Chapter 3: The Consumption of Knowledge
Kael ran for an hour, using his residual momentum, the constant, gnawing pain of the Eclipsed Shard acting as a bitter stimulant. He ignored the shivering, ignored the dull ache in his limbs where the Shard had consumed the Law of Sensation. He pushed toward a visible, geological anomaly—a massive, monolithic archway of fused basalt that stood as a lonely marker on the plain, likely the wreckage of an ancient gate.
He reached the archway as the deep grey light began to thin slightly, signaling the time when the hidden sun was at its apex—the 'Silent Hour'—the Wastes' equivalent of noon. The perpetual gloom offered no warmth, but the heavy ash fall often lessened briefly during this time.
Kael collapsed behind the thick stone column, dropping the short-sword. He was safe, for now. Jareth, the Spindle Adept, was far away, and it would take him time to correct his trajectory and regain his bearings.
Survival demanded he rest, eat, and drink, but the Echo of the Void demanded knowledge. Kael knew the Crimson Hand would not send a single Adept a second time. Their next response would be overwhelming, a legion of Weavers, perhaps even a formidable Patternmaster. He needed more than crude velocity and desperate unraveling; he needed to master a Law that could protect him.
He pulled the dead Weaver's leather journal from his bag. The book felt heavy, charged with the latent Aetheric energy of its former owner.
He ate a few strips of dried meat, chewing slowly to conserve water, forcing himself to focus on the cryptic diagrams and precise notations in the journal.
The journal was a study in Threadweaving Patterns, written for someone with Jareth's skill level. Kael, who was merely a Void-fracture capable of mimicry, found the prose obtuse, but the diagrams spoke to his new, terrifying intuition.
The Weavers used a symbolic language of loops, knots, and taut lines to represent the manipulation of Aether Threads. A tight spiral meant Imposition. A severed line meant Separation.
Kael's eyes skimmed past the attack patterns—Flames, Force, Pierce. He was seeking a pattern of Defense.
He found a diagram on the penultimate page that was drawn with particular care: a dense, overlapping lattice of Aether Threads, intricately woven to repel external force. The corresponding notation was complex, but Kael's fractured mind understood the essence of the weave.
The Law was Resistance. It imposed a localized pattern that caused external Aetheric energy to flow around the target, rendering it immune to low-to-mid level spells and physically resilient to impact.
This was the Law of the Shield. The key to surviving a confrontation with the Hand's legion.
Kael knew he couldn't spend a decade practicing the Law of Resistance. He had to Echo it.
To use the Echo of the Void safely, Kael had to perform the theft of knowledge without external pressure, allowing his soul's fracture to consume the fragment it required without the chaos of combat. Yet, the price remained horrific. The more complex the Law, the deeper the Shard had to burrow into Kael's own Aether Thread to find the necessary payment.
The Law of Resistance was intricate. Its payment would be significant.
Kael closed the journal, placing it on the ground. He knelt, taking the iron short-sword into his hands. He needed a focus, a material to receive the newly stolen Law once it was learned. The crude iron was sufficient.
He closed his eyes and pushed his consciousness toward the terrifying coldness of the Eclipsed Shard of Time.
I demand the Law of Resistance.
The Shard responded not with warmth, but with an insatiable, consuming emptiness. The coldness spread from Kael's chest outward.
Where would the Shard harvest the energy for such a complex defensive pattern? Not just stamina or sensation, but something intricate, something related to self-preservation.
The moment the Echo began its work, Kael felt an overwhelming detachment.
The Shard was consuming the part of his Aether Thread responsible for the Law of Empathy—the ability to feel the suffering or joy of others. It was the deepest wound yet.
Kael saw a rapid-fire succession of images: his mother's tired, gentle hand on his cheek before she succumbed to the Wastes fever; the shared fear in Roric's eyes; the brief, desperate camaraderie with Lyra. These memories didn't fade; they remained sharp, but the feeling tied to them—the warmth, the sense of connection—was surgically excised.
He gasped, a dry, choked sound. Tears tried to form, but his tear ducts were locked, resistant to the emotion the Shard had just consumed.
He was now terrifyingly alone, not just physically, but metaphysically. He had gained a shield, but lost his ability to mourn or connect. The price of survival was his humanity.
The agony passed, leaving behind a blank, hollow stillness.
The knowledge was now his. The complex pattern of the Law of Resistance was perfectly imprinted upon his Void-fracture, waiting to be wielded.
Kael opened his eyes. They were colder, harder—truly the grey of cooled ash now.
He picked up the short-sword, his breathing even and controlled. He focused, for the first time, on weaving the Law he had stolen, rather than violently forcing the Shard to apply its own Law.
