The guild's whisper

The Guildhouse always smelled faintly of iron and wet stone. Tonight, it felt worse.

Callen didn’t ask questions after I checked in, but I caught him watching me more than usual — eyes narrowing when I avoided the torchlight. The package delivery was logged without comment, yet I knew the moment I left the main hall, whispers would begin.

I wasn’t wrong.

The East Wall Guild was a sprawling place, its corridors twisting like veins through the old fortress that served as its base. Voices carried in strange ways here; you could be two rooms away and still hear someone speaking low.

“…black in his eyes,” a voice muttered behind a door as I passed.

“Not any of the Twelve Threads I’ve seen,” another answered. “Could be Severed Weave work.”

My steps didn’t falter, but my grip on the stair rail tightened.

I climbed to the dormitory level and found my assigned room. The single window looked over the river, where the rain had smeared the lamps into wavering ribbons of gold.

I shut the door and sat on the narrow bed. My hands were trembling.

It hadn’t been fear when I fought the Threadbeast earlier. Not exactly. More like a… sharpness. A clarity I’d never felt before, as if the Loom’s voice had stripped away all hesitation.

Now, in the quiet, the sharpness was gone — replaced by an unsettling itch beneath my skin.

A knock at the door.

I opened it to find Maren, the Guild’s scribe, holding a folded slip of paper. She was younger than most here, with ink-stained fingers and a gaze that was too direct for comfort.

“From Callen,” she said. “He said you’d understand.”

She handed me the note and left without waiting for a reply.

The handwriting was neat, precise.

Come to the archive after the second bell. Bring no one.

I glanced at the room’s small clockwork timepiece. The first bell would sound soon. That left less than an hour.

The archive was deep in the fortress, past halls lined with carved shields and the rusted remains of weapons no one dared melt down. The air grew colder the further I went.

Callen was waiting at the bottom of the stairwell, a lantern in hand.

“You saw one, didn’t you?” he asked without preamble.

I hesitated. “Saw what?”

He stepped closer, the lantern’s light catching the hard lines of his face. “Don’t play with me, Kael. The marks in your eyes — I’ve seen them before. Always after a distortion. Always after contact.”

My mouth was dry. “It attacked me.”

“And you’re still breathing.” His gaze sharpened. “Which means you killed it. With what?”

I didn’t answer.

He studied me for a long moment, then said, “Follow me.”

We entered the archive — a long hall lined with locked cabinets and shelves sagging under the weight of ledgers. Callen led me to a table at the far end. On it was a sheet of parchment covered in diagrams of thread-like patterns.

“These are the Twelve Paths,” he said, pointing to each in turn. “Every Threadbearer in the Guild follows one of these. You…” His eyes narrowed. “…don’t match any of them.”

Before I could speak, he took something from his coat pocket — a strip of black silk.

“Wrap this around your wrist,” he said.

The moment I did, the itch beneath my skin vanished. The room’s edges seemed sharper, cleaner. The constant faint hum I hadn’t realized I’d been hearing was gone.

“That’s a dampener,” Callen said. “We use it on anomalies we can’t control. Wear it until I say otherwise. And keep your mouth shut.”

As I left the archive, I could feel the stares in the hallway again. Not open hostility — yet — but the kind of quiet that comes before a blade slips between ribs.

The Guild didn’t like unknowns.

And I had just become one.

That night, the Loom came to me in the dream again. Only this time, she wasn’t faceless.

Her features were blurred, as if seen through warped glass, but I could make out the faintest curve of a smile.

“The second pull is near.”

When I woke, the dampener was gone.

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