"You should rest," Lyra had said.
Zaric lay on the narrow bed, staring at the patched roof as the hut dimmed from gray to almost-black. Wind worried at the reeds overhead. The faint glow of a cheap oil lamp leaked from behind the curtain in the corner where their mother lay.
Lyra sat on the floor near that curtain, knees pulled up, chin resting on them. Every so often, she leaned forward as if to make sure their mother was still breathing, then relaxed again.
He'd meant to sleep.
Instead, his mind walked circles.
Rane's wall of earth. The neat, functional weave around his core. His mother's tangled tapestry. The memory of gold light catching in a wrong knot and dying there.
And Lyra, shoulders bowed under work she shouldn't have had to carry alone.
He cleared his throat softly. "Lyra."
She looked over, eyes catching the lamplight. "You're supposed to be resting," she said.
"I am," he lied. "Just… one thing I want to remember before I sleep." He shifted, wincing as his muscles protested. "Can we talk? About… cores. Spirit veins. Awakening. I'm trying to pull old memories back, but it's like grabbing fog."
Her expression softened.
"All right," she said. "But if you start drooling or your eyes roll back, I'll hit you."
She shifted closer, sitting with her back to the wall near his bed, so she could still see the curtain if she turned her head.
"Everyone has a core," Lyra began, brow furrowing as she tried to put what she knew into words. "They're born with it, but it's… sleeping. Like a lump of stone buried in your chest. At twelve, your spirit veins have formed enough that you can try to wake it."
"Spirit veins are the glowing lines I saw earlier," Zaric said, then mentally kicked himself.
Lyra blinked. "Saw?"
He scrambled. "I mean… I remember a little. From before." He tapped his temple. "It's fuzzy, but I recall you talking about veins… and cores… and how you wanted yours to be fire so you could set the foreman's beard on fire from across the tunnel."
She stared at him.
Then, slowly, a grin crept across her face.
"I did say that," she admitted. "You said if you got wind you'd help fan it."
A ghost of the memory stirred—her laugh, high and fierce, in a dark tunnel. It might have been real. It might have been his imagination filling in cracks.
Either way, it worked. Her suspicion eased.
"Spirit veins grow with you," she went on. "But they're empty until the core wakes. When it does, Radiance starts flowing. That's… the energy you spend to use weaves. Each person's core answers more strongly to one element. Earth. Fire. Water. Wind." She snorted. "Most of us here are earth. Figures."
"Because of the mines," he guessed.
"Because we're poor." Lyra's voice went dry. "The fancy cores go to the ones who can pay for them. Higher cores have a higher chance to awaken a strong element. The rich want their children burning and flying and throwing waves. Earth cores… we get the scraps. The ones that get tossed aside."
"Does the element decide the weaves you can use?" he asked.
She nodded. "Mostly. A waterweaver can heal and shape liquid. Fire burns, lights, sears. Wind moves things, cuts, carries. Earth… holds, hardens, breaks rock." Her gaze drifted toward the back room. "Some people say you can learn more than one element. Combine them. But the healer told me most who try end up like Mom."
Her hands clenched on her knees.
"Twisted veins. Dormant core."
Zaric swallowed, thinking of the foreign knot in his mother's tapestry.
She'd tried to weave something into herself that didn't belong—and the bad pattern had strangled her own Radiance, slowly smothering her core.
He wanted to tell Lyra exactly that. To say: She isn't cursed. She made a mistake trying to save people like Rane and Pelly, and it caught her instead. But he wasn't ready. Not until he knew what fixing it would take.
Lyra scrubbed at her eyes. "Anyway. Awakening. Most kids my age did it at twelve. Those with beast cores got there first. The rest waited and begged.
Her smile wobbled. "We never found a core." She looked down at her hands. "So my veins… never lit."
Zaric felt a pang.
He knew, from the way people on the lane moved, how that marked her. The faint glow in their limbs, the way they leaned into more than mere muscle—Lyra had none of that. Just stubbornness and bone.
"Well," he said softly. "Maybe there's more than one way to wake something."
She gave him a look halfway between hope and don't you dare say something cruel.
He held up his hands. "Just thinking out loud."
And thinking of the way Radiance had flowed from his hand into his mother's veins earlier, propping up her weakest channels. If his core could touch her… could it touch Lyra's too?
He had no idea if that was possible. No idea how dangerous it might be. But the thought lodged in his mind and refused to leave.
