The Threshold of Ash
Oakhaven did not let go easily. Even as Elian crested the jagged ridge of the Weeping Peaks, the scent of burning coal and wet wool seemed to cling to his skin like a secondary layer of filth.
Behind him, the city was a smudge of orange fire and grey smoke against the midnight horizon. Somewhere in those narrow alleys, Jax was hiding, and an Inquisitor was rotting into the mud.
Elian didn't look back. He couldn't. Every time he turned his head, the violet pulse in his vision flared, showing him the ghostly after-image of the man he had emptied.
The wilderness ahead was known as the Shatter-Wood—a primordial forest of iron-bark trees and black-leafed ferns where the sun struggled to reach the mossy floor. It was a place where criminals went to die and where the Inquisition rarely ventured, for the trees themselves were said to be "Aether-thirsty."
Elian's boots, worn thin by the cobbles of the Docks, were ill-suited for the jagged slate and sucking mud of the forest floor. Within hours, his feet were bleeding. Under normal circumstances, he would have sat down, focused his mind, and siphoned the pain of the blisters into a small animal or simply endured it.
But things were no longer normal.
When he reached for the Siphon now, he didn't find the empty vessel he usually was. He found a reservoir.
The Inquisitor's soul—or whatever fragment of "essence" he had torn away—was a roiling, oily mass of energy trapped behind his sternum. It was hot. Too hot.
"You shouldn't have done that, boy," a voice whispered.
Elian stopped dead. He looked around, his hand flying to the hilt of the rusted needle at his belt. The forest was silent, save for the rhythmic drip-drip of rainwater from the iron-bark leaves.
"Who's there?" Elian hissed, his breath misting in the cold air.
"I am the shadow of the man you murdered. I am the cinnamon and the prayer. I am the cold logic of the Light."
The voice didn't come from the bushes. It came from inside his chest. It was Malphas—the Inquisitor. Elian squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles turning white. "You're dead. I felt you empty out."
"A Siphon is a leak, Elian. But a soul is a flood. You drank me, and now I am the passenger in your blood. Tell me... does the gold feel heavy? Or is it just the guilt?"
"Shut up," Elian growled. He began to run. He ran until his lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass, crashing through the underbrush, desperate to outrun a voice that lived in his own ear.
The Hunger of the Void
Three days into the Shatter-Wood, the gold became useless. You couldn't eat gold, and you couldn't use it to start a fire in a forest where the wood was literally as hard as iron.
Elian was starving. The half-apple Jax had given him was a distant memory. But the hunger he felt now was different from the stomach-cramps of the Docks. It was a hollow ache in his marrow. His skin was becoming translucent, the veins beneath appearing a bruised, electric violet.
He found a mountain hare trapped in a thicket. Normally, the "Saint" Elian would have freed it. The "Fixer" Elian would have killed it quickly for meat.
The New Elian simply watched it.
He didn't want the meat. He wanted the spark.He knelt by the hare. It thrashed, its black eyes wide with the primal terror of a prey animal.
Elian reached out. He didn't touch it. He just opened that "hollow" place in his chest—the leak that the Inquisitor had called him.
The Siphon didn't wait for his command. It surged.
The hare didn't scream; it simply withered. In a matter of seconds, the vibrant, kicking creature became a grey, leathery husk. The fur lost its sheen, turning to brittle dust.
Elian gasped as a wave of warmth flooded his body. The blisters on his feet vanished. The ache in his lungs evaporated. He didn't need to eat. He had siphoned the very life-force of the creature.
"Monstrous," the voice of Malphas remarked.
"The Inquisition was right about you. You aren't a healer. You are a parasite. A tick on the hide of the world."
"I'm alive," Elian countered, standing up. His voice was deeper now, carrying a resonance it hadn't possessed in Oakhaven. "Is it monstrous to survive? Your 'Light' burned my mother. Your 'Hero' Alaric leaves refugees to die. If I am a parasite, it's because I learned from the best.
The Trial of the Iron-Bark
As Elian pushed deeper into the wilderness, the geography began to change. The trees grew taller, their trunks etched with glowing blue veins of natural Aether. This was the "Deep Wild," where the laws of the city meant nothing.
