The runes hung before me, still and ethereal. For a second they pulled me straight back into the Trial, back to when looking at each one had meant exactly one thing. My impending death.
YUN OF CLAIOM
DOMAIN: FATE
Looking at my Domain, I let out a short sigh. I still had so many fucking questions, which was insane considering I was the one who had written this fucking mess in the first place.
My eyes moved down to my Aspect.
ASPECT: UNWRITTEN
What was never written holds no promised ending, and thus, Fate itself bends to your will.
The words settled into me as I worked out what they meant. Technically, I was not even supposed to be in this world at all. Maybe that explained the strange Domain. But I knew it was not that simple. It never was. There were still too many gaps.
TIER I: AWAKENED
RELIQUARY: FORMING
I was an Awakened now, my first Reliquary formed.
Each Reliquary unlocked as a person advanced through the stages of being Touched, and each one carried its own ceiling, a ceiling that only rose as Saturated Ichor filled it.
Each Reliquary carried three levels of progression as you saturated it, and only once it was fully saturated were you finally allowed to take your next Soul Trial, aiming to grow another Reliquary and start the whole process over again.
Each Reliquary made you stronger, faster, quite literally turning you into a higher being, and also increased the amount of Ichor you could store and use.
But it did not stop there; each Reliquary also gave you new abilities tied to your Aspect.
Each Aspect carried two types of abilities, Acts and Imprints.
Acts were simply the face of your Aspect. They drew on the Ichor stored inside you and let you pull off feats straight out of the kind of fantasy I used to only write.
Imprints, on the other hand, were tied more to your Mark itself. Some people carried their Mark on their body; others had it in the form of an object, or even a being, and Imprints were the abilities that touched on that.
And while each Reliquary earned you one more Act and one more Imprint, there was also the Anchor. You could carry multiple Acts and Imprints, but only ever one Anchor that came with your very first Reliquary, the fundamental thing that tied your Aspect to existing at all.
But abilities were never the whole of it, and I had made sure of that myself, back when I wanted nothing more than to watch my protagonist suffer for a few hundred more pages.
Now I was at the fucking end of it carrying my own Burden, the very cost of carrying a god’s lineage while a mortal.
And that was not the worst part. As you grew stronger, your Burden grew with you, ensuring there was no workaround. There never was one, and there never could be.
BURDEN
BLANK PAGE
The clearer the threads become, the harder it grows to see the lives tied to them, until people are only puppets, and puppets exist to be moved.
My eyes moved to my Burden, and for a moment I almost laughed out loud in the corridors of the manor.
How fucking fitting.
He must be laughing at his own grave right now, the damn protagonist.
I remembered that last night clearly now, what Aela had seen in me to react the way she had. It had been my eyes. Eyes that had stopped seeing her as herself and started seeing something else entirely. Find the original chapter at g.com.
My fists clenched without me meaning to.
Fuck this. Everyone carried a Burden. I just needed to adapt, to live with it there, and not let it run me. But that was easier thought than done, and I would know it, since I had written that rule myself, long before any of this started.
Turning my attention away, I focused on my abilities instead.
ACT
THREAD’S WARNING
A fatal ending may be lived once before it comes due, then undone, leaving only the memory of dying behind.
My first Act. Reading it let something close to euphoria pass through me, just for a second making me entirely forget about that damn Burden. I had spent years writing about exactly these kinds of abilities in pieces of fiction, and now somehow I carried one myself.
But then I focused back on the actual words and reality dawned on me as I realised I had no fucking clue what any of it meant.
My mind went straight back to the Trial, replaying the lines as I cursed myself inwardly.
Another mess I had brought on myself, and it was every bit as annoying to sit on the receiving end of it as I always imagined it would be if the characters had ever been real to begin with.
The Ledger only ever told you what an ability was, never how to use it. All of it came dressed in the same nonsensical flowery language I used to call the Language of the Gods, back when I thought it sounded clever.
And now I had one of my own, with no idea what it did and nobody there who could tell me.
Maybe I would have wanted to kill myself too, if I were in his place.
