Chapter 1 #2
Minutes passed. Or hours. She lost track. The walls swallowed time, and all she could do was catalog the sounds: the ticking of a thaumaturgic sconce, footsteps muffled behind another door, the gradual slowing of her own pulse.
What could the Registry want? For six-and-twenty cycles she’d lived so low beneath their notice she might as well have been a commoner.
Her affinity had slumbered, a silent passenger, through cycles of heartbreak and poverty and the slow, daily erosion of dignity.
Finding out what kind of magic her blood harbored had seemed entirely irrelevant: she’d accepted she’d never marry.
And without a blood vow to awaken it, her affinity would remain dormant for the rest of her days.
She’d mourned for it, then made peace with it, then forgotten it.
Hadn’t she?
The door creaked open. Sabine jerked to attention.
The High Binder entered in a billow of silk, their silhouette immense yet uncannily weightless. Behind them followed a male clerk burdened by a stack of ledgers.
“Sabine Almarien, of House Almarien, Western Valenholds.”
“Yes.” Sabine straightened her spine. She would not cower, even if her palms were slick with cold sweat.
“You were never Weighed.”
“No.” She met the veiled face without blinking. “My parents died when I was fourteen. Our circumstances changed.”
A noncommittal sound. The clerk scribbled, frantic.
“Do you know what that”—the High Binder pointed to Sabine’s collarbone, where the itch remained, but the glow had subsided—”signifies?”
“I cannot say I do, Your Eminence.”
“It is a recent innovation, you see. The Registry has been implementing these marks throughout the Season’s candidates to identify… auspicious matches. You should consider yourself immensely fortunate to have one. Only a select few were blessed by the magic.”
Sabine’s mind raced. “Even as an Unweighed?”
“The Weighing is merely for cataloguing; it does not impact how your affinity behaves.” The High Binder stepped closer, invading Sabine’s space. “Even so, it is an oversight we shall correct at once, I assure you.”
A gloved hand hovered near Sabine’s forehead. When their thread wrapped around her head, as they had for her pupil earlier, the sensation was cold, clinical—a blueprint being scanned and filed away. Gold light burst beneath the High Binder’s thread of magic, flooding through Sabine’s hair.
With a faint tremor in their wrist, the High Binder seemed to hesitate. As if they hadn’t gotten the response they sought the first time, they tried again, triggering another pulse of gold light.
A glance at the clerk, then back to Sabine.
“Creation,” the High Binder finally pronounced, the word forced out as though they could unmake reality by simply avoiding it.
But the truth hung in the air. The clerk’s fluttering quill stilled.
Creation .
Sabine’s mind grasped desperately for equilibrium, the implications spinning out of control, sending the room tilting around her.
“Impossible,” she said, before she could think better of it.
She had yet to meet someone who wielded the affinity, though in childhood her mother had spun stories of weavers who could make bone into blades and grief into stone, who could engineer entire buildings with sheer willpower.
The thought nearly buckled her knees. She counted her breaths.
It was a habit she’d grown accustomed to after her parents’ deaths, to keep the panic at bay.
Finally, the fear steadied into something harder.
“The Weighing does not err.” The High Binder gestured. The clerk resumed scribbling.
Sabine’s thoughts scattered and reformed. Creation meant value. Value meant control.
Control meant the end of the careful independence she had cultivated since losing her parents.
“What happens now, then?”
“Now, Miss Almarien, you shall join this Season’s candidates. Your mark seeks its counterpart. The Registry will facilitate this union.”
Ice pooled in Sabine’s gut. “You’re forcing me onto the marriage mart.”
“We are correcting an oversight. It would be an unforgivable waste for a Creation weaver to remain unbound, unable to use their affinity. It is too powerful to lie dormant your entire life, so we shall awaken it with a proper blood vow.”
Liora’s face flashed through Sabine’s mind—her sister’s quiet excitement when they’d counted their small savings, the careful planning for this cycle’s debut, the dreams they’d woven together from thread-thin resources and stubborn hope.
Everything they’d scraped together would now be stretched beyond breaking.
This Registry decree threatened to crumble twelve cycles of sacrifices, of making herself smaller so Liora might have the future Sabine had surrendered, all because of a mark she hadn’t asked for, revealing an affinity she’d never sought to claim.
“And should I refuse?” The question emerged with quiet defiance, though Sabine already knew the answer.
Stillness. Even the clerk’s quill hung in the air like a bird arrested in flight.
“Miss Almarien.” The High Binder’s voice slipped into something quieter, more lethal. “Those who resist Registry guidance often find themselves with unexpected misfortunes. You have a younger sister, yes?”
The threat needed no elaboration. Sabine had heard whispers of those who defied the Registry—gentry stripped of titles, families separated, affinities suppressed through methods that left their bearers hollow-eyed and compliant.
The High Binder glided to the door. “The Registry expects your full compliance in this matter.”
They departed without awaiting a response, clerk in tow.
Silence pressed in from all sides. Her fists curled tight, nails biting her palms.
For a few minutes, Sabine sat still and counted her breaths.
Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.
Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three.
She would not let the Registry make a pawn out of her.
Once she felt her legs would hold firm, she left the chamber and spilled into the corridor.
Only a few clerks mingled about. They paid Sabine no mind, even when she attempted to get their attention to ask for directions.
It was no matter—she was fairly certain she could retrace her steps back to the Weighing Hall.
Sabine set her jaw and did just that, keeping to the wall.
The corridor was long and windowless, lined with sconces that flickered in time to the thrum of her pulse.
Her hands stayed tightly clasped at her waist as she counted her breaths, her steps, the number of doors she passed.
Seven. Eight. Nine. Each one identical, lacquered in black and trimmed with a single brass numeral, as if the Registry could not abide even the smallest deviation from its own suffocating order.
She was nearly at the junction to the main hall.
She rounded the final corner, heart pounding, and nearly collided with a Registry attendant, who startled and dropped his sheaf of papers in a cloud.
Sabine bent to help. The clerk only mumbled a perfunctory thanks and vanished, leaving her alone in the corridor once more.
The next moment, sure and heavy footsteps echoed in the hall. Sabine froze, every muscle taut as wire.
A man stood framed in the archway. He moved with the silent certainty of someone who could measure every threat in the space between heartbeats.
Several things in his appearance suggested a disdain for societal standards, from his ironwood-brown hair, worn in a knot at his nape and far longer than imperial norms, to his cravatless shirt, which revealed the dark, sun-warmed skin of his neck.
On his lapel gleamed a pin shaped like a hand.
The Emperor’s Hand.
Sabine didn’t know him, but she knew of him—his name trailed behind him like a funeral procession, his reputation for efficiency and violence a whispered legend through all of Velyar.
Every survival instinct Sabine had ever cultivated told her she was in the presence of a predator, and her best bet at survival was to remain very, very still and hope to stay unnoticed. Alas, all her plans had failed spectacularly today, and it would seem her luck was not about to turn now.
Her breath must have come in too ragged, because his head snapped up, catching her in a stare so direct Sabine felt it like a physical blow. His eyes were the palest of hazel, stark and arresting against his otherwise darker features.
Her mark exploded into gold, burning through the thin fabric of her gown. She could feel it radiating, a living thing, eager and wild and utterly beyond her control. An answering darkness bloomed at the Hand’s throat, obsidian to her gold.
For a long moment, even the air seemed to still. And then, he charged towards her.