The magic was dying, and Aldric was the only one who could hear its screams.
He walked through Valdrence's morning streets with his son's small hand clasped in his own, watching the city breathe its last beautiful breaths. Light didn't just illuminate the city—it sang from every stone. A woman on a balcony grew jasmine vines from her fingertips, their perfume sweetening the air. A mason smoothed a wall's edge with a thought, stone flowing like water. Children chased wisps of captured starlight through the alleys, their laughter ringing like bells.
It was glorious. It was alive.
And it was killing them all.
"Papa, look!" Gareth, just seven, pointed at a fountain where water danced in impossible shapes—dragons, ships, constellations. "Can you teach me that?"
Aldric ruffled his son's dark hair. "Soon, little spark. When you're older."
The lie tasted bitter. There might be no "older" for Gareth. Not if the wildings continued.
Even now, Aldric could feel the tremors beneath the beauty. The magic—the living energy they called the Weave—was becoming unstable. Like a river flooding its banks after too much rain. Last week, an entire street had crystallized overnight, people frozen mid-step, their expressions forever caught between wonder and terror. Yesterday, a Resonant who could once grow orchids from bare rock had instead spricked thorns from his own skin, screaming as his blood turned to sap.
The Weave was sick. Dying. And when it died, it would take the world with it.
A runner found them at the market, her face pale. "Master Aldric. The Council summons you. It's urgent."
Aldric knelt before Gareth. "Go straight home. Tell your mother I'll be back by supper."
The boy nodded, serious beyond his years. He'd seen the crystal street. He knew what "urgent" meant.
Aldric watched him go, a small figure disappearing into the singing light, and wondered if this was the last time he'd see his son as a child.
The Council Chamber was carved from the mountain's heart, a cavernous space where seven of the greatest minds of the age sat around a stone table older than the city. Maps were spread before them, marked with spreading red stains—the wilding zones.
High Sage Theron, white-haired and weary, didn't bother with greetings. "It's accelerating, Aldric. We've lost three more villages since dawn. The Weave is tearing itself apart."
Aldric studied the maps. The red stains were spreading like blood in water. "Evacuations?"
"To where?" snapped Lyra, the materials master. Her hands were stained with something that glittered unnaturally. "The wildings follow people. Fear attracts it. Panic feeds it."
The arguments began again—the same ones they'd had for months. Flee. Fight. Surrender. Adapt. None of it worked.
Aldric waited for the silence. When it came, heavy with despair, he spoke.
"What if we don't destroy it or flee from it?" he said. All eyes turned to him. "What if we contain it? Channel it? The Weave isn't evil. It's sick. Fevered. We build a… a dam. Not to stop the flow, but to control it. Filter out the sickness."
Theron leaned forward, hope warring with skepticism. "A dam of what? Stone? We've tried warding circles. They shatter like glass."
"Not stone," Aldric said. "Us."
He placed his hands on the table. "Resonants. Strong ones. We become the conduits. We draw the wild Weave in, filter it through our own consciousness, stabilize it. A great working. The greatest ever attempted."
The silence deepened. Lyra stared at him. "You're talking about drinking poison to cure the well."
"I'm talking about being the filter between the world and the flood," Aldric countered. "We build a tower. A focal point. I'll be the anchor. The keystone. We draw the wild Weave there, contain it, heal it slowly. When the balance is restored, we release it."
"And if it doesn't work?" Theron asked quietly.
"Then we die trying to save the world instead of running from it."
They voted at dusk. The light through the chamber's high windows was the color of old blood. It was unanimous.
Theron placed a hand on Aldric's shoulder. "What do you need?"
"Volunteers," Aldric said. "The strongest Resonants. Those who can hear the Weave's song clearly. And builders. Stone-shapers. We raise the tower at the city's heart, where the ley lines converge."
"How many volunteers?"
"As many as will come." Aldric met his gaze. "Tell them it's temporary. A few months, maybe a year. Until the fever breaks."
Theron nodded, but his eyes held a doubt he wouldn't voice. Nothing this profound was ever temporary.
The tower rose in weeks, stone flowing upward like a reverse waterfall. Aldric stood at its heart, arms spread, conducting the symphony of creation. The Weave responded to his call—not the wild, screaming thing in the countryside, but the deeper, older song beneath it. The healthy heart. Stone melted and reformed. Patterns etched themselves into walls. The tower became a living thing, a lung for the world.
Volunteers came. Dozens of them. Men and women who could sing flowers into bloom, calm storms with a whisper, light fires with a thought. They stood in circles around Aldric, their faces bright with purpose.
"It won't be forever," he promised them. "Just until the balance returns. You'll be heroes. The ones who saved the world."
They believed him. He almost believed himself.
The day of the Severance—though they didn't call it that yet—dawned clear and cold. Aldric stood at the tower's peak, the volunteers arrayed in concentric circles below. Across the city, people watched from rooftops, from windows, holding their breath.
"Ready?" Theron asked.
Aldric nodded. He closed his eyes. Opened himself.
And called the wild Weave home.
It came like a tidal wave of light and sound—a screaming, glorious, terrible flood. It tore through the sky, violet and silver and impossible gold, and Aldric reached for it not with hands but with will. Here, he sang. Here is safe. Here is calm.
The Weave hesitated. Then it surged toward the tower.
The volunteers opened themselves as he'd taught them. The wild energy flowed into them, through them, and Aldric felt the change immediately. The screaming edge softened. The chaos began to order itself. It was working.
