Jeremiah set his palms on the corners, as Ulrick had shown him, with his fingers splayed across the opposite edges. The cube’s surface felt cool, polished smooth, a little too perfect under his skin. For a long moment, nothing happened. The crystal just sat there on the wobbling table, runes pulsing faintly, as if mocking his effort.

  His brow furrowed. Maybe he had pressed too lightly? Maybe he hadn’t angled his fingers quite right? He shifted, trying to copy Ulrick’s grip exactly. Still nothing. A frown creased his face.

  Then the itching started.

  It began faint, almost like the brush of wool against his palms, but quickly sharpened until it crawled along the lines of his hands. He hissed, instinct pulling him to lift away, but his hands didn’t move. His fingers tugged; the cube might as well have been nailed to the table. His chest tightened, and he gave a sharper yank, but it held him fast.

  “Oi, lad.” Ulrick’s voice rumbled low, steady as a river’s current. “Don’t fight it.”

  Jeremiah’s gaze snapped up, panic bubbling in his throat. “I can’t let go!”

  “Aye. That’s how you know it’s working.” Ulrick leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, watching with infuriating calm. “Struggling will only snarl the threads. Breathe. Let it work.”

  Jeremiah clenched his jaw, forcing his shoulders down. Ulrick hadn’t given him any reason to think he meant harm, yet the helplessness of it made his skin crawl. Being pinned to the thing left him far too exposed, far too… vulnerable.

  He dragged in a breath. Then another. Slowly, the hammering in his chest eased, the rush in his ears quieting to a steady thrum.

  The itch shifted, softening into a steady, strong warmth. Not painful exactly, but still uncomfortable. It spread through his palms, crawling into his wrists, sinking deeper until his forearms tingled with a restless heat. Jeremiah’s eyes narrowed.

  Then he saw them.

  At first, only a few: hair-thin threads unspooling from the cube’s corners. They shimmered faintly in the bakery’s light, colors shifting like oil on water. But more followed, spreading in fine filaments until the cube looked like a loom mid-weave.

  Jeremiah’s breath hitched. He’d seen Ulrick’s display — the flood of threads so thick they had filled the cube with color. His own were fewer. So much fewer. Bare strands, where Ulrick’s had been a forest.

  But… they felt different.

  Each thread tugged at him in a way he couldn’t explain. As though they weren’t just lines of light, but pieces he recognized — not by sight, but in his bones. His heart answered them, some quiet part of him whispering mine with every glimmer.

  His throat tightened. He leaned forward unconsciously, eyes wide, breath fogging faintly against the cube. The threads gathered themselves into thicker cords, winding together, knotting, and weaving as if guided by a hand he couldn’t see.

  Jeremiah didn’t blink. He couldn’t. His whole world had narrowed to the cube, to the threads that belonged to him and him alone.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ulrick’s beard twitched with the start of a grin. The baker said nothing, only watched patiently, while the first lattice of Jeremiah’s soul began to take shape.

  Jeremiah held his breath as the threads multiplied, unspooling from the cube in lazy swirls. A few gleamed sharp and distinct, their colors pulling at his attention with quiet insistence. A cord of pale blue shimmered like glass held to the light, its surface rippling with a sheen that reminded him of water under moonlight. Another gleamed dull and coppery, worn like an old coin passed from hand to hand, edges nicked and rubbed smooth. A green strand wound lazily past them, not bright like Ulrick’s, but tired and dusted, like weeds pushing stubbornly through cracks in stone.

  More followed. A thread of soot-black drifted across unseen currents, quivering as if restless, never willing to bind itself to anything. A deep brown that reminded him of old leather and the smell of ink, a thread that trembled with a harsh, angry red before dulling into rust, pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and one that shimmered faintly golden — not bright, but faded, like light reflected through smoke.

  Jeremiah’s gaze snapped from one to the other, hope sparking every time their movements hinted at a pattern. He felt them pulling at his bones, each one plucking at him in ways he couldn’t name. Yet instead of weaving together, instead of forming anything whole, the strands slid past each other, hesitant and uncertain.

  Where Ulrick’s threads had bent toward each other with purpose, braiding into an elegant lattice of growth and decay, Jeremiah’s wavered. They drifted, tangled, and collided. The pale blue cord curled toward the earthy green, only to snag on the brittle black, which yanked it aside into a sharp knot. A copper glint brushed the guttering gold, and both recoiled, curling in on themselves, weak and half-spent.

  But no pattern emerged.

  They looped without aim, tangling themselves into snarls that dragged others down with them. Some clung together stubbornly, vibrating with tension, only to snap apart in sudden recoil. Others twisted tight, frayed, and unraveled into nothing.

  He leaned so close his nose almost touched the crystal, trying to make sense of the mess. If he stared hard enough, he thought he could glimpse tiny bursts of order — a triangle forming where three strands crossed, a loop that closed neatly before unraveling again. The soil-brown and ink-green wound gently around one another, radiating a quiet care that felt solid and true. His heart caught — only for a jagged scarlet lash to rip through, severing them clean, and drag both threads sideways into a knot that warped the whole mess further out of shape. Each flicker of structure teased him, then collapsed into chaos.

