Chapter 1: The Unlit Wick
The Awakening Hall was a monument to power and peril, its obsidian walls towering like the ribs of some primordial beast. Gold veins streaked through the stone, glowing faintly as if molten sunlight had been trapped within. Stained glass windows loomed high above, their panes depicting Librarians of old: heroes with quills that carved reality into submission, warriors shackling roaring beasts into Prison Books, scholars drowning in rivers of liquid knowledge. The air hummed with the static of unstable narratives, thick with the musk of aged parchment and the iron tang of fear.
Kael Vostra stood at the edge of the dais, his borrowed linen robe hanging loose on his wiry frame. The garment reeked of saltfish and failure—handed down from a cousin who'd been rejected three years prior. Around him, the other candidates whispered, their voices sharp with privilege. Sons and daughters of spice magnates, guildmasters, and chrono-fruit moguls, they wore robes stitched with family sigils and faces flushed with unearned confidence.
Focus, Kael told himself, digging his nails into his palms. This is your only chance.
His father's voice echoed in his memory, rough as dock ropes: "Librarians don't mend nets, boy. They mend fates."
The Librarian Overseer stepped forward, her black robes rippling like ink. Silver runes coiled across the fabric, binding spells that hissed as they moved. Her face was a mask of glacial indifference, eyes pale as frosted glass. In her hands, she cradled the Tome of First Stories, its cover bound in the scaled hide of a storm drake. The book pulsed faintly, its pages whispering promises of power and prison.
"Candidate Kael Vostra," she intoned.
Kael climbed the dais, his bare feet flinching against the cold stone. The Overseer unrolled the Tome. Its pages glowed a venomous green, casting jagged shadows that writhed like caged animals.
"Place your hand upon the narrative," she commanded.
He pressed his palm to the parchment. Cold seared his skin—deeper than winter, deeper than the abyssal trenches where ghost-ships drifted. The ink stirred, letters unraveling into chaos. Symbols he couldn't comprehend slithered across the page, coiling into a verdict that burned itself into his vision:
THE STORY REFUSES YOU.
Laughter erupted behind him. Cruel, familiar. Tyrus Renliss, draped in silk-lined linen, his fingers glittering with chrono-rings looted from a time-lost caravan. "Net-binder's whelp," he sneered. "Did you really think you could bind a beast?"
The Overseer snapped the Tome shut. "Next candidate."
Kael stumbled down the dais, the robe tangling around his legs. The hall blurred—a smear of mocking faces, glinting stained glass, and the Overseer's icy disdain. He fled into the labyrinth beyond, where the City of Pebbles coiled like a serpent drunk on its own venom.
The streets were a cacophony of fractured realities and commerce. Today was the Day of Awakening, and the market thrived on desperation. Vendors hawked wares from a hundred dimensions:
Beast merchants displayed cages of shrieking creatures—feathered serpents from desert realms, ice-wolves whose breath crystallized the air, and prismatic slugs that oozed hallucinogenic slime.
Core traders peddled crystalline beast cores, their innards swirling with elemental energy. A grizzled hawker thrust a fire-drake core at Kael. "Ignite your destiny, boy! Cheap for you!"
Prison Book peddlers whispered of "gently used" tomes, their covers stitched from the hides of failed espers. One flickered open, revealing a screaming face pressed against the parchment.
Kael shoved past a stall selling mirrorwine—a liquid that showed drinkers their deaths—and ducked into an alley reeking of void-spice. A dead end shimmered ahead, its air warped like heat haze. Beyond it, a sub-realm flickered: a garden of frozen flames, their petals curling in a windless breeze. A child's laughter echoed from within, high and distorted. He recoiled. Last month, a spice merchant had wandered into a similar rift; they'd found his corpse days later, clutching a bouquet of singing flowers.
"Make way!"
A Librarian enforcer barged past, his black robes stitched with silver chains that clinked like bones. He dragged a shackled man behind him—a rogue mage, his face bloodied, eyes hollow.
"Another rebel," a fishmonger muttered, spitting into the canal. "Bound for the Eternal Script."
The mage raised his head, meeting Kael's gaze. His eyes looked dead, devoid of all hope. A chill ran up Kael's spine.
As the mage opened his mouth to talk to Kael, the enforcer yanked the chain, silencing him. From his belt hung a Prison Book titled The Light bringer's Lament. Its cover pulsed faintly, the skin of its previous owner still stretched taut across the spine.
Kael turned away, nausea churning his gut. Last winter, he'd watched enforcers bind a water esper into a similar tome. The boy's screams had lingered for hours, his essence dissolving into ink.
The canal district stank of fish guts and lost hopes. The Vostra house slumped at the docks' edge, its stone walls moss-choked, nets hanging like spectral shrouds from the eaves. Kael's father sat on the stoop, mending a trawl net with hands scarred by decades of labor. He didn't look up.
"Well?"
Kael's voice frayed. "They… I wasn't chosen."
The needle paused. "Then you'll work the dawn tide. Sleep."
"Dad—"
"Sleep.* He resumed stitching, the net's fibers groaning. "The buyer needs nets by first light."
Kael climbed the creaking stairs to his room—a closet-sized space with a pallet of moldering straw and a window warped by damp. Below, the canals hissed as a ghost-ship passed, its hull barnacled with coral from a drowned dimension.
He lay awake, the Overseer's verdict burning behind his eyelids.
THE STORY REFUSES YOU.
But as moonlight seeped through the shutters, something stirred in his chest—a spark, faint and foreign, whispering of embers and earth and depths uncharted.