Tom Blackwood worked me like a mule with opinions.
Every morning at six, I showed up at The Crooked Beam, and every morning, he put me on the floor. That was the lesson. Get knocked down, get up, get knocked down again. The philosophy was simple: you would get hit, you would fall, and the only question was what you did afterward. The answer was to get up faster than you fell.
By the end of the first week, I could take a hit without my ribs forcing me to stop breathing for three seconds. A few days later, I could throw a combination of two jabs and a cross that would actually land on a man who wasn’t trying too hard to dodge. Tom didn’t compliment my progress. He just moved the line. "Faster," he’d say, and then he’d swing at me, forcing me to move faster or eat the punch.
He didn’t talk much outside training. But once, after a session that left me gasping for air, he sat across from me and said, "You fight like a man who’s thinking instead of reacting. You’re in your head too much. The body doesn’t think. The body moves. You need to let it."
"I’m not sure I know how to do that."
"That’s the problem. You know too much. Knowing is slow. Reacting is fast." He tapped his temple. "Get out of there. The body knows what to do. You just keep getting in its way."
He was right. I was always in my head too much. But fighting wasn’t analysis. It was the body doing what it did when the brain shut up long enough to let it.
So I practiced shutting up. Tom would swing, and I’d try to react without thinking. Mostly, I’d get hit. But sometimes, for a brief moment, I’d move before I even realized I was moving. The punch would miss, and Tom would grunt, which was his version of applause.
Clara and I fell into a rhythm. Not a romantic one, not yet, but a practical one. She handled the town’s daily business while her father dealt with the bigger matters, and I was the guest who ate at her table, walked with her to the market, and sat in the garden while she worked through her paperwork.
We didn’t talk about the big things. We talked about the small things. The price of grain, the farmer who kept overcharging for eggs, and the seer who’d set up a tent on the edge of the market and told fortunes for two coppers.
"The seer," Clara said one afternoon, not looking up from her papers. "She arrived three days ago. Her name is Pell. She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that a great traveler has come to the region, that the prophecies are being fulfilled, and that the age of heroes is at hand."
I looked up from the garden bench where I was pretending to sharpen the blade Gwen had made me. "Pell?"
"You know the name?"
I didn’t. But I knew what she represented. I’d written seers into the world as background texture, nothing more than a line in the story bible about how people in this world knew of the hero’s coming.
Seers and soothsayers spread prophecies of the hero’s arrival.
That was all I’d written. No specific seer. No Pell. But the narrative had filled in the blanks, and now she was in Millhaven, telling people that Ren was the prophesied traveler.
"What has she been saying?" I asked.
"That a man from beyond the eastern sea came through the gate. That he carries the mark of the traveler. That he’ll face great trials and emerge victorious." Clara set down her quill. "She’s drawing crowds. People are excited. A real hero in Millhaven. It’s good for morale, which is good for the town, which is good for my father. That’s why he hasn’t asked her to stop."
"Do you believe her?"
Clara looked at me. "No. Actually, I don’t know."
That was fair. Not believing in prophecies was perfectly reasonable, but deep down, I knew Pell was talking about Ren. He was the hero, after all. The man the story had been built around.
Going to see her was probably a bad idea.
Naturally, I went anyway.
Pell’s tent stood at the edge of the market square. It was small, made of canvas stretched over a wooden frame, with a sign painted in symbols I didn’t recognize. The fee was two coppers, which I didn’t have. I waited until the line cleared, then walked in without paying.
Because, well, why not?
Pell was older than I’d expected.
Not ancient, but weathered. Her face was lined, her hands rough, and her eyes a pale gray. She sat on a stool behind a small table. The moment I entered, she looked at me and kept looking, as though she’d forgotten there was anyone else in the world.
I assumed she was waiting for me to pay her two coppers.
"Sit, child," she said.
Her voice was low and rough, like gravel in a paper bag.
I sat.
She studied me for a long time. Longer than was comfortable. It was the kind of stare that seemed to go beyond your face and straight into whatever lay beneath it.
"You don’t have a thread," she said.
My heart stopped. Just for a beat, but long enough for me to feel it skip before starting again.
"What do you mean?"