Then Elara, a young Resonant with a gift for healing, cried out.
"It hurts," she gasped. "It's… it's aware. It's scared. It doesn't understand!"
"Hold!" Aldric commanded, his voice vibrating with power. "We're almost there!"
The tower pulsed. A wave of energy radiated outward, visible as a ripple in the air. Across the city, the wild manifestations winked out. The crystal street thawed, people stumbling free, confused but alive. The thorn-man's transformation reversed, leaving him weeping on the cobbles, human again.
In the fields beyond the walls, the wilding zones stilled. The red stains on Theron's maps stopped spreading.
A cheer rose from the city. Distant, joyful.
In the tower, the volunteers wept.
Aldric lowered his arms, breathing heavily. The weight was immense—not physical, but spiritual. The wild Weave was contained, but it wasn't… quiet. He could feel it thrashing in the volunteers, in the tower's stones, in himself.
Jorath, a gentle man who could talk to animals, fell to his knees. "I can hear them," he whispered. "Voices. So many voices. They're trapped. They're screaming."
Theron approached, his face etched with relief and something darker. "It worked, Aldric. The city is safe."
Aldric stared at the volunteers—at their trembling hands, their haunted eyes. "At what cost?"
"A necessary one." Theron's voice was gentle but firm. "We'll find a way to ease their burden. But for now… the world is saved."
Aldric looked at his hands. They glowed faintly with captive light. He could feel the Weave inside him, not as a tool, not as a partner, but as a prisoner. Caged. Confused. Hurting.
"This was supposed to be temporary," he said.
Theron didn't answer.
Months passed. The volunteers didn't recover. They deteriorated. The voices grew louder. Some began to change—their skin taking on the shimmer of captive Weave, their eyes glowing with borrowed light. They were becoming something else. Something new.
And something desperate.
Jorath broke first.
He'd been quiet for days, staring at walls, whispering to people who weren't there. Then, one evening, he screamed—a sound that wasn't entirely human. Black fire erupted from his hands, his eyes, his mouth. He wasn't attacking. He was escaping.
"LET THEM OUT!" he roared, his voice layered with a hundred others. "THEY'RE SCREAMING! CAN'T YOU HEAR THEM?"
They had to kill him. Aldric watched, helpless, as Theron's guards cut Jorath down. The black fire died with him, leaving only a husk and a spreading silence.
"The Weave is corrupting them," Theron said that night in the Council Chamber. His face was grave. "We need to replace the failing ones. Find new volunteers."
Aldric stared at him. "Replace them? We promised them release. We promised them this was temporary."
"The wild Weave outside is worse now," Lyra said quietly. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "It's been trapped so long it's festering. If we release what we've captured now, it'll rip the world apart. The cure has become the disease."
"So we make it permanent?" Aldric's voice was dangerously calm. "We build an eternal prison? For conscious beings? For people?"
"For the greater good," Theron said. "One life, one hundred, one thousand—weighed against the world. This is what we agreed to."
"I agreed to save the world. Not damn it."
He began working in secret. Studying the captured Weave. Listening to its whispers. Learning its pain. He found patterns in the madness—memories, echoes of what the Weave had been before the sickness. Before the cage.
He started designing a new working. Not a Severance. An unbinding. A way to release the captured Weave gently, safely, healing it as it flowed back into the world.
Theron found his notes.
"You'll destroy us all," the High Sage said, his face pale with anger. "The Severance is stable. The world is safe. Don't touch it."
"It's built on suffering," Aldric said. "We have to fix it."
Theron looked at him with something like grief. "Then you leave us no choice."
They turned on him. The seven members of the Council, his friends, his colleagues. They used the tower's own power against him, weaving a new seal—not around the Weave, but around Aldric himself.
"You're the keystone," Theron said as the golden light wrapped around Aldric, binding him to the tower's heart. "If you break, everything breaks. So we'll make sure you can't."
Aldric struggled, but the tower's power was his own, turned against him. He felt it settling into his bones, his blood, his soul. A cage made of his own gift.
"You're building a monument to cruelty," he gasped as the light tightened. "And someday, someone will tear it down."
Theron's face was the last thing he saw. "Perhaps. But not today."
The deep levels were cold. And quiet. And endless.
Aldric sat in the sphere of crystal they'd built around him, watching the world through a haze of golden light. He could feel everything—the tower's pulse, the captured Weave thrashing in its prisons, the new volunteers (they called them Hollows now) breaking one by one.
He could feel his own son, Gareth, growing up in a city that had forgotten the cost of its safety.
Once, when Gareth was sixteen, they let him visit. Just once.
The boy—no, young man now—stood outside the crystal, his face a mask of grief and fury. "I'll get you out," he promised.
"No," Aldric said, his voice echoing strangely in the sphere. "You survive. You live. You remember. And maybe, someday, one of your children will be strong enough to do what I couldn't."
Gareth left. He met a woman named Elara—a name that made Aldric's heart ache with memory. They had children. A boy. A girl.
The years blurred. The weight never lessened. The whispers never stopped.
How long? the captured Weave asked him, its voice a chorus of the damned.
Aldric pressed his hand against the crystal, feeling the tower's heartbeat sync with his own.
"I don't know," he whispered. "But I promise you—not forever."
He looked up, through layers of stone and time, to where a grandson he would never meet was being born into a world of cages.
"Not forever."