Darkness.
The same darkness he knew. Yet this morning it felt different، though he couldn't find the right word for it..
Silas sat on the edge of his bed, his small fingers tightening around his cane. Closing his already sightless eyes, he began what had become his morning ritual. Slowly, he cast his senses outward, thread by thread, room by room.
Lola. Her turquoise threads drifted in the slow, relaxed rhythm of deep sleep.
Hans. Indigo threads pacing back and forth in his room. Always an early riser.
Liam. Bright orange veins, yet huddled and shrinking into his usual corner.
Maris. A faint pink, barely visible, as always.
And Carlin.
Silas paused.
He pushed his awareness further, focusing on the space where he usually found those emerald-green threads. The room next to Maris. The specific corner she always curled into, as if trying to take up as little space in the world as possible.
Nothing.
Just nothingness.
He tried again, straining until a dull ache throbbed behind his eyes. The room was there—he knew that. The walls, the ceiling, the floor. They all existed. But inside?
A suffocating void. Not a single thread illuminated it.
He gripped his cane with both hands until his small knuckles turned white.
—
Carlin had been here yesterday. He was sure of it. He remembered her emerald threads cowering in the corner, shy and silent, as if apologizing for merely existing. He remembered the green eyes he had never seen, but had heard Hans mention once.
And now... nothing.
His breathing grew heavy.
He didn't know Carlin well. They hadn't exchanged a single word. But he had "seen" her threads every day; he knew the rhythm of her breathing, when she slept, and when she woke. In the back of his mind, he had placed her right next to himself and the other children.
In the same boat.
But now? It felt like the boat had shrunk.
***
He stood up.
It wasn't a conscious choice. His feet moved on their own. He held his cane but didn't use it to tap the floor. Instead, his own threads, the purple mana that was slowly memorizing the layout of this place, guided him forward.
He stepped out of his room.
The hallways held the heavy, still silence of early morning. He moved slowly at first, his free hand stretched out, until he found his rhythm. He stopped in front of Carlin's door.
He pressed his palm against the wood.
It was cold.
He pushed it open.
Inside the blackness, there was nothing. An entirely empty room, as if no one had ever lived there. Even the faint, lingering traces of mana that people left behind on objects had gone completely cold. No imprint. No residue. Just still air and a darkness that felt... clean.
Silas hovered on the threshold, refusing to step inside.
He didn't quite know why. Perhaps because stepping in wouldn't change the fact that the girl was simply gone.
He pulled the door shut.
—
Instead of waiting for Erca—who seemed entirely absent this morning—he tried to practice in his own room.
Sitting down, he closed his eyes and coaxed the thread in his chest outward. But the mana in his bedroom was scarce, nothing like the saturated air of the training hall. The usual steady drops slowed to a trickle. Soon, a hollow ache seeped into his arms and chest.
He stopped.
He sat and waited.
He waited until he realized Erca truly wasn't coming today.
***
He didn't give up immediately.
He searched for her first, casting his senses across the entire building, scanning room after room, hallway after hallway. But the red threads were nowhere within his reach.
His focus returned to the children.
Lola remained motionless in her bed. Hans was pacing. Liam was in his corner.
Silas gripped his cane and opened his door.
Again, he kept the cane lifted, navigating by his own internal rhythm, one hand trailing along the wall as his purple threads guided him toward the shrinking orange veins.
He stood before Liam's door.
He knocked once.
No answer.
He knocked again.
Immediately, the orange threads beyond the wood pulled taut.
*"Liam? Can I talk to you for a bit?"*
Still no answer. But the frantic vibration of the threads told him Liam had heard.
Silas found the doorknob and slowly pushed it open.
"Wh—what are you doing here? Get out! Get out, quick!"
The voice was much smaller than he expected. Not just in volume, but in everything.
Silas felt the raw terror filling the room. And it wasn't just his own fear. Liam's dread hung in the air itself—thick, suffocating, and entirely different.
*"Erca isn't here,"* Silas tried to say it calmly, though the slight tremor in his cane betrayed him. Still, he hid his hands behind his back and continued, *"So, you don't need to worry."*
The orange threads only trembled more violently.
Silas didn't want to waste time; he was terrified Erca might suddenly appear. He kept half his awareness on the hallway outside. No red threads yet. But he knew that meant very little.
*"Liam, do you know what it means to be a Seed?"*
*"Liam?"*
No verbal reply came, but one 'look' at Liam's veins confirmed he was reacting to every single word. Silas didn't back down. He asked again.
*"I don't know! I don't know! Get out... please, get out!"*
Silas stood there for another moment. He wanted to say something else, but the words stuck in his throat. He let out a shaky sigh, gripped his cane, and turned to leave.
Then, he heard it.
A faint sound. A stifled sob. It was so quiet, as if the boy crying was desperately trying to swallow his own tears so they wouldn't be heard.
*"There used to be more of us."*
Silas turned his head back.
*"What?"*
*"There used to be more children here."* The words tumbled out brokenly, punctuated by quiet gasps. *"Sylvie... Marco... Maria... Joshua... all those empty rooms... they used to belong to them."*
Silas froze.