He encountered his first real test on the seventh night: a Shadow-Stalker. It was a predator of the Shatter-Wood, a feline beast the size of a pony with fur that shifted like liquid smoke. It had tracked him for miles, drawn by the strange, violet scent of his corrupted magic.
Elian found himself backed against a cliff face, the beast's amber eyes glowing in the dark.
"I don't want to kill you," Elian said, though he wasn't sure if he was talking to the beast or the voice in his head.
The Shadow-Stalker pounced.
In Oakhaven, Elian would have been dead. He was a weaver's son, not a warrior. But as the beast leaped, time seemed to slow down. The Inquisitor's memories flared—years of combat training, the knowledge of anatomy, the instinct to see an opening before it appeared.
Twist left. Drop the center of gravity. Reach for the heart-pulse.
Elian moved with a grace that wasn't his own. He caught the beast mid-air, not with a blade, but with his bare hands.
The contact was electric. The Shadow-Stalker was a wellspring of wild energy. Elian didn't just siphon it; he channeled it. He felt the beast's strength flow into his arms, and with a roar that sounded more like a thunderclap, he slammed the predator into the stone ground.
He didn't stop there. He let the Siphon wide open.
The Shadow-Stalker's smoke-like fur began to dissolve into pure violet light, flowing into Elian's palms. The beast let out a mournful howl that echoed through the canyons, its massive frame shrinking, drying, and finally crumbling into a pile of grey ash.
Elian stood in the center of the clearing, surrounded by a swirl of dying violet embers. He felt... god-like. The hunger was gone. The cold was gone. He felt like he could tear the very trees out of the earth.
"Careful, boy," Malphas warned, his voice now tinged with a flicker of genuine fear. "The more you drink, the less of 'Elian Thorne' remains. You are filling a cup that has no bottom. Eventually, you will drink so much that you'll forget how to be human at all."
Elian looked at his hands. The violet glow didn't fade this time. It settled into his skin, forming faint, glowing tattoos that looked like the veins of the iron-bark trees.
"Good," Elian whispered. "Humanity didn't do much for me anyway."
The Architect of Absence
The deep woods did not just hide the sun; they devoured it. By the tenth day, Elian's internal map was a blur of shadows and the constant, rhythmic thrumming of the violet energy in his veins. He was no longer walking; he was being pulled.
He stumbled into a clearing that felt different—static charged the air, making the hair on his arms stand up. In the center sat a hovel constructed entirely of iron-bark, its wood polished to a mirror sheen.
An old man sat on a stump out front, carving a piece of bone with a flint knife. He didn't look up as Elian approached, shaking and radiating a sickly purple light.
"You're late," the old man said. His voice was like grinding stones. "The forest said a void was coming, but I expected you two sunrises ago."
Elian collapsed to his knees, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "Who... who are you?"
"I am Kaelen," the man replied, finally looking up. His eyes were milky white—blind, yet he stared directly at Elian's chest. "I was a Siphon before your grandfather was a glimmer in a weaver's eye. And I can tell you right now, boy, you're doing it all wrong. You're holding that Inquisitor's soul like a hot coal. If you don't learn to weave it, it will burn through your floorboards."
"Listen to the hermit, Elian," Malphas's voice echoed in his head, sounding strained. "Even I find his presence... unsettling."
"He's in my head," Elian groaned, clutching his temples. "The man I killed. He won't stop talking."
Kaelen laughed, a dry, hacking sound. "Of course he won't. You took his house, but you didn't change the locks. You aren't just a thief, Elian. You are a Vessel. A Siphon doesn't just take; we provide the space where things stop being."
The Mother's Thread
Kaelen ushered Elian into the hut. The interior was filled with thousands of hanging threads—wool, silk, sinew, and even strands of human hair. It looked like a macabre version of the Weaver's District.
"Your father taught you that you were a bandage," Kaelen said, handing Elian a cup of bitter, cold tea. "He was a fool. A bandage is external. A Siphon is the needle. We go through the fabric. We pull the thread from one side to the other."
Elian pulled the rusted needle from his belt. It was vibrating so hard now it made his fingers numb. "This was my mother's. Why is it doing this?"
Kaelen took the needle, his blind eyes turning upward. "This isn't just steel, boy. It's been soaked in the intent of a woman who spent her life trying to mend what was broken. It has become a focus. In your hands, it isn't for sewing cloth. It's for sewing realities."