He used the remnants of his personal Aether Thread, supplemented by the stable, constant power of the Shard. The Shard didn't provide the pattern; it provided the anchor for the pattern.
Kael drew a thin, silvery thread of energy from the air—pure, wild Aether—and imposed the Law of Resistance onto the crude iron sword.
The sword did not glow or change color. It simply felt impossibly heavy and impossibly solid. It was not just hard; it actively refused damage.
To test it, Kael placed the tip against the massive basalt archway and struck the flat of the blade with a heavy rock.
Clang!
The rock shattered. The short-sword, now infused with the Law of Resistance, didn't even vibrate. The force of the impact had been smoothly shunted away by the defensive lattice woven into its core.
Kael smiled, a cold, empty upturn of his lips that contained no humor. He was a Weaver now, albeit one powered by sacrifice.
He spent the next hour moving, staying low, studying the journal further, and practicing simple, low-cost Threadweaving to stabilize his control over the Resistance Law.
He learned to coat himself, not with the powerful, drain-heavy shield that required the Shard's raw power, but with a thin, flexible layer of Resistance over his skin, enough to deflect minor cuts and low-powered Aetheric shocks.
Suddenly, the cold, empty clarity gifted by the consumed Law of Empathy warned him. He didn't feel fear—he felt data.
A massive, high-density Aetheric signature approaching from the West. Too large for one man.
He abandoned the archway, scrambling up a gentle slope toward the rim of a shallow, ash-filled crater.
He reached the summit and looked back. What he saw was far worse than the Adept.
Across the Wastes, a moving shadow was consuming the landscape: a company of Crimson Hand Enforcers, nearly fifty strong, mounted on dust-runner steeds—four-legged beasts bred for speed in the ash.
Leading them was not Jareth, but a figure in a deep, purple-black cloak, moving on foot, seemingly floating above the dust. The cloak was woven with intricate, shimmering patterns that spoke of immense, ancient power.
This was the Patternmaster.
The Patternmaster was weaving an entire Law of Conduction over the ground itself, enhancing the speed of the mounted legion and ensuring that no escape attempt would go unnoticed.
The Patternmaster stopped, lifted a hand, and pointed directly at Kael's position a mile away.
The Law of Conduction was redirected and refined into a single, massive attack. A wave of shimmering, focused heat—a Law of Conflagration—surged across the Wastes toward Kael's crater.
Kael watched the wave of incinerating heat approach. It was too fast to dodge, too vast to outrun, and too powerful for his limited, thin Resistance Law to block completely.
He dropped behind the crater rim.
He didn't need to block the heat. He needed to make the Law of Time fight the Law of Conflagration.
Kael had only seconds. The Shard was his only answer.
He pushed his awareness deep into the Law of Time, forcing it to impose its will on the localized Aetheric field around his body.
He forced the Aether to slow down.
Not his body's movement—that would be suicidal—but the speed of time itself in a tight bubble around him.
The Law of Conflagration struck the edge of the crater, and the world instantly went into an agonizing, viscous slow motion.
The roaring wave of heat seemed to crawl. The sound of the blast was elongated into a deep, agonizing hum. Kael saw the individual molecules of heated air separating, the Aether Threads of the Conflagration pattern struggling against the opposing Law of Time.
Kael had achieved a small, temporary temporal distortion field.
But the field was imperfect. The sheer heat still seeped through the temporal resistance, scalding the air he breathed, searing his eyes. He felt the intense, burning heat of the Conflagration Law trying to overcome the Law of Time.
He held the field for two agonizing, elongated seconds of relative time.
Then, the Patternmaster, sensing the resistance, drove his Law harder.
The temporal bubble snapped.
Kael was hurled forward by the instantaneous return to normal time, collapsing in a painful heap. He had survived the Conflagration wave, but his skin was blistered, his lungs were burning, and the temporal distortion had thrown his senses into chaos.
He felt the inevitable payment from the Shard. This time, it consumed the Aether Thread governing his Recall—the ability to access long-term, complex memory. He remembered the facts of his slavery, but the painful details, the nuances, the full context—they became flat, distant echoes. He had sacrificed the vivid reality of his past for the chance at a future.
Kael didn't hesitate. The Patternmaster and his legion were now less than half a mile away, closing fast.
He staggered to his feet, grabbing his short-sword, its defensive Law of Resistance still faintly humming. The Canyonlands were tantalizingly close, but they were about to be cut off.
He was facing fifty trained killers and a Patternmaster capable of weaving the landscape itself.
The only way out was through.