  Jeremiah’s chest hollowed. His palms still burned faintly against the cube, but the warmth that had felt like promise only minutes before now carried the sting of humiliation.

  The cube continued to spin out his resonance, and the sight grew no clearer. If anything, the mess deepened. The golden shimmer flickered and stuttered, swallowed by the muddle until it vanished from sight. The pale blue circled back around, looping endlessly as though chasing its own tail. A half-dozen smaller threads tangled into a knot so dense they strangled each other into stillness.

  This was no tapestry. It wasn’t even a half-finished weave.

  It was a snarl.

  Like a knitter’s basket abandoned mid-project, all loose ends and half-pulled strands, nothing finished and nothing discarded. The sight clawed at him.

  Jeremiah’s throat worked. He pressed his palms harder into the cube, as though pressure alone might force the threads to behave.

  Yet, with every new knot that formed, every crooked line that defied order, his heart sank further.

  Compared to Ulrick’s lattice — steady, purposeful, beautiful — this looked worthless. A mistake given shape. Broken.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  He felt his jaw clench, a sour taste pooling on his tongue.

  Jeremiah forced himself to keep his gaze on the cube, though every instinct screamed to look away. The snarl of threads writhed and collapsed in on itself, even as he braced for Ulrick’s judgment, for the slow shake of the head that would confirm what the chaos already told him.

  But before Ulrick could speak, something changed.

  A shiver crawled up his arms, deeper and heavier than the itching warmth from before. The crystal pulsed, not with light but with weight, a resonance that thudded like a note struck too far below hearing. Its corners flared, and new threads spilled forth — threads Jeremiah swore hadn’t existed a heartbeat ago.

  He leaned forward, blinking.

  These cords came darker than the rest, a blue so deep it bordered on black, until the lamplight slid across them and revealed the hidden undertone. They moved at a measured pace, patient and deliberate, weaving outward in steady arcs. Where his other strands twitched and snapped against each other, these slid smooth and certain.

  Jeremiah’s breath caught. They felt… different.

  The sensation they carried wasn’t sharp or personal like the others. But neither were they distant and tempered like Ulrick’s had been. Rather, they were …quieter. Muted, but no less insistent. They seemed to hum somewhere behind his sternum, a note his body recognized before his mind could name it. Yet the more he watched them weave through the snarl, the more familiar the sensation became.

  His brow furrowed. The familiarity nagged at him until the thought clicked into place.

  Billy.

  The recognition hit like a spark, but almost as quickly, doubt followed. It wasn’t the full weight of the kraken’s mind pressing into his own, not the tide of curiosity or the instinctive pulls that sometimes bled across their bond. This was different. Fainter. Distant. Like catching the echo of a voice carried through water.

  And yet… he knew it.

  He wouldn’t have noticed it without the System stitching their connection so tightly, but the longer he stared into the cube, the stronger the certainty grew. These threads carried the echo of that bond. Not Billy himself, but the part of Jeremiah tied to him — reflected here, tangled in his own resonance.

  Jeremiah’s lips parted, but he clamped his jaw shut before the words could slip free.

  Across the table, Ulrick’s eyes had narrowed, his calm cracked by the smallest flicker of surprise. He leaned forward, but said nothing, waiting, watching as the threads multiplied.

  And multiply they did.

  One cord became three, three became a dozen. Before long, they outnumbered every other color in the lattice. Soon, there were nearly twice as many of them as the next dominate. They didn’t flood the cube like Ulrick’s had, but their presence dominated nonetheless.

  Jeremiah’s pulse quickened.

  Then the cords moved.

  They didn’t just float aimlessly as the others had. These threads pressed into the snarl with deliberate purpose. He saw one wedge itself into a knotted clump of rust-red and earth-brown, prying them apart until the tension eased. Another coiled around a looping trail of ink-green and copper, pulling them into alignment before releasing them again. Where his resonance had been a mass of fights and fractures, the dark-blue lines pulled like mediators, separating arguments here, forcing handshakes there.

  Jeremiah leaned so close that his breath fogged the cube.

  By the time the lattice stretched taut and anchored against the cube’s lower corners, the shape inside was still a mess — knotted, crooked, disordered.

  And yet… not quite.

  Jeremiah’s heart thumped hard.

  The weave inside was still a disaster — colors crossed at angles that made no sense, tangles sat like clots in a vein. Yet, it didn’t feel like the complete collapse he had braced for. The black-blue cords wound through the lattice, holding gaps open, cushioning knots, keeping the whole from hardening into an immovable lump.

  It was still chaos. But softer. Pliable.

  His pulse thundered in his ears.

  Jeremiah tore his gaze from the cube at last, unable to hold it any longer. He looked to Ulrick, half-expecting the man to laugh, to shake his head, to tell him this mess was worse than nothing at all.

  Instead, he found the baker staring at the cube, beard twitching with something caught between a frown and wide-eyed wonder.

  For the first time since Jeremiah had met him, Ulrick looked surprised.

