Free Web NovelChapter 27: Threadseer
Aidan walked out to the pond.
If he was going to pull a stranger out of somewhere across the Nine Realms Tree, he figured he’d do it somewhere open, with room to run if the room turned out to be a bad idea.
Morning light sat on the water. The Tier-7 energy pooled thick here, close enough to see, a faint silver shimmer breathing above the surface. Behind him the house was quiet. Solenne was still asleep in a room he’d told her was hers now, in a house with her name on the deed, in the first safe place she’d had in a long time.
’Right.’ Aidan rolled his shoulders. ’Let’s see who’s home.’
He reached for the talent.
Exotic Summoner answered instantly, eager, an X-rank thing with no ceiling stretching wide at the first excuse. A portal tore open above the pond, but it wasn’t like Arthur’s had been. Arthur’s portal had been a clean golden gate. This one came in wrong colors, edges frilling like torn silk, and through it Aidan felt not power, not hunger, but something small.
Small, and old, and very, very far away.
[Manifesting Exotic Portal. Reaching a random Exotic Being. Contact established.]
[Note. This being died before its exotic brilliance ever bloomed. Its potential was never realized in life. As with all such contacts, whether it accepts the pact depends on your first exchange.]
’Died before it bloomed.’ Aidan’s brow creased. ’Like the description said.’
Something stepped through.
It was, at first glance, extremely unimpressive.
It landed on the grass at the pond’s edge with a soft flump, about the size of a housecat, if a housecat were made of dark blue-black fur that drank light instead of catching it. Four legs, too many joints in each. A long ringed tail. Two enormous round eyes, one gold and one silver, set in a small pointed face that managed to look both ancient and deeply, personally offended.
It looked around the estate. At the trees. At the pond. At the shimmer of Tier-7 energy.
Then it looked at Aidan, sat down on its haunches, and spoke in a dry little voice that sounded like it had been waiting a thousand years to complain.
"Oh, wonderful. Another one."
Aidan blinked. "...Another what?"
"Another summoner." The creature’s ringed tail flicked. "Yanks a soul across the width of creation, no warning, no introduction, and stands there with his mouth open like I’m supposed to be grateful." It sniffed. "You all look the same. Big dreams, small manners."
’...What.’ Aidan stared at it.
[The pact is being evaluated, Player Aidan. This being is difficult. Choose your words with care.]
’Difficult. Yeah. I got that.’
Aidan crouched down slowly to put himself at eye level with the offended cat-thing, the way you would with an animal that might bolt or bite.
"Okay," he said. "Fair. I did just yank you here. Sorry about the no-warning thing, the talent doesn’t come with a doorbell." He tilted his head. "What are you?"
The creature drew itself up with enormous dignity, which was difficult at its size.
"I," it announced, "am a Vaelith. A Threadseer of the Deep Vaels." A pause. "Was. Would have been. If certain events had gone differently."
"Would have been," Aidan repeated.
The dignity faltered.
The two mismatched eyes, gold and silver, dimmed a little, and when it spoke again the dryness had a crack running through it.
"I died small," the Vaelith said. "Runt of a doomed litter, in a den the world stepped on without noticing. My kind see threads. The ways things are connected. Cause to consequence, choice to outcome, the whole tangled weave of what-leads-to-what." Its tail curled around its feet. "A grown Threadseer can read the weave of an empire. Warn a city of a war a decade out. Guide a fool away from the cliff he’s about to walk off." It looked at the pond, not at Aidan. "I never grew. I saw the first inch of my own thread and then it was cut. I’ve spent whatever-comes-after being nothing but a promise nobody kept. Including me."
Aidan went quiet.
He knew that feeling. Better than almost anyone alive.
A life ended before it got to be a life. Potential rotting in the dark, unspent. The specific, grinding grief of having been meant for something and getting nothing.
He’d lived a billion years of it.
"Yeah," Aidan said softly. "I know that one."
The Vaelith’s ears twitched. Its eyes cut back to him, sharp again, and this time they didn’t just look at his face.
They looked through it.
The gold eye and the silver eye caught the morning light and held it, and Aidan felt something brush against the inside of his chest, gentle, curious, a whisker-touch against the enormous tangled knot of everything he was.
Then the Vaelith recoiled.
Its fur stood on end. Its back arched. Both eyes blew wide, gold and silver going huge, and it scrambled backward three steps before it caught itself.
"What," it breathed, "are you."
"Long story."
"Your thread." The Vaelith’s dry voice had gone thin. "I looked. I always look, it’s what I am, I can’t not. Everyone’s thread runs back a little way and forward a little way and it’s all very tidy." It swallowed. "Yours doesn’t run back. It goes down. Into a dark that has no threads in it at all, a place that eats them, and it goes down and down and down for so long I couldn’t find the bottom, and then, right at the end of all that nothing, it comes back up." Its ears flattened. "Nothing comes back up. Nothing has ever come back up. What you did should not be a shape a thread can make."
Aidan smiled, and it was a tired, honest thing.
"I got out," he said simply. "That’s the whole trick. I was somewhere that unmakes people, for longer than I can hold in my head, and I decided I wasn’t done. So I got out."
The Vaelith stared at him.
Something was happening behind those mismatched eyes, some vast recalculation, a creature that read the shapes of fate looking at a man whose fate had done the impossible and simply refused to end.
"You came back from the place threads die," it said slowly. "And you’re offering me a pact."
"I’m offering you a pact." Aidan shrugged. "I don’t really know how to sell it. I’ve got a dragon who’s asleep in a cocoon evolving into something scarier, a girl upstairs I pulled off a ledge yesterday, more money than sense, and a whole lot of anger I’m trying to spend responsibly." He met the little creature’s eyes. "I don’t need you for fighting. I’ve got fighting covered. But I’m walking into things I can’t see the shape of. People with backing I can’t trace. A war I don’t understand the sides of yet." He held out one hand, palm up, the way he had for Arthur. "You see the ways things connect. I’m about to need that. And you never got to grow into it."
The Vaelith looked at the offered hand.
"You’re saying," it said carefully, "you’d let me finish blooming. The thing I died before doing." freewёbnoνel.com
"I’m saying I’d be a fool not to. And you’d be a fool to say no to the one thread in existence that already beat the ending." Aidan grinned. "We’re both fools who didn’t get to finish. Let’s finish together."
For a long moment the little creature didn’t move. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Then, slowly, it padded forward across the grass, and set one small blue-black paw into the center of Aidan’s open palm.
The mismatched eyes flared, gold and silver, bright as coins in the sun.
"...Fine," the Vaelith said, with enormous reluctance and something underneath it that was almost, almost hope. "But I’m keeping my complaints. All of them. You get the thread-sight and the attitude as a set."
[Pact accepted.]
[You have formed an Exotic Pact with a Vaelith Threadseer of the Deep Vaels.]
[Warning. This being’s exotic potential was never realized. Under your Exotic Summoner talent, it will now bloom along its true path for the first time.]
A soft light rose off the little creature, threading through its dark fur in lines of gold and silver, and Aidan felt a second warmth settle into his chest beside the sleeping ember that was Arthur, smaller, sharper, watchful.
The Vaelith shook itself, sat down, and immediately looked put out again.
"Right. First order of business." It fixed him with the gold eye. "I refuse to be summoned as ’hey, you.’ The dragon got a name. I want a name. A good one. Better than his."
Aidan laughed, the first easy laugh he’d had in days.
"Yeah," he said. "I can do that."
He looked at the small strange creature that read the shapes of fate, the runt that died in the dark and came back to bloom, and thought about threads, and second chances, and the long way up out of nothing.
"Your name is—"
