CHAPTER 2: A SKETCH OF LIGHT
The wind atop the Bellspire cliffs screamed like a dying god.
Elaris stood alone, her black wings outstretched against the crimson sky, the fractured light of a broken sun spilling across the cathedral ruins that sprawled below. Once, this had been a place of worship—a sanctum where the Seraphim gathered to weave light into prophecy and song. Now, the air reeked of burnt stone and old judgment.
Ash drifted from the heavens like snow.
She stepped toward the edge, boots crunching over sacred glass that had not sung in centuries. Her sword—a jagged length of crystallized wrath—hung loosely from her back, humming with faint anger, like a heart that had forgotten how to stop bleeding.
The cathedral below was called the Sanctum of Accord. She had helped build it.
And she had been the one to burn it down.
Once.
Elaris remembered little of the war. Not because time had dulled her memory, but because she had chosen to forget. There were truths that bent the mind like steel to flame. The divine war had not ended—it had simply fractured, its shards buried in realms and riddles.
And now, something stirred.
Her gaze fell on the horizon where the sky buckled. A ripple. A breach. The Thread was awakening.
"They found another," she whispered.
She turned her hand upward. In her palm appeared a flicker of blue fire—divine light turned dark through sorrow. It pulsed once, then formed into a shard: a glimpse into a boy sitting in a dusty classroom, a generator humming on a desk, a glyph burning into chalk.
She closed her fist.
Sameer.
The name came unbidden. She didn't know how she knew it—but she did.
He had touched the Thread. He had become one of the six.
The Rift would follow.
The wind changed.
Elaris turned slowly. At the far end of the cliff, wrapped in shifting folds of fog and shadow, stood a figure she had hoped never to see again.
Feathers white as judgment. Eyes veiled in gold.
"Jeremiel," she said.
"Elaris."
His voice was both song and blade, a tone forged from the breath of dying stars.
"You were warned."
"I was betrayed."
Jeremiel stepped forward. His wings unfurled—untouched by war, still pristine. "You cannot protect him. Or the others. You remember what happened the last time the Thread chose wrongly."
Her hand found the hilt of her sword.
"They aren't wrong," she said. "They're new."
"You mistake potential for purpose."
"And you mistake obedience for faith."
The wind shrieked again. Ash and light danced around them.
"You defy the Accord," Jeremiel said. "Still."
"I defy tyrants dressed as saints."
They stood in silence. The sky behind them cracked with distant thunder—not of storms, but of realms shifting. The Mortal Plane was stirring. The Thread's hum now echoed through the bones of the world.
"I will not let you kill another Threadbearer," she said.
"I will not need to," Jeremiel replied. "The Rift will devour them on its own."
He vanished, fading into golden sparks. Elaris turned back to the broken cathedral, her hands clenched.
The boy in the classroom was just the beginning.
Below her, the ruins groaned as if remembering pain. Elaris spread her wings and leapt, the sky folding around her. The earth did not welcome her, nor did the heavens. But she no longer needed welcome.
She needed answers.
And she would start where it all ended the first time:
The Cathedral of Truth.
Sameer's world hadn't been the same since the night of the glyph.
The generator no longer responded to normal physics. Equations broke down around it. Lights flickered when he entered rooms. His dreams bled into reality. Sometimes he saw places that shouldn't exist—cities floating on inverted seas, stairways winding through starlight, mirrors that showed not his reflection but other versions of himself.
Radhavan had moved them into hiding—a safehouse buried beneath the old university archives, shielded by wards the professor refused to explain.
Sameer flipped through his notebook again. More sketches had changed. One now depicted a woman with black wings, sword drawn, standing atop a cliff of broken glass.
He hadn't drawn it.
"Who is she?" he asked aloud.
The notebook didn't answer.
But the generator buzzed louder.
Across the realms, in the Graveyard of Echoes, Ashriel knelt.
He pressed the last lily to the soil of the final grave: Han Jiwoon.
The name no longer shimmered. This was the last of them.
The Rift had stirred again. He felt it in the marrow of his broken wings. The curse binding him to Jiwoon's soul was unraveling—but something worse was taking its place.
A tether to the Thread.
He stood, black feathers shedding slowly into the wind. "You're free," he whispered to the grave. "But I'm not."
He turned his gaze skyward.
The Thread was moving.
And someone else had touched it.
He had to find them—before the Watchers did.
Back in the Sanctum, deep beneath the Cathedral of Truth, a stone shifted.
Dust fell. A long-buried mechanism clicked.
A voice, long dead, whispered into the dark:
"One chosen. Five remain."