THE VOID WEAVER
Arc 1: The Blackstone Bastard
Chapter 1: Blood Under Moonlight
The alley tasted like piss and copper. Orin Fox knew both flavors intimately.
Three ribs cracked, maybe four. Hard to count when your lungs were screaming and the world tilted at angles geometry hadn't invented yet. He pressed his palm against the slick cobblestones, fingers splaying through something wet that wasn't rain. His blood, probably. The distinction mattered less than it should.
"Stay down, blackstone."
Orin recognized the voice. Garrett Vance, sixteen and blessed with a green birthstone that glowed like poisoned emeralds when he channeled essence through it. The kind of boy who'd never known hunger sharp enough to keep you awake, never understood that cruelty was just boredom wearing expensive boots.
"I'm down," Orin wheezed. "Congratulations. You beat up a kid half your weight."
The kick caught him in the stomach. Physics and malice, collaborating.
"You've got a mouth on you." Garrett crouched, close enough that Orin could smell the honeyed wine on his breath. Noble vintage, probably. "My father says blackstones should learn silence early. Says it's a kindness, really. Managing expectations."
Orin spat blood. It landed on Garrett's polished boot, which made the next kick worth it.
They left him after that. Bored, probably, or late for whatever green-blooded parasites did when they weren't practicing casual violence. The alley returned to its usual symphony: distant tavern songs, the skitter of rats, the wet rasp of Orin's breathing.
He lay there counting stars through the gap between buildings. Forty-three visible. He'd counted them before, on other nights like this. The stars didn't judge. They just burned, indifferent and clean, while the world below festered.
*Get up.*
The thought arrived cold and clinical. Pain was just information. His body's crude way of suggesting he'd made poor decisions. Accurate, but not particularly useful.
*Get. Up.*
Orin's fingers found the wall. Brick, crumbling mortar, the ghost of old graffiti worn smooth by weather. He pulled himself vertical through sheer bloody-minded spite. His left eye was swelling shut, turning his vision into a keyhole view of the slums he'd always called home.
The Old District, they named it. Old like rotting fruit, old like a wound that wouldn't heal. Buildings leaned against each other like drunks sharing secrets, their foundations gnawed hollow by time and neglect. This was where the city's unwanted festered: blackstones, the debtbound, anyone whose birthstone marked them as beneath notice.
Orin stumbled forward. Each step felt like a negotiation with gravity. His hand throbbed where the birthstone sat embedded in his flesh, a glossy black oval that marked him as fundamentally worthless. No essence capacity, no attribute enhancement worth mentioning. Just enough strength to lift boxes, enough durability to survive another beating.
Just enough to stay alive in a world that insisted you shouldn't.
The shrine appeared like a mirage, tucked between two condemned buildings at the district's forgotten edge. Orin had discovered it three years ago while running from a different set of fists. Nobody came here anymore. The goddess it honored had no name he could find in any book, and he'd read every book he could steal or borrow or glimpse over someone's shoulder.
The shrine's door hung crooked on broken hinges. Orin pushed through.
Inside, moonlight fell through a collapsed section of roof, painting everything silver. Three mirrors lined the far wall, their surfaces dark with grime and age. Once, maybe, they'd been polished to reflect a goddess's glory. Now they reflected only shadows.
Orin collapsed beneath them. The stone floor was cold, almost soothing against his fevered skin. He pressed his cheek to it and closed his eyes.
*Tomorrow,* he thought. *Tomorrow I get my first weaving.*
Fifteen. The age when children received their first essence infusion, when their birthstones awakened to full capacity. For green-stones, it meant martial techniques and elemental manipulation. For blue-stones, enhanced labor abilities that guaranteed decent work. For purple-stones, the world on a platter, their massive essence reserves translating to power that bent reality.
For blackstones?
The ability to carry slightly heavier boxes.
Orin laughed, which turned into coughing, which turned into something that might have been crying if he'd had any tears left. The shrine swallowed the sound, indifferent as the stars.
He drifted. Pain and exhaustion dragged him down toward unconsciousness. Somewhere distant, a bell tolled midnight. His birthday, technically. Fifteen years of surviving a world designed to grind him into paste.
*Happy fucking birthday, Orin.*
The light started as a whisper.
Silver, threading through the gaps in the roof, concentrating. Orin's working eye cracked open, confusion cutting through the pain-fog. The moon hung directly overhead, full and luminous in a way that felt wrong. Too bright. Too focused.
The mirrors began to glow.
Orin tried to move. His body ignored the suggestion, pinned by exhaustion and broken ribs. The grime on the mirrors burned away like mist under a furnace sun, revealing surfaces that reflected nothing. They were doorways, he realized with mounting horror. Windows into somewhere else.
Somewhere that noticed him.
The moonlight lanced down, struck the mirrors, and rebounded. Three beams converging on the birthstone embedded in his hand. The impact felt like drowning in frozen light, like every nerve in his body screaming a single note that shattered thought.
His birthstone pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times in rhythm with a heart that wasn't his.
The black surface fractured. Not breaking, but opening. Tiny silver specks bloomed across it like stars being born, spreading until his birthstone looked like a slice of night sky transplanted into flesh.
The light released him.
Orin gasped, sucking air into lungs that had forgotten how. His hand burned, cold fire radiating from the birthstone up his arm. He held it up, watching the silver specks swirl and dance beneath the surface.
Damaged. Had to be damaged. Another layer of bad luck to stack on the pile.
The mirrors dimmed, returning to grimy obscurity. The moonlight softened back to normalcy. The shrine was just a shrine again, abandoned and indifferent.
Orin lay there, breathing, alive despite probability.
His hand throbbed with each heartbeat, the rhythm slightly off. Like his body was learning a new song and hadn't quite mastered the tempo yet.
*Tomorrow,* he thought again. *First weaving. Then the academy entrance exams. Then...*
Then what? Escape the slums? Become someone who mattered? Stop taking beatings in alleys that smelled like piss and defeat?
The stars through the broken roof offered no answers. They just burned, distant and clean, while Orin Fox bled beneath them and dreamed of a world where blackstones could bite back.
He closed his eyes and let the darkness take him, unaware that something in that darkness had just woken up.
Unaware that the voice waiting in his birthstone had been counting down the years, patient as stone, hungry as the void between stars.
Unaware that tomorrow, when the weaver's essence touched his birthstone and activated what shouldn't exist, everything he understood about power and weakness would shatter like glass under a hammer.
The shrine kept its secrets. The mirrors reflected nothing but shadows.
And Orin Fox slept, his transformed birthstone glittering like captured starlight, while the moon watched and waited for the world to realize what it had just created.