The screaming came first.
Not the screaming of a dream this time. It was real cutting through the walls, filling the corridors with something unlike any sound Silas had ever heard. A scream that slid from pain into chaos, as though the one screaming had no say in when it would stop.
Silas jolted upright.
He grabbed his cane before he opened his eyes. Before he breathed normally. Before anything else.
Then the screaming changed.
Slowly, in a way that was deeply wrong, it began to dissolve into something entirely different. Laughter. But it wasn't the laughter of joy, it was hollow and loud and frayed at the edges, as though someone was attempting to imitate happiness without knowing what it was supposed to sound like.
In the darkness, Silas swept the surrounding rooms.
Teal threads. Orange. Deep blue. Emerald green. Faint pink.
All of them contracted.
The contraction wasn't identical across all of them, but it meant one thing. Lola's teal threads pressed themselves into a far corner. Liam's orange threads had shrunk until they nearly vanished and Silas knew by now what that meant. Hans's deep blue threads were still, but pulled taut, like a rope stretched between two points that refused to snap.
And in the distant room, the red threads.
They were moving.
Not in their usual calm and steady rhythm. They were twisting and lurching, expanding then contracting, as though something inside them was searching for a shape it couldn't hold. And the sounds kept coming from that room — laughter fracturing and rising, then fading, then returning.
Silas didn't move.
He sat on the edge of his bed, both hands on his cane, watching those turbulent red threads from a distance.
Then everything stopped.
No laughter. No screaming. Only silence that dropped all at once like a wall.
The door opened slowly.
The red threads emerged from the distant room, but they were not as he saw them before.
The red he had grown used to was now mixed with something else. Black threads seeping between the crimson ones, absorbing them, turning them into something closer to dying embers, a dark red that carried darkness in its core and refused to let go.
The threads moved slowly through the corridor.
Silas felt a faint sound coming from that mass. Words too low to want to be words. He listened.
"... flesh?"
His heart stopped for a moment.
"...cut them?"
The two words came in a tone that neither asked nor decided. As though they were an idea trying to become reality.
The dark red threads stopped in front of a door.
Liam's door.
A hand was placed on it. The murmuring continued, low and broken, only its sounds reaching Silas, not its meaning.
And in his room, he saw Liam's orange threads shrink until they could barely be seen.
A child sitting in a corner, crying in a silence that didn't want to leave.
The palm was still on the door.
Then it was removed.
"Don't." Eirka's voice but not the voice he knew. This voice was speaking to something Silas couldn't see. "The Lord will punish us."
Silence.
Then:
"He won't." The same voice, but different. "He won't. How many times have we given him what he needed? When will he give us what we need?"
Then footsteps. Slow, returning to where they had come from.
Silas stayed still, not breathing more than necessary, watching the dark red threads disappear slowly into the distant room. And after that, very slowly, the darkness began to recede back into the familiar red. The black threads dissolved one by one, like embers cooling without knowing they had been burning.
That same night, Silas didn't close his eyes.
He lay on his back watching the darkness, the red threads in the distant room now quiet and steady as though nothing had happened. But the two words wouldn't leave him.
Flesh. Cutting them.
He extended his hand and placed it on the cold wall beside his bed. He felt the pulse of deep blue mana from the other side.
Hans was awake.
"Hans."
The reply came immediately, in a voice lower than usual. "Yes."
"Do you know what happens with Eirka?"
Silas kept his attention on Eirka's distant room. The red threads didn't move. Then he brought his focus back to Hans.
The deep blue threads contracted.
"I don't kn—" He stopped. "I don't know. I'm going to sleep. Don't ask me."
"Hans—"
No answer.
"Hans."
The deep blue threads remained still and steady, pretending to breathe in the rhythm of sleep.
Silas pulled his hand from the wall.
And lay in his darkness, watching the distant red threads until morning came.
In the training hall, Silas tried to understand.
He extended that thread in his chest as usual, but his eyes, those eyes that saw nothing except what mana chose to show them, were fixed on Eirka.
She sat before them as she always did. Her red threads steady, calm, and clean. No darkness. No embers. Nothing of what he had seen the night before.
As though nothing had happened.
Silas tried to find a trace, one black thread that had stayed caught between the red. But there was nothing.
The red threads were as they should be, dense and regular, flowing in the rhythm of a woman sitting with nothing troubling on her mind.
Perhaps it was his imagination.
He turned his focus back to absorbing mana.
And here he noticed something different.
The flow was faster. Not by much but enough to notice.
Before, he had been collecting drops through a thin straw. Now the straw itself had widened slightly, and the drops had become thicker. He was still far from those coiling stars he could see forming in Hans and Lola's chests, but the difference was real and it was there.