*"Where are they now?"*
The orange threads began to settle slightly. But it wasn't a calm settling. It was the stillness of something that had completely exhausted its energy—something too tired to even shake anymore.
*"Liam,"* Silas took a slow step forward. *"Do you know what happens to someone who isn't a Seed?"*
Silence.
*"Liam, please tell me."*
*"I don't know! I don't know!"* The orange threads spiked wildly, more erratic than before. *"Get out now! Get out!"*
Silas left.
He closed the door behind him.
***
Out in the corridor, he stopped dead in his tracks.
He didn't know where to go. His feet refused to move. He stood before the closed door, listening to the muffled crying inside, which had grown slightly louder now that he was gone.
He had been afraid since the beginning. He knew that.
But the fear clinging to him now was fundamentally different. His five years of life hadn't given him many experiences, but instinct alone knew the difference. It knew that fear had layers, and that a person only reached the deeper layers when they suddenly understood something they already knew, but had desperately tried not to know.
The memory of the man with the insects in his veins surfaced again in his mind. That smile he could 'hear' in the hollow voice. Erca's dismissive headshake when asked about him. And Liam's words, spilling out as if they had been caged for a lifetime.
*There used to be more of us.*
Sylvie. Marco. Maria. Joshua.
Names of people whose threads he had never seen. People who had claimed rooms in this building, rooms that were now empty.
Carlin had been here yesterday.
Now, her room was empty.
He started walking back to his room.
***
By noon, the red threads appeared.
He heard her before he sensed her—calm, measured footsteps moving from room to room. The clinking of plates being set on tables. Doors opening and closing.
When his own door opened, Silas didn't move from his bed until she spoke.
*"Eat."*
He rose slowly. He found his chair. He found the table. His fingers located the coarse bread and the plate.
But Erca didn't leave.
In the blackness, the red threads stood right behind him. Perfectly still. Not moving, not speaking.
Silas picked up the bread.
It was rough, as usual, breaking stubbornly against his small teeth. On any other day, he would have relished this hard bread—something real and solid in his mouth after the agonizing starvation he had endured in the alleys and the mines. But now...
The red threads behind him didn't flinch.
It felt like a needle pressing into the back of his neck. That was how he felt her stare, without needing to see it. A gaze that didn't ask questions or judge; it merely observed. And sometimes, a thing that watches you in dead silence is far more terrifying than a thing that screams.
He felt like he was just waiting for the moment she would unhinge her jaw and swallow him whole.
He finished eating.
When he was done, Erca silently gathered the plates and left.
She hadn't said a single word.
***
The next day began like every other.
Silas cast his senses outward. Room by room.
Lola sleeping. Hans awake. Liam in his corner. Maris with his faint pink threads.
And Carlin—
Blackness.
The same blackness he had found yesterday. But this morning, it didn't surprise him. He was expecting it.
He gripped his cane.
His breath grew heavy as the realization settled in: even if he searched every single room in this sprawling building, he wouldn't find what he was looking for.
Liam's list of names echoed in his mind. Sylvie. Marco. Maria. Joshua. And now, it seemed, Carlin had been added to the list.
Empty rooms. A clean darkness. As if they were nothing but ghost stories.
And the question he had asked Liam still hung thickly in the air.
*What happens to someone who isn't a Seed?*
In the blackness, a red dot slowly began to form.
Then another.
The crimson threads bled out of the dark, taking shape thread by thread as if materializing from nowhere. Silas noticed something different. Usually, Erca started her rounds at Maris's room, the one closest to the main corridor.
But this time, the threads weren't heading towards Maris.
They were coming straight for him.
Silas sat on his bed, frozen. His cane in his hand. His breathing was heavy but strictly controlled. And in his chest, that ever-present ember flared.
The red threads drew closer.
The door clicked open.
*"Get up."*
Silas stood up immediately.
*"Follow me."*
In a world made entirely of darkness, the training hall in Silas's mind was like a blazing sun. Bright, overwhelming, and beautifully radiant. But this time, none of the other children were present. He slowly extended his senses around the vast room, but found nothing besides Erca's imposing crimson veins.
*"We won't waste time. Sit down and start drawing mana."*
Her strict, clinical tone made Silas obey instantly, without hesitation.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, breathing slowly. He pushed the thread inside his chest outward, gradually pulling the ambient mana into his tiny body.
As always, the sensation of absorbing mana was deeply refreshing. It felt like he was a patch of barren earth finally drinking in drops of rain. But this time... something felt off. A subtle wrongness. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, couldn't identify the variable tainting the mana.
He focused harder.
The invisible thread drawing the mana paused. Instead, it hovered around the scattered drops of energy. As he zeroed in on the sensation, he finally understood the source of the wrongness.
The mana he usually absorbed had always been pure, uniform. It felt completely clean, untouched. But now? He could feel another trace—a foreign variable—trying to merge with the raw mana.
Right at that exact moment, a bead of cold sweat slid down his spine.
He immediately stopped drawing mana. His small hands began to tremble.
The sudden halt caught Erca's attention.
*"Hmm?"*
He felt the massive red threads shift slightly, leaning down toward him.
But Silas couldn't care less about how he looked right now. He knew exactly what that foreign, lingering trace in the mana was. A single word echoed endlessly in his mind.
"Carlin?"