He handed it back. "The Inquisition is coming. I can smell the silver on the wind. They don't want to kill you anymore; they want to use you as a living battery. If you want to survive, you have to stop fighting the Inquisitor in your head. You have to stitch him into the needle."
"How?" Elian asked, terror rising in his throat.
"Give him a job. He was a hunter, wasn't he? Make him the edge of your blade. Use his memories of the Light to find the shadows."
The Scent of Silver
The lesson was interrupted by the sound of a snapping branch—a sound too heavy for a deer, too rhythmic for a beast.
"They're here," Kaelen whispered, standing up with surprising agility. "Three of them. Silver-bloods. They've tracked the leak you've been leaving across my forest."
Elian stepped out of the hut. The rain had returned, turning the clearing into a gray cathedral of mist. Three figures emerged from the trees. They wore the full plate armor of the Silver Inquisition, their shields
embossed with the Sun-and-Needle.
"Elian Thorne!" the lead Inquisitor shouted. "By the authority of the High Father, you are declared a Class-One Deviation. Surrender, and your death will be swift. Resist, and we will keep your soul in a jar for a century."
Elian felt the familiar surge of panic, but this time, he didn't let it drown him. He closed his eyes and looked inward, into the roiling violet storm where Malphas lived.
"Malphas," Elian thought. "You want to be useful? You want to see the 'Light' again? Show me how they move. Show me the weakness in that silver plate."
There was a moment of icy silence. Then, a flood of tactical data hit Elian's brain. He saw the joints in the armor. He saw the way the lead Inquisitor favored his right leg. He felt the rhythm of their Aether-breathing.
"I'm done surrendering," Elian said. His voice didn't sound like a ten-year-old boy anymore. It sounded like a storm.
The Inquisitors charged.
Elian didn't run. He held the needle out. The violet energy from his arms flowed into the steel, extending it into a shimmering, three-foot spike of pure, concentrated agony.
The first Inquisitor swung a mace. Elian parried with a speed that shouldn't have been possible. He didn't just block the blow; he siphoned the kinetic energy of the swing. The mace went limp, falling from the Inquisitor's hand as if it had turned to lead.
Elian stepped inside the man's guard and drove the needle into the gap at the neck.
He didn't pull the life-force this time. He pushed. He dumped the stored trauma of the Weaver's District—the heat of the fires, the sound of his mother's cough, the weight of his father's belt—directly into the man's nervous system.
The Inquisitor screamed, but no sound came out. He simply collapsed, his mind shattered by a decade of borrowed pain delivered in a single second.
The other two stopped, their boots sliding in the mud. They looked at their fallen comrade, then at the boy who was glowing with the intensity of a dying star.
"He's a monster," one whispered.
"No," Elian said, his eyes burning violet. "I'm just the bill you forgot to pay."
Emergence
The fight was over in minutes. Three suits of silver armor lay empty in the mud, their occupants not dead, but hollowed. They would live, but they would never speak, never think, never feel anything but a lingering, phantom cold.
Elian stood over them, his chest heaving. The needle in his hand was no longer rusted. It was a sleek, black shard of metal that seemed to drink the very light around it.
He turned back to Kaelen, who was standing in the doorway of his hut.
"You're ready," the old man said. "But know this, Elian. Once you leave this forest, there is no 'Saint' to return to. You have become the Weight. You carry the world's pain, but you are no longer its victim. You are its judge."
Elian looked at his reflection in a pool of rainwater. He was taller now. His hair, once brown and dusty, was shot through with streaks of white. His eyes were a permanent, haunting violet. He looked like a man who had seen the end of the world and decided it wasn't enough.
"Where will you go?" Kaelen asked.
Elian sheathed the black needle. "They think the Citadel is a fortress. They think they can hoard the Light and leave the rest of us in the Grey."
He looked toward the north, where the spires of the capital pierced the clouds.
"I'm going to find Sir Alaric. I'm going to find the men who sell 'miracles' for blood. And I'm going to show them that the needle doesn't just mend."
He stepped out of the clearing, leaving the hermit and the iron-bark behind. He wasn't running anymore. He was hunting.
The boy was gone. The Lord of the Siphon had begun his walk.