commanders were controlled when the building was already on fire.
"I will not insult you with hope. I will not pretend this is survivable if you behave correctly."
A pause. A breath, carefully taken, as if time itself was expensive.
"My name is Oslo, many of you know me as your patriarch."
Weaver felt the name land like a stamp.
"People of the vermillion reach, do not hate me for what you are about to hear, for you have already been condemned. I am sorry."
The sphere's orange swirls brightened in a slow pulse.
"I do not have much time. I stole this Pearl from the Holy Summit vault."
Weaver's fingers curled into the edge of the desk. The dream did not feel like a dream. The air had weight. The words had consequence.
Oslo said, "During the Holy Summit, I revealed our findings to the gods. I believed it was righteous to share a ladder."
His voice sharpened just slightly.
"That belief was naïve."
The sphere hummed—quiet, angry.
"The Red swan sect had found a way for mortals to reach godhood by their own hands. Not by being chosen. Not by kneeling until the heavens grow bored and point."
Weaver's breath caught.
In his room, in his bed, he had whispered that exact wish like a joke. Here, it sounded like treason.
Oslo continued, "After the Summit, I was taken."
The word was simple. It carried iron.
"To Oracline."
The name made the air change.
Not colder. Not warmer.
Just smaller.
"A castle," Oslo said, "that sits above the Heavenly Realm."
Weaver's mind tried to reject it. A castle above heaven was like a ceiling above the sky. It was impossible in the way prisons were impossible—until you were inside them.
"I need you to understand," Oslo said, slower now, as if forcing comprehension into unwilling heads. "They teach you there is no lone ruler of this world. They tell you the heavens are a paradise. They tell you godhood is freedom."
A bitter exhale—controlled, but real.
"Even the gods are not free."
Weaver felt that sentence crawl along his spine.
Oslo's voice lowered. "There is a throne above thrones. There is a King."
The word King should have sounded mythic.
It sounded administrative.
"There is no choosing," Oslo said. "No mercy. No promotion. Mortals who come too close are culled. Not because they are evil. Because they are proof."
Weaver didn't know what he meant by proof, but he understood the shape of it: a lie that could not survive a single counterexample.
Oslo said, "If you are hearing this, then you must flee Vermillion Reach. Leave the land. Leave the names. Burn what cannot be carried. Take only what makes you hard to find."
His breath hitched. For the first time, fear broke through the discipline.
"Go now. Before they—"
Footsteps sounded in the room with Oslo.
Not hurried. Not aggressive.
Calm.
Oslo stopped speaking.
In the gap, Weaver heard something else—an ambient pressure entering the recording, the way weather enters a house through the seams.
A voice spoke from behind Oslo.
Not loud.
Not cruel.
Perfectly enunciated, as if it had been written down.
"That's enough, Oslo."
Oslo exhaled once—fast, involuntary.
"You came quickly," he said.
"You broadcasted treason across an entire continent," the voice replied. "Quickness is implied."
Oslo's voice sharpened. "You're afraid."
A pause.
Then the reply, gentle as snowfall: "Afraid is not the correct word. We are correcting an error."
Oslo said, "So the gods really are jailers."
The voice did not answer the insult. It did not need to.
It said, "Oracline has heard you. The Heavenly Realm has heard you. The Primordials have heard you."
Oslo laughed once, raw and small. "Primordials. As if putting a prettier name on a butcher makes the knife holy."
The sphere's swirls flared—orange shifting toward white.
Oslo spoke fast now, urgency sharpening him into something almost youthful.
"Listen to me, Vermillion—"
A hand struck.
Weaver didn't see it. He felt it in the audio—the sudden cut of air, the interruption of breath. A choking sound, not dramatic, just the ugly reality of a throat being closed by something that didn't struggle.
Oslo tried to speak. Only wet noise came out.
Then a thud.
Silence.
It was not the end.
The other voice addressed the continent like a clerk addressing a file.
"Continent-wide communications are only permitted when they preserve order," it said. "What you have heard is disorder."
Weaver could not move. His jaw was tight enough to hurt.
"For what you have heard," the voice continued, "is worth more than your life."
The sentence did not feel like a threat.
It felt like policy.
"The Vermillion Reach will be erased from history."
