"I don't know what I saw.I don't know what this means.But the seams are real.And they're starting to pull."
The thread vanished.
One blink, and it was gone—like breath in frost, like memory dissolving upon waking.
Darian sat still, quill hovering above parchment, ink slowly spreading into the fibers of the paper. The candle flame steadied again, indifferent. The room returned to silence.
But something had shifted.He had seen it.
Again.
A thread, no longer suspended in the mirror or veiled behind dreams, but here—direct, near, undeniable.
He didn't touch it this time.Didn't need to.The air had told him enough.
He set the quill down and closed the parchment. Folded it twice, then tucked it beneath the floorboard beside his cot—the one that always creaked, the one no one stepped on.
His hand hovered a moment longer before sealing it shut.
The candle's light danced across his features—drawn, pale, hollowed by questions he didn't know how to ask.
The following day crawled.
He moved through his duties in a trance: fetching coal, polishing handles, washing out silver vessels for a celebration he would never attend. The other servants avoided him more than usual. Perhaps it was the circles beneath his eyes. Or the way his movements had grown precise—too quiet, too focused, as though mimicking threads he no longer saw but could still feel.
He caught glimpses. Tiny flickers in the corners of rooms. Lines along the edges of objects that shimmered too long before fading.
He said nothing.
He wrote nothing.
He only watched.
In the late afternoon, he was sent to deliver a sealed bottle of Darenthor wine—aged, dust-covered, and worth more than most servants earned in a year—to the upper halls. His path took him near the Grand Gallery, where lords and ladies often strolled in idle judgment beneath stained-glass saints.
As he passed a narrow arch, voices leaked from within.
"…and if the boy causes trouble, you know what to do."
A pause.
"You don't have to remind me. His mother was trouble enough. The last thing we need is another dreamwalker."
Dreamwalker?
Darian froze.
He pressed his back against the stone wall, barely breathing.
Another voice now—softer, clipped, older. "He's a stain. An echo. He shouldn't even be here."
"And yet here he is," the first voice replied. "Which means someone must be watching."
Footsteps.
Darian slid back, ducking into a side passage before the arch emptied. Two noblemen passed down the corridor—tall, robed, faces he had seen but never been allowed to name.
They didn't notice him.
But the word followed him like a weight around the throat.
Dreamwalker.
He didn't know what it meant.
But they had said it with disgust.
And fear.
That night, he returned to the room.
His mother's chamber.
The door resisted him, as if the wood had swollen with memory. It groaned as it opened, a breath of must and shadow spilling into his face.
He stepped inside.
The air was still heavy. Still charged.
The mirror remained covered.
He didn't uncover it.
He didn't need to.
Instead, he went to the wardrobe—the one sealed with red wax. He had not touched it before.
Now, his fingers hovered above the wax seal. The sigil upon it was faint—rubbed nearly to nothing: a spiral. Again.
He pressed gently.
The wax cracked.
He opened the wardrobe.
Inside, carefully folded: robes of black and silver, a velvet sash embroidered with patterns so fine they looked like they moved. A pair of gloves, unstitched at the fingertips. And beneath them all, a box.
Wooden. Locked. No key in sight.
He picked it up. It was light. Too light.
But the weight of what it held pressed on him nonetheless.
He returned it to the shelf and stepped back.
Suddenly, a sound behind him.
A breath.
He turned.
Nothing.
But the candle in the room had dimmed, just slightly, and for a moment—just a flicker—he thought he saw a shape in the mirror beneath the cloth.
He didn't check.
He backed out slowly and shut the door.
This time, the lock clicked on its own.
The dreams came heavier that night.
Not visions. Not nightmares.
Just a sensation of falling—not through space, but through layers of cloth. Velvet. Silk. Bone. Thought.
Each layer whispering as it passed:
"Unpick. Undo. Unravel."
He woke before dawn, sweating despite the cold.
The air around him shimmered faintly.
He sat up, slowly.
There—on the far wall.
A thread.
Pale. Vertical. Still.
He stared.
It did not vanish.
And then—
It bent.
Just slightly. Toward him.
He didn't breathe.
It bent again. As though drawn by something beneath his ribs.
He stood.
It retreated.
Not vanished—just moved. Slid along the wall, disappearing behind the bookshelf.
He stepped forward.
Traced its path.
Found nothing.
But behind the lowest shelfboard, the wood had warped—ever so slightly. A gap no one would have seen.
He pried it loose.
Inside: a folded slip of parchment, brittle with age.
Five words, again.
Written in the same hand.
"Follow the ones no one sees."
The day passed in a haze.
Darian saw people, but not faces.
He walked halls, but not destinations.
His world had narrowed to lines. Angles. Threads that weren't there—until they were.
He no longer questioned their appearance.
He only followed.
At dusk, he found himself at the edge of the lower cloister gardens—a place half-swallowed by vines and silence.
No one ever came here.
But the thread did.
It shimmered faintly in the dying light, curling around the base of a crumbling statue—an old saint whose face had long since eroded.
He stepped closer.
And heard the breath again.
Not air. Not wind.
A presence.
Behind him.
He turned.
A boy. Maybe eleven. Dirty. Thin. Barefoot.
He stood near the gate, eyes wide and fixed on Darian's chest.
"Y-you see them," the boy whispered.
Darian froze.
The boy pointed—not at him, but slightly behind him.
"They're all over you. The strings."
Darian opened his mouth. No sound came.
The boy flinched.
"They're moving," he whispered. "They like you."
Then he ran.
Darian chased him.
Across stone, through weeds, around corners.
But when he turned the final bend—
—the boy was gone.
No footsteps. No breath. No thread.
Only silence.
And a candle burning in a window far above.
His own.
That night, Darian didn't write.
He didn't sleep.
He sat.
And listened.
And somewhere between one breath and the next…
…he began to feel the thread inside himself.
Tugging.
Not out.
But deeper in.
"They're not visions.Not madness.They're markers.And I'm starting to believe they've been waiting."