The air in Lethis tasted like a rusted knife. Kael Vritra leaned against the splintered doorframe of the Blackened Quill, watching the street through eyes the color of clotting blood. Rain slashed sideways, pooling in cobblestone cracks stained with things he didn't name. Somewhere, a bell tolled—not for prayer, but curfew. War had made timekeepers of the desperate.
"Another round," he called, tossing a chipped silver coin onto the bar.
The barkeep—a gaunt man with a scar where his left ear should've been—eyed the coin like it might bite. "You've had enough, demonkin."
Kael's smile was a wound. "Careful. You'll hurt my feelings."
He didn't need the drink. He needed the noise, the stink of unwashed bodies, the way the tavern's din drowned out the whispers only he could hear—the hum of the world's threads, taut and trembling. Most days, he ignored them. Today, they itched beneath his skin like a promise.
The door slammed open. Three soldiers in cobalt-and-silver staggers in, armor dented, faces streaked with ash. Kael didn't turn, but he felt their gazes snag on him. Crimson eyes. Shadowspawn.
"You." The tallest soldier's voice dripped with holy venom. "The mercenary who let the Dockside garrison burn."
Kael swirled his wine. "They didn't pay me to die prettily."
The soldier's sword scraped free. "You'll die ugly, then."
Chaos, Kael had learned, was a dance.
He sidestepped the first swing, the blade grazing his ribs. The second soldier lunged, but Kael was already moving, a shadow slipping between strikes. He didn't draw his dagger. Not yet.
It was the third soldier who made the mistake.
The man overreached, and Kael caught his wrist, twisting until bone snapped. The soldier screamed—then gurgled as Kael drove the man's own knife into his throat. Hot blood sprayed the bar.
That's when he felt it—a tug.
A thread.
It shimmered at the edge of his vision, gossamer-thin, spooling from the dying soldier's chest to the tavern door. Kael froze. He'd seen threads before, flickering at reality's corners, but never so clear. Never so loud.
Pull it, something hissed in his skull—a voice like smoke and serrated steel. His demonic blood, restless.
The remaining soldiers charged.
Kael reached.
The world unfolded.
The thread snapped taut, and suddenly he wasn't in the tavern. He was everywhere.
He saw the barkeep's knife hidden beneath the counter.
The rotten beam overhead, groaning under a pigeon's nest.
The second soldier's boot, laces frayed, about to slip on a puddle of wine—
There.
Kael flicked the thread.
The barkeep's knife flew into his hand. The beam cracked. The soldier stumbled.
And then—
Later, they'd call it an accident. A tavern brawl turned massacre. A collapsed roof, a kicked brazier, twenty-three souls swallowed by flame.
But Kael remembered.
He remembered the threads, hundreds of them, erupting like spider silk from every body, every blade, every breath. He'd pulled, and the world obeyed. Blood became kindling. Fear became fuel.
When the screaming stopped, he stood alone in the rubble, his hands trembling, his skin seared with black sigils that hadn't been there before. They coiled up his arms like chains.
"Impressive," came a voice like oiled gears.
A woman stood in the ashes, untouched. Her robes were the gray of tomb dust, her eyes twin voids. A silver key hung at her throat—the mark of the Infernal Cartography.
"You've been busy, Vritra," she said. "We have a job for you."
Kael spat blood. "I don't work for specters."
"Oh, but you will." She smiled, and her teeth were needles. "After all, you've just murdered an Ordos Tempus informant. The celestials do so love their... retribution."
She nodded to the rubble. Beneath a charred beam lay the barkeep's corpse, his chest branded with a sigil Kael recognized—the Ordos' hourglass eye.
Fuck.
The woman pressed a parchment into his burned hand. On it, a name: Elyra Voss, Celestial Envoy.
"Kill her," she said, "and the Cartography will make your... indiscretions disappear."
Kael stared at the smoking ruins of his life. The threads still hummed, hungry.
He laughed.
"Fine. But I want double."
Above the city, unnoticed, a lone raven watched. Its eyes were not a bird's eyes.
They were the color of storm clouds, and they burned with celestial fire.