Chapter 52
AUGUST
The sound of Lily’s footsteps fading into the tunnel was the only permission I required.
I turned. Elias still stood at the edge of the crumbled platform, robes untouched by the chaos he’d unleashed, his expression as unreadable as ever.
The revolver too light in my hand. My breath came fast and shallow—not from fear, but from fury.
He had unraveled Ysella like she was nothing. Had looked at me as he did it—a lesson. A warning. And her last words were seared beneath my ribs: Don’t forget who your mother was. Who you are. . . What was she about to say?
The tunnel behind me quaked with another blast of magic. The collapse echoed like thunder. Dust and dirt rained from the ceiling. Still, I didn’t move.
Lily was safe. The Weavers were safe.
And I wasn’t going to let Elias follow them.
I stood at the broken mouth of the escape tunnel, pistol in hand, blade strapped to my back. The ruined square glowed gold with fire and golden threads.
This was what it was like to burn for something. To stay behind when my instincts screamed to run.
Smoke parted like a curtain.
Elias Hawthorne. My father.
He stepped through it like judgment incarnate, silver hair catching the light, eyes cold and fathomless. They locked on me as if I had always been precisely where he wanted me.
“August,” he said.
I raised the revolver.
He halted a few paces away, calm, hands clasped behind his back. “So. You’ve made your choice.”
“Not yet.”
His brow arched faintly. “Oh? Then put down the gun.”
“I’m not that great a fool.”
“No,” he said softly. “You’re not. Which is why you’ll listen.”
Magic surged behind me. The air snapped. A stone struck my shoulder and knocked the pistol from my grip. Another pulse of energy slammed into my knees.
I collapsed.
Boots crunched. A foot pressed down between my shoulders, pinning me.
I did not need to look to know.
Elias crouched beside me, one hand almost gentle on my shoulder. “You were never going to kill me, August. Not truly.”
I spat blood into the dirt. “Then watch me next time.”
He did not flinch. “There shall not be one.”
Everything went black.
I woke to stone. Chains. Cold.
The cell lay deep in the bowels of the Iron Spire—no windows, only torchlight. My wrists burned where iron bit into skin. My limbs were heavy. Thoughts, slower still.
He had made certain I could not move. Could not escape. Could scarcely think.
Footsteps echoed. The door opened. Elias entered alone.
No guards. No audience. Only him and the truth he’d come to spill like blood.
He folded his arms behind his back, studying me. “You do not appear surprised.”
“I’m not.”
“You ought to be.”
“And why is that, Father?”
He tilted his head slightly. “Because you’re still alive.”
I did not reply.
He circled slowly. “I should’ve killed you. But your mother would’ve hated that.”
My spine straightened. “Do not speak of her.”
“She was a Weaver,” he said.
After all these years he was finally admitting it. It should have brought me relief. Instead, it hit like a blade to the gut.
He smiled—thin, sharp. “Have you felt it? That stirring beneath the skin? The gift she left you?”
“What are you speaking of?”
He crouched before me. “She tried to save me once, August. Tried to save the Weavers. All she did was create me, the one thing she meant to stop. It broke her.”
My chest tightened.
“She passed that wretched power to you. You’ve seen it, sensed it, haven’t you?” he said quietly. “The threads. The magic.”
He tilted his head slightly, gaze cutting through me.
“You’re the first male Weaver born in over a century. A threadbreaker. Stronger. Wilder. Untethered.”
“No.” The word came out strangled. “That's not—I'm not—”
But even as I denied it, the truth resonated in my bones. Every moment the threads stirred. Every time I'd touched Lily and something sparked between us. The way the Weave had recognized me at the stream.
The words struck deep.
I staggered—not physically, but in the soul-deep way that changes everything.
A threadbreaker.
Not an Unraveler like him. Not a destroyer of lives.
But something more dangerous. Freer.
“If you knew. . . why did you not end me?”
His jaw twitched.
“I tried,” he admitted. “But you're my greatest weakness.”
He stepped closer, studying me like I was his greatest creation. “You were not born to serve the Weave. You were born to rewrite it.”
“You raised me to be a weapon.”
He smiled, cruel and gleaming. “And I was right.”
“No,” I said. “I'm not your weapon.”
The words came final as a blade sliding into place.
