*Lord of Destiny — Chapter 5: The Anchor*
Kael pulled.
His hand closed around the Anchor Thread and the world went white.
Sound vanished. Light vanished. Even pain vanished.
All that was left was weight. Ten thousand voices, ten thousand breaths, ten thousand futures pressed into his palm.
He yanked.
The Spire convulsed. Threads snapped and re-stitched themselves in new patterns across the ceiling. The red ones dimmed. The gold ones flared so bright Kael had to shut his eyes.
Outside, the red crack in the black sky over Karthos sealed shut. The noon-darkness thinned to gray. Somewhere far below, a bell rang once. Normal. Midnight.
It worked.
Then the price hit.
Fire lanced up Kael’s arm. The black mark surged past his elbow, past his shoulder, and stopped just above his collarbone. He could feel it, cold, right over his heart. One more big pull and it would touch it.
Kael dropped to his knees, gasping. The Anchor Thread was gone. In its place, a thin black scar hovered in the air, then faded.
Coren clapped. Slow. “Well done, little brother.” His white eyes were bright. “You just saved a city. And doomed yourself.”
Lyra caught Kael before he hit the floor. “Idiot,” she whispered, but her hands were shaking. “You’re not supposed to touch that until you’re trained.”
“I didn’t have time,” Kael managed. His throat felt full of copper. “What... what did I do?”
“You rewrote Karthos,” Lyra said. “The plague won’t start. The tyrant dies next winter. The blacksmith’s son becomes a healer instead of a killer.” She looked at Coren. “You got what you wanted.”
Coren’s smile faded. “Not all of it.” He gestured at the ceiling. The threads were still moving, but slower now. Wrong. “The Weaver’s unstable. Pulling the Anchor bought us time. Maybe a year. Maybe a month.” He looked at Kael. “Then it breaks anyway. Unless we cut the source.”
“The source?” Kael asked.
“The Weaver itself,” Coren said. “It’s dying. And when it dies, every thread snaps. Every city falls. Unless someone new holds it together.”
He stepped closer. The black marks on his neck pulsed in time with Kael’s.
“That’s why I killed the last Lord. And why I need you. Two Lords can hold the weave longer. If we do it together.”
Lyra stepped between them. “Don’t listen to him. If two Lords hold the weave, the Weaver feeds on both of you. You’ll burn out twice as fast.”
Coren shrugged. “Or we burn bright enough to fix it for good.”
The Spire went quiet again. The threads above them drifted, waiting.
Kael looked at his arm. The mark was so close to his heart he could feel it beat.
Two choices. Trust his brother who killed to save the world.
Or trust the woman who said saving it would kill him.