IMPRINTS
SPUN
A thread may be drawn where nothing existed before, gentle enough to bind and fine enough to cut.
Something simpler, at least. My eyes dropped to the faint lines on my forearms, remembering how threads of the same silver had passed clean through them during the Trial.
So I could pull threads out of nothing and use them however I wanted.
I stopped in the corridor and tried it. The Ichor sat low in my gut, the same restless pressure I had felt since the trial, and I pushed it toward my arms.
Heat crawled up under the skin of my Mark, and something in my stomach clenched hard, drawing tight around itself.
I stood there for a second, waiting on nothing.
It made sense, once I stopped being an idiot. I had pushed the Ichor and forgotten to want the thread.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the thread itself instead, and felt the pull under my skin change direction.
A thread broke the surface of my forearm. Thin and silver, it caught just enough of the morning light to prove it was really there. It hung a few inches off my skin, stopping dead in the air.
I could not help but grin like a total idiot, still in the middle of the corridor.
A few inches was nothing. Given time I could be cutting a man’s throat with it, or wrapping it around a wrist before he ever saw my hand move. The possibilities were endless. Genuinely endless. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
I let the thread fade and pulled the runes back up, eyes moving to what was left.
ANCHOR
STEADY HAND
Chance rarely announces a favourite, and yet a mistake turns fortunate just often enough to matter, but never quite enough to prove.
My Anchor read fancier than it needed to, though the meaning underneath seemed simple enough if I was reading it right.
Wait. Was I just luckier now?
I dismissed the runes. The corridor opened ahead of me, the training yard sitting in the distance against the early morning sun.
I had never set foot here, not as myself. Yet my body moved on its own, muscle memory doing the walking.
After all, this yard had been Yun’s second home since the day his mother died.
Regardless of the day, regardless of how badly he had been beaten the one before, he always showed up here every morning. His Jian with him, strapped to his side.
I almost laughed at the memory of it, how he had been barely eleven and had marched in here in front of Arn, standing there and asking to be trained.
Sure, he had been the son of the Head, but he had always been known throughout House Claiom for the wrong reasons. His looks never matched Claiom’s silver and violet; instead they carried the plain dark of his mother’s blood, from House Urhas.
And then there was the frail build that did nothing to help his case.
Arn had turned him away that first day like he should have, and regardless he came back the next morning anyway, and the one after that.
When Arn kept refusing to teach him, he had grabbed a longsword off the rack himself. The weight had been too much for his thin, frail body, and yet he had stood there holding it as he tried to copy the retainers around him.
Maybe that was what had finally swayed the man. Since that day, Arn had taken him in and trained him himself.
He had given him his first Jian, given how weak he had been, and through the years that had not changed. What had changed though was his skill with the blade.
Looking at the memories now, I could see how pitifully weak he had been, honestly. And yet his technique with the Jian had been unmatched, as if he had been born to hold one. If not for Ichor augmenting them, he could have made short work of most retainers here, had it come down to technique alone.
And now I carried all of it within me. All that technique, that talent, that hard work he had spent years building in the dark, when no one had been there to see it or acknowledge it.
Some part of me hated that, but the rest of me had already decided to make use of the legacy he had left behind.
My eyes moved over the yard stretching out beyond me, wide enough to fill my whole view, walled in on every side.
The near wall carried House Claiom’s banner, an ivory horn stitched into it, the tip dyed black against the rest of the polished white.
An alcove ran along one side, wooden shelves stacked with row after row of weapons catching the morning sun. Sparring posts and dummies filled the other end, where a dozen retainers were already lost in their morning drills.
In the middle of it, my eyes found him.
Broad-shouldered, his silver hair long and faded almost to white. But where the rest of the bloodline carried violet, his eyes were a faint blue, already turned toward me like he had felt me watching.
For some reason, despite never having held a sword or thrown a real punch in my life, I wanted nothing more than to spar with him right there.
It was a strange feeling, like I had held a sword my whole life. Every move, every bit of the technique already sitting there, waiting. At least for Yun.
But now, in some way, for me as well.