A pause, as if waiting for the world to understand the grammar.
"All born on that land," the voice said, "or born from a consequence of someone from that land…"
The sphere's light pulsed, slow and final.
"…will be erased from history."
Weaver tried to breathe and found the air too thin.
The broadcast cut.
Not like a channel closing.
Like a throat being sealed.
—
Weaver woke to his alarm.
The sound was obscene in its normality—bright, cheerful, designed for mornings that belonged to people.
His eyes opened to a ceiling he recognised. Smooth white. Hidden lighting. A camera lens disguised as a smoke detector. His room, his cage.
His mouth was dry. His heart hammered as if it had been running.
"What a weird dream," he muttered, and the words came out wrong, like he was copying someone's life.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor was warm beneath his feet—heated tiles, a luxury that felt like a leash.
The mirror across the room caught him before he was ready.
He looked as he always looked: dark hair cut to perfection, skin maintained by expensive routines and the quiet violence of expectation. A face the country could print on posters without editing.
Only one thing stained it.
The dark circles under his eyes.
His father hated them. Weaver knew because his father had said it once, calmly, over dinner like an observation about weather.
"You look tired," his father had said. "Don't."
Weaver took pride in the dark circles. Petty, perhaps. But it was his only visible act of disobedience. Proof that the body could still fail in ways that could not be legislated.
Symbols do not get tired.
Weaver was meant to be a symbol.
He moved through his morning the way he moved through every day: efficiently, silently, without ownership. The schedule was already on his phone. The assistants already knew what he would wear. The guard detail already knew what he would eat.
His father ran his life the way he ran the country—like a man runs a blade over a whetstone: patiently, relentlessly, without affection.
The nation loved his face because it had been trained to.
The world feared his father's voice because it decided what was permissible to be true.
And his son—his only son—was the successor.
Not a person.
A continuation.
In the bathroom, he turned on the tap and let cold water flood his hands. He watched it run over his fingers like it could wash the dream out of him.
He bent over the sink.
He closed his eyes.
For a split second, he was sitting at that other desk again.
Black wood. Papers. The sphere in the corner, orange swirls turning like a heart refusing to stop.
Weaver recoiled so hard he slipped.
His shoulder hit the bathroom wall. Pain flashed. The dream-desk vanished. He was back in tile and mirror and running water.
He stood there breathing in sharp, controlled pulls.
Lack of sleep, he told himself.
Stress. Overconsumption. Too many stories.
The brain recycling nonsense.
But his body didn't accept it.
His body remembered the policy voice saying erased from history.
History.
That word sat wrong in his head—too heavy for a dream.
He dressed and left his room for the day's first lesson—history and philosophy at seven, because his father believed knowledge was a weapon and weapons needed sharpening before breakfast.
The estate corridors were quiet, immaculate, designed to make footsteps feel like intrusions. Guards bowed with faces that did not move. Cameras watched with the calm of animals trained not to blink.
By the time he reached the car, his hands had stopped shaking.
By the time the convoy entered the city, he had built his expression into neutrality again.
The streets were clean. The air was dry. The sky was the colour of an unspilled secret.
His father's portrait was everywhere.
Weaver's was beginning to appear beside it.
That was how the future was introduced—incrementally, like poison.
He was meant to go directly to the academy.
He did not.
Halfway there, his mind began to drift—not lazily, but with a strange, forced slip, as if something inside him kept tugging toward that other desk. He stared out the tinted window, and for a moment, the city seemed like a set: faces moving, traffic flowing, everyone acting out a life they had been assigned.
Weaver hated the thought.
He hated that the dream had given him a new metaphor for his own imprisonment.
When the car stopped at a light, he made a decision that felt almost suicidal in its simplicity.
He opened the door.
The guard in the front seat turned instantly. "Sir—"
"I need air," Weaver said, and stepped out before permission could form.
The street sound hit him like a wall: engines, voices, a distant siren, the constant murmur of a million people trying not to become problems. His guards followed, of course, but he walked faster than usual, putting distance between himself and the car like distance could create privacy.
There was a small convenience shop on the corner—cheap lights, cheap drinks, the kind of place his image was not supposed to enter.
He went anyway.
The shopkeeper saw him and froze. Not fear exactly. Something like a person realising they are suddenly holding a live wire.