“I'm the thing fate never saw coming. I'm not here to destroy the world you built, Father.”
“I'm here to break it open.”
And then the Weave answered. Not with silence. Not with light. With force.
It roared to life in my chest, wild and furious, ripping through every thread he thought he controlled. Power coursed through me like molten gold, like lightning, like everything I'd ever been denied suddenly rushing back into my veins.
The ground cracked beneath my feet. The chains around my wrists didn't just break—they dissolved, reduced to rust and memory. I took a step toward him, the Weave whispering at the edge of my senses—vibrating, trembling, waiting.
And as I stood there, wreathed in golden thread-light, Elias took a single step back.
The first he'd ever taken away from me.
But then his smile returned. Wider. More terrible.
“Perfect,” he whispered.
The pendant at my throat—my mother's, the one piece of her I'd carried all these years—blazed with heat. Not the gentle warmth from before, but searing, burning pain that drove me to my knees.
The one thing I'd thought was mine. The one connection to a mother who'd loved me.
He'd corrupted even that.
“Did you think I didn't know what you were?” Elias asked, circling me as I gasped, clawing at the chain around my neck. “Did you think I raised you in ignorance?”
The pendant pulsed, and with each pulse, my newly found power poured out of me. Pulled into the hourglass like water into a drain.
“Your mother made this for you, yes,” he continued conversationally, as I writhed on the stone floor. “But I. . . improved it. Every threadbreaker needs a focus, August. Something to channel their power through. And I've spent my time making sure yours would serve my purposes, not hers.”
The threads of light around me weren't free anymore—they were being channeled through the pendant, bent to threads I couldn't control. And those threads of light turned dark.
Unraveling magic
“No,” I gasped, fighting against the magic even as it poured out of me. “I will not—”
“You have no choice. The pendant doesn't just focus your power, boy. It commands it. And right now, it's commanding your threadbreaker abilities to do something very specific.”
The golden light streaming from me began to darken, to twist. It seeped past the cell walls, threading through the Iron Spire like poison in a bloodstream.
“Every Weaver who's ever been imprisoned here,” Elias paused, letting the words sink in. “Their echoes remain. Your power follows them. To every camp. Every refuge. Every hidden place.”
I stared at him, horror dawning.
“To destroy them all.” He leaned down, his face inches from mine. “Including your precious Lily.”
“Stop,” I choked. “Please—”
“I cannot,” he said, and something in his tone made my chest tighten—not anger, but something worse. Pity. “Even if I wanted to. The magic is self-sustaining now. Fed by your threadbreaker nature, it will continue until every Weaver in England is nothing but ash and memory.”
Lights blinked out in my mind.
One by one.
Lives, snuffed like candles.
And somewhere among them—
Lily.
The woman who'd shown me magic could be beautiful. Who'd trusted me when no one else would. Who'd looked at me like I was worth saving.
I was going to kill her. With my own power, my own magic, the gift my mother had given me.
I tried to stop it. Clawed at the pendant with bloody fingers, tried to sever my connection to the Weave, tried to turn the magic inward—to destroy myself before I could destroy them.
But the pendant held firm, and the magic flowed relentlessly outward.
“The beautiful irony,” he whispered, “is that she will recognize your magic the moment it touches her. And she’ll know it was you.”
Something broke inside me then. Not cleanly, but in jagged pieces that would never fit back together.
I screamed then—rage and anguish and helplessness tearing from my throat. But the sound was lost in the growing roar of unraveling magic as it spread across the countryside like wildfire.
The pendant burned against my skin, impossible to remove, fused to me by magic and metal and a lifetime of careful preparation.
And in the distance, getting closer, I could hear footsteps.
Guards, perhaps. Or just Elias departing.
It did not matter.
In my mind, all I could see was her face. The way she'd looked at me in the tent, when I'd confessed my feelings. The trust in her eyes when she'd asked me to stay.
“I know,” she'd whispered. “I feel it too.”
And now she would die knowing I'd betrayed her.
I had become what he always intended.
The threadbreaker who would end the Weavers forever.
Starting with the one person who'd shown me what it meant to be free.
But somewhere in the wreckage of everything I was, a single thread held fast—fragile, stubborn, bright as the woman who'd woven it: She had found me in the dark before. She would find me again.