“Maverick Silkborn.
Step forward.”
The Officiant’s voice carried across the school hall without effort.
It was the voice of a man who had said the same thing 300 times since morning and would have very much liked to go home.
Maverick did not move.
It wasn’t defiance.
His left foot had simply gone numb about an hour ago, and he had been too proud to shift his weight in front of 400 people.
Now the leg refused to cooperate.
‘Great.
Wonderful start.’
Someone behind him snickered, and Maverick felt his face burn.
He gritted his teeth, dragged the dead foot forward, and began the long walk toward the stage with all the grace of a wounded crab.
The whispers started before his third step.
“That’s him.”
“The traitor’s son.”
“They’re really letting him take the Bestowal?”
A foot slid out into the aisle in front of him.
Mav stepped over it without looking down.
‘Ignore them.
I’ve done it for eight years.
I can do it for one more morning.’
Maverick kept his eyes on the stage and his face blank.
He’d had eight years of practice at hiding what he felt.
Inside, he was sick with nerves.
Eight years ago, his father had been declared a traitor and put to death.
That was the official version.
Maverick had a different one, and no one to tell it to.
Since then, people had called him the traitor too, as if treason were something a 10-year-old could inherit.
After a while, the word had stopped stinging and turned into something more like weather.
Unpleasant, but not worth carrying an umbrella for.
Besides, they had a point.
If it were up to the people in this hall, he wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Bestowal.
It was not only the students.
The teachers had asked for his name to be left off the list, and the school had only kept it because the law gave it no choice.
Up in the gallery, the parents of his classmates were watching him the way people watch a rat cross a kitchen.
Luckily, it wasn’t up to them.
It wasn’t up to anyone.
500 years ago, when humanity had grown too big and too clever for its own good, something had answered.
No one knew what it was or where it had come from.
People called it the Genesis, mostly because they had to call it something.
What the Genesis did was simple.
Once a year, it looked at everyone who had turned 18.
It ignored 9 out of 10 people.
But to the tenth, it gave a world.
An actual world, somewhere so far beyond the stars that no ship had ever reached one.
A patch of newborn land, a handful of creatures to rule, and the chance to grow in power and conquer galaxies.
Those chosen few were called the Awakened.
They grew stronger as their worlds did, strong enough to crush stone with their bare hands, and the strongest among them owned everything on Earth worth owning.
The other 90% were called the Worldless.
They owned a shift at the foundry and whatever was left of their backs by the age of 50.
That was all the Bestowal really was.
One morning, one hall, one slab of black stone, and a line of 18-year-olds finding out which kind of person they were going to be.
For most of them, it took about four seconds.
Hand on the stone.
Nothing.
Next.
Mav, as the few people who still spoke to him called him, had been counting all morning.
He counted most things.
It was cheaper than hoping.
Of the 311 students called before him, the stone had lit up for 29.
The rest had walked down the far steps wearing the careful expression of people who had expected nothing and were hurt anyway.
He understood the feeling.
He just couldn’t afford it.
If the stone stayed dark, he would be standing next to his uncle on the foundry floor by the end of the week.
His uncle had worked that floor for 26 years.
He was 44, and he walked like a man of 70.
Mav would stay there for the rest of his life, and the Silkborn name would end quietly, exactly the way certain people had been hoping for eight years.
And if it lit up…
Well.
Then, at midnight, he would be thrown onto an unknown world with nothing but what he could carry on his back.
A lot of new Awakened did not survive their first month, and that thought scared him more than he wanted to admit.
‘One problem at a time.’
He reached the steps.
His foot chose that exact moment to wake up, flooding his leg with pins and needles, and he climbed onto the stage with a grimace that probably looked a lot like fear.
To the left of the stage, the 29 sat on a long bench of their own, already apart from everyone else.
Some of them were still pale.
One girl kept turning her hands over, as if they belonged to someone new.
At the near end, Dorian Ashgrove was watching him come with a wide, delighted smile.