A young couple in the aisle turned their heads, saw him, and immediately looked away as if eye contact was illegal.
Weaver moved to the fridge and stared at the rows of energy drinks, brightly coloured, aggressively hopeful.
He took one.
The can was cold. The sound of it clicking against the shelf felt loud.
He paid without speaking. The shopkeeper's hands shook.
Outside, he cracked it open and drank.
Sugar and chemicals and carbonation—purely indulgent, purely unnecessary.
Purely his.
For a few seconds, the bitterness in his mouth felt like freedom.
Then he saw the faces around him.
Not all of them. Just enough.
Some looked away in practiced neutrality. Some stared with careful hatred. Some watched with the blank obedience of people who knew their thoughts were not private.
The son of a dictator.
Weaver understood contempt. He had been born into it. But what always surprised him was how clean people kept their hands while throwing it.
They hated him for what his father was.
They feared him for what his father could do.
And because they could not safely hate the father, they poured it into the son like a substitute.
He walked a little farther from his guards, drawn by nothing but a desire to stand somewhere no one had arranged.
At the edge of a small park, he stopped beneath a tree.
The leaves barely moved. The air was too still.
His dream returned without warning—A voice, calm, fatal.
All born on that land… or born from a consequence…
Weaver's throat tightened.
He lifted the can again.
A sound snapped behind him—sharp, mechanical, wrong among birds and cars.
Weaver turned.
A man stood near the park entrance, half-hidden by a signpost. Not a uniform. Not a guard. Plain clothing, plain face, the kind of plain that could disappear into any crowd.
The man's arm was extended.
In his hand was a pistol.
For a fraction of a second Weaver didn't move.
Not because he was brave.
Because his mind refused to accept that violence could be this direct.
The shot cracked.
The world punched him.
Pain bloomed in his side with a brightness that erased thought. His fingers released the can. It hit the ground and rolled, fizzing its last cheap freedom into the dirt.
Weaver staggered back, one hand clamping over the wound automatically. Warmth flooded between his fingers.
Blood. Real blood. Not dream-blood.
His guards shouted. People screamed. Someone yelled his name like it was a warning.
The shooter didn't run.
He stepped closer, calm as a man finishing a sentence.
Weaver tried to speak and found only breath.
The shooter's mouth moved.
"You people live like kings," he said, voice low, intimate, meant only for Weaver. "So die like one."
Weaver's knees hit the ground.
His vision swam. The park tilted. The sky above the leaves looked too blue to belong to a world that allowed this.
Around him, people scattered.
Not because they didn't care.
Because caring in public was dangerous.
Because helping the dictator's son was a gesture that could be remembered.
Weaver lay in the grass with his blood soaking into something that had never chosen sides.
The guards were yelling into radios. The shooter was tackled somewhere out of his sight. Everything became distant, like the world was stepping back to see if he would finish dying properly.
Weaver stared at his hand—slick, red, shaking.
His mind, with its cruel talent for clarity, began to speak.
So this is it.
Not a grand assassination. Not a public trial. Not a martyrdom that could be framed as meaning.
Just a bullet in the side and strangers deciding that your suffering is safest when it remains unacknowledged.
He tried to laugh and coughed instead.
Blood bubbled at his lips.
He wanted—absurdly—to blame them. To call them hypocrites. To say: you judged me my whole life for a man you were too afraid to judge honestly.
He wanted to tell them that being born into a throne did not mean you chose the throne.
He wanted to tell them that the son of a monster still woke up as a boy in the morning, still tasted fear, still had to swallow his own life like medicine.
But no one was leaning close enough to hear.
And maybe that was the point.
A thought surfaced, deep and bitter, and it was not philosophical. It was childlike. It was the thought that had kept him alive through years of control.
If only I were a god.
Not for power.
Not for worship.
For the simplest thing on earth:
To choose.
Weaver's fingers tightened in the grass as his vision narrowed into a dark tunnel.
In that narrowing, his last coherent anger took shape as a vow—not to his father, not to the country, not to history.
To himself.
If I get another chance…
His breath shuddered.
…I will not spend my life living for someone else.
The leaves above him blurred into a single green smear.
The blue sky dimmed.
He closed his eyes.