The Thread Ceremony was supposed to be sacred.
To the other children, it was their becoming—the day they'd stop being peasants and start being spellcasters. Even in a forgotten dust settlement like Litchfield, the ceremony was never skipped. Not even for the plagueborn. Not even for orphans.
And definitely not for Ari Solen, the strange boy with the far-off eyes and unsettling calm.
No one knew he was different. They just felt it.
The Thread Altar stood in the ruined chapel at the town's center. Once, it had been grand—a full spellcircle inlaid with True Iron, set with six elemental anchor stones. Now it was cracked, faded, and only three stones still hummed with dormant glyphs.
But it still worked.
Because the Arkanet never forgets.
Ari stood barefoot on the weather-worn sigils, dust rising around his ankles. Twelve years old, lean from hunger but strangely composed. While the other kids fidgeted and clutched prayer tokens, Ari kept his hands loose.
He was scared.
But not of failure.
He was scared of remembering.
"Place your palm on the anchor," said Father Denrick, the old priest who maintained the last rites. His voice trembled. The ceremony was part prayer, part computation.
"And speak your name."
Ari stepped forward.
The Thread Altar pulsed—dimly, like a system waking from deep sleep.
"Ari," he said. Then paused. Something inside resisted the rest. But his mouth moved anyway.
"Ari Solen."
The stones flared.
All of them.
Not three.
Not six.
All Twelve.
The chapel gasped. Even Father Denrick stumbled back. The altar wasn't supposed to do that. The other stones—long dead, long disconnected—hadn't reacted to anyone in generations.
The light intensified.
Glyphs spun into the air, wrapping Ari in glowing, recursive spirals of code.
And then the Arkanet spoke.
THREAD CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN
THREAD SIGNATURE: ROOT [ACCESS SEAL PARTIAL OVERRIDE DETECTED]
WARNING: THREAD TYPE NON-STANDARD
EXECUTING SYSTEM BACKUP TRACE...
MEMORY PARTIAL RESTORE COMMENCING
Ari staggered.
His heart raced—not from fear, but from the sudden torrent of memory clawing its way back into him.
He saw flashes of the world before. Not Earth, not Heaven. But the space between simulations—a logic field, pure and cold.
A place of System Weavers.
He had been one of them.
But now?
He was something else.
The glyphs intensified.
The entire altar fractured—not destroyed, but rewritten, like an old program forced to run bleeding-edge code.
Children screamed. Dust exploded into radiant lines.
And Ari—
—floated.
Not high. Just inches. But enough.
Light poured from his eyes and fingers, shaped like sigils no one recognized. The Arkanet wrapped around him like a boot sequence, trying to reconcile an entity it had archived as dead code.
RESTRICTION LIFTED: PRIMARY CORE ACCESS GRANTED
THREAD STATUS: UNTHREADED / ROOT-WIRED HYBRID
FIRST ABILITY UNLOCKED: SYSTEM ECHO [LEVEL 1]
Spell Description: Read and replicate any spell within line-of-sight as transient code.
Ari hit the ground on his knees, panting.
The light was gone. The altar was cracked.
And the priest was kneeling.
Not in awe.
In terror.
"What are you?" the priest whispered.
Ari didn't answer. He wasn't sure yet.
But the voices had returned.
Whispers of threads beyond threads. Echoes of spells not yet cast.
Somewhere, hidden between the glyphs still circling his vision, a final line blinked slowly.
OBSERVER THREAD STILL ACTIVE
TRACE: STALKCLASS // PERMISSION LEVEL: UNKNOWN
CLOSING LOG… FOR NOW.
Ari clenched his fist. The power hadn't fully returned.
Not yet.
But something had changed.
The world had noticed him.
And it wouldn't be long before something came looking.