"I see the threads of everyone who comes to me. The baker, the farmer, the guard. They all have threads. Thin or thick, it doesn’t matter. They all have them." She leaned forward slightly. "You don’t. You’re blank. You’re like a hole in the weave."
She tilted her head, her gray eyes searching my face.
"I’ve never seen anyone without a thread. The prophecies don’t mention people without threads. You’re not supposed to be here."
I shifted in my seat, only then realizing how tense I’d become.
"Can anyone else see them? These threads you speak of?"
"No. Only seers. That’s why we’re seers. We see what other people can’t." She leaned forward again. "The traveler has the thickest thread I’ve ever seen. Bright, golden, woven through everything. He’s the center of the weave."
Her gaze returned to me.
"But you? You’re not in the weave at all."
I needed to leave. I needed to think about what she’d said and what it meant. If Pell could see that I didn’t have a thread, then the narrative had given seers the ability to perceive its own structure. That was a level of self-awareness I’d never planned for.
But I was connected to the story. I was inside it, living in the body of a character I’d created. So why couldn’t she see my thread?
Unless I didn’t have one.
"Does anyone know about this?" I asked. "About people without threads?"
"No." She shrugged. "You’re the first one I’ve seen."
I left the tent.
The market was loud, warm, and perfectly normal around me. Vendors shouted their prices, children ran between stalls, and the smell of fresh bread drifted through the air. I walked through it all feeling as though I were moving through a world that could see less of me than I could see of it.
I found Clara in the garden. She sat on the bench with her papers, but she looked up as soon as I entered and immediately noticed something was wrong.
"What?" she asked.
"I went to see the seer."
"And?"
"She said a whole bunch of nothing."
Clara put down her papers. "What does that mean?"
"It means she said nothing that made any sense." I sat across from her. "We should forget about her."
Clara was quiet for a moment. She picked up her papers, set them down, then picked them up again. It was something she did whenever she was trying to fit a problem into categories that didn’t quite accommodate it.
"I suppose we should."
"Yup."
"Joseph."
She said my name the way she always did when I was being difficult, emphasizing the second syllable with the patience of someone who had learned that pushing me rarely worked.
"You keep saying you can’t explain things. You keep knowing things you shouldn’t know. You knew about the letters. You knew about the attack, and now you’ve visited a seer who’s apparently telling you a whole bunch of nothing."
"I’m surprised as well."
"No, you’re not." She put her papers aside. "You walked into that tent already half expecting her to say something like that. I watched you leave the house. You weren’t curious. You were confirming something."
She was too sharp for her own good. She read people the way her father did, patiently observing them and connecting details other people missed.
I couldn’t lie to her. Not convincingly, anyway. But I also couldn’t tell her the truth.
"I’m not from here," I said. "That’s all I can give you right now. I’m not from here, and I know things because of where I’m from. I can’t explain where that is. Not yet. Maybe not ever."
Clara studied me. The afternoon light had turned amber, and the garden was quiet except for the occasional rustle of leaves. The herb beds smelled of sage and rosemary.
"You’re asking me to trust you."
"You could put it that way, I guess."
"You’re asking me to trust a man I know almost nothing about?" She stood. "I chose to stay, Joseph. I chose you over Ren. I need you to understand what that means. It means I have faith in your capabilities."
"I know."
"Do you?" She looked at me for a moment before continuing. "Maren is supposed to be in Haremdale City. She’s been gone for over a week. When she comes back, she’ll have questions for you. She’ll want to know everything."
"I’ll try to remember that."
"You really should." Her voice softened, but when she looked at me again, I caught that familiar hint of jealousy. "Just be careful, Joseph."
She went inside.
I stayed on the bench as the sun sank below the horizon and the garden fell into darkness. I thought about the seer who could see threads, and the man in the dark coat whose threads Scrivener’s Eye couldn’t reveal.
The similarities bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
Was he like me? Or was he something worse? Another hole in the weave, something that didn’t belong?
The story was alive, and somehow, it knew something was wrong.
And I was the wrong thing.
My divergence remained at eighteen percent. I still had no idea what would happen when it reached one hundred.
Would it really be my story at that point?