  Ulrick leaned closer to the cube. The baker’s bulk cast half the table into shadow, his eyes narrowed on the shifting lattice inside.

  “Interesting,” he murmured, voice low but steady.

  Jeremiah’s stomach knotted at the single word. Interesting.

  It wasn’t rejection, not quite, but it was maddeningly vague. His chest ached with the silence that followed, the cube’s glow reflected in Ulrick’s calm eyes.

  He forced air into his lungs, steadied himself, and asked, “Interesting how?”

  Ulrick’s brow rose. The corners of his beard twitched with a hint of amusement. “’Tis your resonance, lad. I’d reckon you know what we’re looking at more than me.”

  Jeremiah paled. His mouth opened, closed, opened again — no words came. He couldn’t say it aloud. Couldn’t admit what he thought he saw, not with Mero’s warning still burning fresh in his memory.

  Before he could choke on the silence any further, Ulrick lifted a broad hand. “As I said, I’ll not pry too deeply, lad. With that in mind…” He leaned forward, peering closer at the cube. “Let me tell you what I see.”

  His thick finger pointed toward the main tangle of drifting colors. “Your resonance is about what we expected. No discernible affinity, and many of your aspects are tangled.”

  The words fell like stones. Jeremiah’s shoulders sagged, heat climbing his neck. His palms ached where they pressed against the cube. Despite how many years had passed, it didn’t hurt any less to hear the same verdict he had then.

  Ulrick chuckled, soft but firm, and the weight shifted. “Don’t feel down, lad. As I said before, that’s to be expected for the vast majority of people.” He shook his head, beard bristling. “That doesn’t mean you’re lesser. Or broken.” His voice dipped, muttering almost to himself, “Despite what some might claim.”

  “Think of it like trying to pick out a song in a noisy room,” Ulrick continued. “The song is still there. It’s just buried under a lot of noise.”

  Jeremiah let out a dry laugh. “What’s next? You’re going to tell me you were born with the noise too?”

  Ulrick coughed into his fist, beard twitching. “No, lad. I was… fortunate, when it came to my own resonance.”

  Jeremiah sagged back in his chair, but Ulrick leaned forward, eyes glinting with mischief. “My mother, though — now she was as noisy as they come, or so she liked to remind me. And yet, she taught me near everything worth knowing.” He puffed out his chest, his massive frame swelling until the chair beneath him creaked. “Some days I wonder if I’ll ever be half the mage she was.”

  The words caught Jeremiah off guard. He blinked, the sting of his own verdict still sharp, but dulled now by Ulrick’s steady tone. He didn’t know how to answer, but his jaw loosened, his shoulders easing a fraction.

  Ulrick’s smirk softened into something steadier. “But that tale’s for another day.” He tapped the cube with two thick fingers, and the crystal thrummed faintly under his touch. “For now… that brings us to this.” His hand shifted, pointing to the black-blue cords that threaded the snarl. “Now this… this is something I wasn’t expecting.”

  Jeremiah tilted his head.

  “It’s similar to what you might see with a Familiar,” Ulrick said, scratching at his beard, “but different. In ways I’ve never seen.”

  “A Familiar?” Jeremiah asked, his voice tighter than he meant.

  Ulrick nodded. “Aye. As you saw, not all aspects get along proper. Sometimes they pull against each other, knot themselves into tangles. There are ways to untangle them — rituals, disciplines, lifetimes of practice. But one of the most common paths is a Familiar. These beings can be anything from a stray beast to a crafted construct. The mage weaves their resonance with that of the Familiar. Each influences the other, filling gaps, lending strength, and influences that the other might lack.”

  Jeremiah swallowed, knuckles whitening on the table’s edge.

  “It’s not without risk,” Ulrick continued. “Done poorly, it can tear a man’s soul to shreds. Even done well, it takes balance and restraint. A lifetime’s craft.” He leaned back slightly, gesturing to the cube. “This, though…” His brow furrowed. “These blue-black threads aren’t clashing the way they should. Not in the way something sloppy or malicious would. If anything, they’re the opposite. They pry your resonance open, yes, but in the same breath, they’re settling into it. Rooting. Becoming part of it. I’d not call it manipulation. More like an… artificial affinity, for lack of a better term. A graft that took, if you were.”

  His eyes narrowed, voice lowering as if weighing the words in his mouth. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve heard theories, of course. But whoever wove this knew exactly what they were about. Skilled beyond measure, and deliberate in their aim.”

  Jeremiah’s eyes went wide. Hope sparked hot and sudden in his chest, enough to push past the knot in his throat. “Does… does that mean—”

  Ulrick’s gaze lifted from the cube. The grin that spread beneath his beard was sharp and sure, carrying more weight than any words Jeremiah had expected.

  “Aye, lad,” he rumbled. “I still have deep questions. And I’ll likely have to corner that pot-bellied menace for another talk.” His eyes glinted. “But yes. I think I can teach you a few things.”

  Jeremiah’s heart surged, the air catching in his lungs. For a moment, he forgot the sting of the snarl, forgot the knots and the noise. All he could see was the path opening in front of him, lit by the glint of black-blue threads.