He held onto that flow with concentration and tried not to think about last night.
But he couldn't manage it.
Eirka stood up suddenly.
She said nothing. She simply rose and left the hall, her red threads disappearing beyond the door.
In the darkness, Silas noticed other threads.
They were outside the hall. Standing.
Watching.
He focused.
And recognized them.
His posture shifted.
It wasn't a decision. It was the reaction of a body that sees something it doesn't want to see. He heard small movements around him, Liam and Lola and Hans and even Maris in his distant corner, all turning toward him.
He took a breath.
Then another.
And brought his gaze back to the man standing outside the hall.
The threads were green. That was what he had seen the first time, and what he expected to see in everyone else.
But the green threads here were not alone.
Inside them, something moved.
Not mana. Not threads. They were things. Small and numerous, writhing inside the green threads as though they had found exactly what they needed there.
Some moved slowly, as though eating. Some twisted around each other. And some were still in their places, still in the way of things that don't need to move because they have already found what they came for.
Insects.
The word came to him slowly and heavily.
But they weren't insects in any sense he knew.
They were something that used the shape of an insect the way a person uses clothing. Something that lived inside this man's veins and had made a home of them.
He forced himself to look away.
He sat. Put his hands on his knees. And breathed.
Eirka returned.
The man came with her.
They entered the hall together, Eirka ahead with steady steps, the man behind her with steps that made no sound.
They stopped behind the seated children. The children didn't turn around, but Silas saw their threads pull slightly inward.
"So?"
The man's voice was unlike anything Silas had heard before. Not cold and not warm. Empty in the way of things that had been deliberately hollowed out.
"Hans and Lola and Maris will become excellent seeds," Eirka said. Steady and professional, as though reading from a page.
"As for Liam and Karin..."
She shook her head.
The man stood looking at the children from behind. A smile on his face that Silas couldn't see but could hear in the voice.
"And what about the blind one?"
The air stopped in Silas's chest.
"He's a gravity mage."
"Oh?" The hollow voice rose slightly. "Is he a seed then?"
Eirka shook her head again.
And said nothing more.
In the darkness, Eirka's threads were still calm and steady.
But Silas's mind was not.
The insects. Those things writhing inside the green man's veins, eating and moving and living as though they had found what they came for. He couldn't erase the image no matter how he tried. And beside it, one word he hadn't fully understood but understood well enough.
Seed.
Hans and Lola and Maris were seeds. And me?
He had seen the threads move on Eirka's head left and right when the man asked about him. He wasn't foolish, he knew what that movement meant. But what did it mean for him?
What happened to someone who wasn't a seed?
He didn't fully understand death. But death wasn't what frightened him most.
What frightened him was the cold streets he once lived in.
The cold that never ended and the hard ground under his back and the darkness that no threads lit from within.
At least here the bed was warm and food came twice a day. At least here he could see the walls.
He held his cane in both hands and closed his eyes into the familiar darkness.
Half of the life he could remember had been coal and dust covering his face. The other half he preferred not to remember at all. He had never known what a home meant. He had never known what a family meant.
But he knew the difference between a place that shelters you and a place that swallows you.
And this place, whatever it was, had been sheltering him so far.
He wanted to stay.
The next day, before Eirka came to take them to the training hall, Silas took his cane and moved.
The teal threads were in the neighboring room. Lola.
He approached her door slowly, his hand tracing the wall beside him.
From her threads he could tell she was moving in a steady, repeated rhythm. Something rising and falling, back and forth. Water perhaps.
Or that was what he guessed.
He knocked.
The teal threads tensed for a moment. Then slowly they moved toward the door and opened it.
A short silence. Then: "What do you want?"
A calm voice that didn't suit her age. Silas recognized this kind of calm.
"I wanted... I wanted to ask you something."
"About what?"
Silas gripped the cane with both hands. He could see the small star in her chest, coiling around itself and growing day by day at a pace that made his own progress look like it was standing still.
"I wanted to ask how you gather mana so quickly. The thing inside your chest grows every day, and I wanted to know how."
Silence.
Then: "My chest? Grows? Quickly?" The calm in her voice fractured slightly. "What do you mean?"
And in that moment Silas understood what he had done.
No one could see what he saw. No one knew there was a star coiling inside Lola's chest because no one could see the threads the way he did.
And he had just told her something he had no way of knowing.
He stumbled over his words. "The mana... the mana inside you grows every day and quickly. I wanted to know how to do the same."
The door closed.
Silas stood in front of it, his hand still extended toward the wood. In the darkness, the teal threads had returned to their steady rhythm but with something different in them now. Something more careful.
He lowered his hand.
And walked back to his room without fully understanding where he had gone wrong.
Only knowing that he had.