When Ari opened his eyes again, it wasn't to code-lit skies or crystalline syntax hills.
It was to a dirt ceiling, cracked and leaking dust, and the soft, haggard breathing of someone nearby.
He was alive.
More accurately: he was born.
His lungs burned. His skin prickled. His body—a child's body—was too small, too fragile. He was wrapped in roughspun wool, lying on a straw mat in a one-room cottage. No glyphs lit the walls. No circuits hummed beneath the ground.
Magic wasn't absent. It was just distant—like a signal just outside the range of an antenna.
Ari blinked, his vision blurry and doubled. Not from damage. From disorientation.
The System was quiet. No floating UI. No status.
Just cold air and the scent of boiled roots.
A woman leaned over him. Thin, worn hands cupped his cheeks. Her eyes were hollow, but soft. She wasn't young. And she looked exhausted in the way only mothers can.
"My boy," she whispered in a dialect that didn't exist five minutes ago but Ari understood anyway. "You made it."
She smiled like someone who had lost too many children.
He couldn't speak. His throat worked, but only a soft cry escaped.
And inside him, something flickered.
USER: ARI.SOLEN // INSTANCE: CHILD
THREAD STATUS: UNINITIALIZED
RESTRICTIONS: LOCKED [MEMORY], LOCKED [CORE ABILITIES]
INITIATION CONDITION: UNKNOWN
LOCATION: DOMAIN: GAELTHROWN > CLASS 0.0 SETTLEMENT: LITCHFIELD
A pulse of system data rolled through his consciousness—encrypted and veiled, as though it came from a distant backup drive buried under wet stone.
Something—someone—had sealed his power.
Not erased it. Not lost it. Just… hidden.
Not from others. From himself.
Ten Years Later
Ari was poor.
Not in the metaphorical, character-building sense, but in the too-hungry-to-cry, burn-dung-for-heat kind of way. Litchfield was a dust-tier settlement, a fringe-zone commune barely scraping the lowest rung of Arkanetica's stratified society. The Kingdom of Roven considered it too small to govern and too poor to protect.
There were no Thread Schools here. No Class Altars.
Just labor, illness, and old books no one could read.
Ari could, though.
At five, he'd cracked the glyphs in the preacher's prayerbook.
At seven, he recited ancient code fragments that buzzed in the minds of others like music.
At nine, he heard something no one else could: the faint whisper of System Threads humming through the stones of the church, buried like veins under centuries of dirt.
It wasn't magic in the usual sense.
He couldn't cast spells.
He couldn't even light a candle.
Because his Thread was sealed.
status: inactive
class access: denied
spellcasting protocol: unavailable
root access: dormant
But every now and then, when he focused—when his will hardened like iron around a concept—he'd feel something spark.
Like the world was waiting for him to remember the right word.
Most kids got their Threads at twelve, during their Class Weaving. They'd stand before the Thread Altar, place their hands on the Anchor Stone, and the Arkanet would scan their potential, their philosophy, their soul—then bind them into one of the Magic Lineages.
Shardweaver. Flamewright. Dominion Knight. Nullcaster. Fatescript. Dozens more.
Thread class determined spell access, status, and power level. It was identity as infrastructure.
And Ari was terrified of it.
Not because he thought he'd fail.
Because he thought he'd break it.
On the eve of his Thread Ceremony, Ari sat on the roof of the broken church with his legs dangling over the side. The stars were dim here. No auroras. No syntax skies.
But if he looked hard enough—just for a second—he could see layers beneath the fabric of the night. Patterns behind the stars. Pulsing lines.
Code.
"You don't belong here," he whispered to himself. "You weren't born. You were deployed."
And deep inside his mind, something stirred.
TRIGGER FLAG: NEARING INITIATION
UNLOCK CONDITION: CLASS INTERFACE ENGAGEMENT
MEMORY LOCK: PARTIAL LIFT SCHEDULED
WARNING: PRESENCE DETECTED > OBSERVER THREAD TRACER ACTIVE
A shiver ran down his spine.
He wasn't the only anomaly.
Something—or someone—was watching.
The next morning, he'd be placed before the stone, like all the others.
If he was lucky, it would reject him, mark him unworthy, and he'd live a quiet, powerless life.
If he was unlucky... the System would remember what he was.
And then?
The world wouldn't be able to ignore him anymore.