Eventually, exhaustion won. Lyra's head dipped, her words slowing. She shook herself a few times, glaring at her own body for betraying her, but after a while she simply folded her arms on her knees and rested her forehead on them, still seated near the curtain.
Her breathing deepened.
Zaric sat quietly, listening to the duet of inhales and exhales—Lyra here, their mother there.
The Core in his chest pulsed softly.
He hesitated.
Seismic Sight tugged at him like a dangerous tool hanging within reach. He should rest. His Radiance was already low from inspecting his mother and pushing the skill too far.
But Lyra had just said the words he needed: my veins never lit.
If that were true, he would expect… nothing. A sleeping lump where a core should be. Dark channels waiting.
He swallowed.
"Just a peek," he whispered to himself. "Slow. If it hurts, I stop."
He reached out and laid his fingers gently over Lyra's wrist.
Her skin was roughened by work, but warmer than the air. A smear of mine dust streaked her forearm where she'd wiped away sweat and forgotten to clean it.
He closed his eyes and brushed Seismic Sight.
The world shifted.
Lines of light flared into existence beneath her skin. Thin, pale, almost transparent compared to Rane's, but present.
Radiance barely moved, a sluggish trickle at best. But it wasn't nothing.
His gaze traveled up along her arm toward her chest.
Her core sat there, smaller than their mother's, the size of his own, maybe. It was a muted, dull brown—iron-stage, if he trusted the instincts whispering in his bones. It looked… smothered.
Not dead. Asleep, yes, but with a strange tension to it, like a muscle clenched for too long.
Around it, her tapestry was simple. Few loops. Fewer crossings. A child's half-woven cloth compared to the dense pattern wrapped around their mother's core.
And on the right side of that small tapestry… there it was.
A knot.
Not as wild or harsh as the one strangling their mother's weave. This one was… careful. Deliberate.
Threads of blue wove through it—thin, water-aligned lines, cool and clear. They wrapped around a section of her pattern like a bandage, binding it tight. Radiance that tried to flow through that part of her tapestry slowed to almost nothing, redirected around the knot in gentle curves.
A seal.
It didn't look like Lyra's work. It was too precise, too measured. And the flavor of it—the way the blue thread interacted with the white—felt painfully familiar.
His mother's hand.
He changed the angle of his awareness slightly, watching how the foreign threads sat. They didn't clash with Lyra's core the way the wrong pattern had with his mother's. They cradled it, cocooned it, pressed down on it.
Holding it back.
"Why?" he breathed.
The healer's warnings rose in his memory, filtered through Lyra's voice. People who tried for more than one element end up in vein-sleep.
If Lyra's core had shown signs of waking in some unusual way—too early, too wild, too mixed—his mother might have sealed it rather than risk the same fate for her daughter.
He forced himself to breathe slowly, to look carefully. The seal wasn't perfect. Time had frayed it in places. A few thin, white threads poked through the blue bandage like roots breaking through old cloth. Radiance seeped there in tiny pulses.
He wanted—badly—to start tugging at it. To pick at the knots the way he'd unjam a tangle of support beams in a damaged shaft. To let her core breathe properly for the first time in years.
But every instinct screamed caution.
His mother had known enough to put this in place. He, by his own admission, barely understood what he was looking at. A careless attempt to "free" Lyra could twist her veins the same way his mother's were twisted now.
"Not yet," he whispered. "I see you. That's a start. But I'm not breaking anything until I know how to build something better."
He let Seismic Sight fade.
The glowing map of Lyra's insides dissolved back into skin and cloth. Her arm lay relaxed in his hand, oblivious.
Sweat slicked his temples. His head pounded like someone was tapping the inside of his skull with a pick.
He took his hand away and leaned back against the wall, breathing shallowly.
Radiance inside him flickered low. Whatever number his tapestry would show now, he knew it would not be kind.
Worth it, he thought. Knowing is worth it.
Lyra shifted in her sleep, murmuring something unintelligible. For a moment, her hand groped blindly toward him. He caught it and let her fingers curl around his.
"I'll fix this," he murmured, so softly only the earth could hear. "You're not broken. You're sealed. When I unmake it, I'll do it right."
Somewhere outside, voices rose. A group of men and women trudged past, talking louder than most. To them, Lyra would be just another unawakened girl from the mine lane.
Zaric closed his eyes, feeling the faint, stubborn pulse of her smothered core beneath his fingertips.
They were wrong.
And one day, the village would see it.