It was the smile of someone who had just been handed a gift.
As Mav passed in front of him, Dorian leaned forward and spoke softly, so that nobody else could hear.
“I hope it lights up, Silkborn.
Out there, nobody will ask what happened to you.”
He was still smiling.
“My father says your little sister cried for her mother until the very end.
I’ve always wondered if you would cry too.”
Mav’s hands closed into fists.
For a moment, he was consumed by uncontrollable rage.
Then he opened them again.
Dorian was a noble’s son, and the stone had already chosen him.
If Mav struck him here, in front of 400 witnesses, the guards would drag him out before he ever touched the stone.
That was exactly what Dorian wanted.
‘I can’t do anything to him.
Not today.
But I’ll remember every word, and one day, he’ll pay for each of them.’
Mav had a second thought under the first one, colder and quieter.
‘How would his father know that?’
He put the question away for later and kept walking.
At the far end sat Cassian Pyrecrest.
He was not watching anything at all.
He looked bored, like someone who had already decided that nobody here was worth his attention.
Mav looked away.
‘He doesn’t even see me.
Fine.
I’m used to it.’
Up close, the Officiant was a thin man in gray robes, with ink on his cuffs and the eyes of someone counting the names left on his list.
Next to him stood the Bestowal stone.
It was a slab of black rock as tall as a man, worn smooth by five centuries of nervous palms.
The Officiant glanced at him, then at the list, then at him again.
Something changed in his expression.
“Silkborn.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man’s lips thinned.
He lowered his voice and said:
“A word of advice, boy.
Whatever happens, walk off quietly.
There is no love for your name in this hall.”
Mav looked at him for a moment.
‘Really?
I hadn’t noticed.’
“I understand, sir.”
The Officiant nodded, like a man crossing one more item off a long list of things that were not his problem.
He pointed at the stone.
“Right hand.
Flat against the surface.
Do not remove it until I tell you to.”
Mav turned to face the slab.
In its dark surface, he could see his own reflection: a lean young man with black hair that needed cutting and a jacket he had outgrown two years ago.
Behind the reflection, there were rows and rows of faces.
Most of them were waiting for him to fail.
A few were hoping he would do it loudly.
He wiped his palm on his trousers.
There was no reason to give the thing a sweaty handshake.
‘10%.
Those are terrible odds.
I’ve never beaten odds like that in my life.’
That was not quite true.
He had beaten far worse once, simply by being somewhere else on the right day.
He tried not to think about that.
Mav’s heart was pounding as he pressed his hand against the stone.
The first thing he noticed was the cold.
The stone was perfectly still, like the door of a vault.
One second passed.
Two.
Somewhere in the hall, someone laughed under their breath.
Three.
‘…Of course.’
Four.
He knew the number well, because four was when the Officiant always said “next.” His stomach sank.
The Officiant drew a breath.
And the stone turned warm.
It began under his palm and spread outward.
Pale light crawled through the black rock like frost across a window, thread by thread, until the whole slab was glowing.
The whispers died.
400 people forgot to breathe at the same time.
Mav forgot too.
Joy rose in his chest, so fast that it almost hurt.
1 in 10.
He was one of the 10.
For a single heartbeat, eight years of weight shifted on his shoulders.
He could not have said whether it had grown lighter or heavier.
Nobody clapped.
For every other student whose stone had lit up, the hall had applauded.
For him, there was only silence.
It stung more than he had expected.
Then the air above the stone rippled, and an image unfolded over the stage for everyone to see.
He had watched it happen 29 times that day.
29 worlds had bloomed above this stage.
Forests.
Red deserts.
A plain of black glass.
Even a ring of burning mountains that had made the Officiant drop his pen.
This one was his.
He looked up.
Water.
Dark water, from one edge of the image to the other, under a sky full of unfamiliar stars.
There was no shore.
No island.
Not so much as a rock.
Mav stared at it and waited for the rest of his world to appear.
It didn’t.
Author’s note: This is my first novel.