Two more days of recovery brought Spencer's Codex Stamina to 18/36 — still depleted, still dragging at his awareness like a weight tied to his consciousness, but finally past the threshold the system had demanded.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: Minimum Stamina threshold met. Thread Tracing now operational. Recommend testing at reduced capacity.]
Spencer sat at his recovery room window, watching the morning sun paint Fal Dara's stone walls gold. The fortress was returning to something like normal after the chaos of the Eye's aftermath — soldiers drilling in courtyards, merchants setting up temporary stalls, the eternal preparation for Shadow incursions that defined Borderland life. Lord Agelmar's people didn't have the luxury of recovery. The Blight was always there, always hungry, always pressing south.
But Spencer had other concerns than Trollocs this morning.
Rand's golden thread blazed in his Thread Sight like a bonfire glimpsed through fog — visible even through the stone walls separating Spencer's room from wherever the Dragon Reborn was currently located. The ta'veren's signature was impossible to miss, a beacon that made Spencer's eyes water if he focused too long.
Perfect test subject.
---
Spencer focused on Rand's thread and activated the new ability.
The sensation was unlike anything he'd experienced with the Codex before. Thread Sight showed threads — passively, constantly, a filter overlaid on normal vision. But Thread Tracing was active. It grabbed Rand's golden thread and pulled Spencer's perception along it like a bead sliding on a wire.
The walls dissolved.
Not literally — Spencer's physical eyes still saw his recovery room, the wooden chair, the water pitcher on the bedside table. But his Codex-awareness flowed outward, following the golden thread through stone corridors, around corners, down stairs. He wasn't seeing with eyes anymore. He was seeing with thread.
Three seconds. Five. Eight.
He found Rand.
The Dragon Reborn stood in Fal Dara's training yard, wooden practice sword in hand, facing Lan across a circle of packed earth. Rand's thread pulsed with exhaustion and determination — he'd been at this for hours, probably since dawn. Lan's gray-green thread moved with predatory patience, correcting Rand's stance with a tap of his own blade.
Spencer perceived all of this without physically seeing any of it. The Thread Trace showed him Rand's position, his emotional state, the connections flowing from his golden thread to the people nearby. Mat's silver-blue corruption-healed thread sat on a bench at the yard's edge, watching. Perrin's green-gold wolf-tinged thread stood near the stables, arms folded.
The trace held for thirty seconds before snapping back.
[Thread Tracing complete. Duration: 30 seconds. Stamina cost: 8. Current Stamina: 10/36.]
Spencer exhaled. His head throbbed — not the splitting agony of thread-burn, but the dull ache of a muscle pushed past comfort. The ability worked. It worked better than he'd hoped.
Surveillance through stone. Location tracking without physical proximity. And that was just the ta'veren thread — the easiest target in the Pattern.
He needed to test that theory. But first, he needed to move. Recovery room isolation was driving him insane, and the Codex wasn't the only system that needed exercise.
---
Spencer found Perrin in the lower courtyard, sitting on a stone bench with a whetstone and an axe.
The young blacksmith's golden eyes tracked Spencer from the moment he emerged from the fortress's side door. Those eyes — wolf-touched, changed forever by whatever bond Perrin had formed with the dream — saw things that normal vision couldn't. Spencer had known that since their first confrontation in Caemlyn.
What he hadn't known was that wolves could sense Pattern-level disturbances.
"You're up," Perrin said. His voice was neutral, but his thread flickered with something between wariness and curiosity.
"Walking helps the recovery. Or so the Shienarans keep telling me." Spencer moved to stand near the bench, keeping his distance respectful. Perrin's space was his own — pushing into it uninvited would trigger the wolf underneath. "Mind if I watch?"
Perrin shrugged and returned to his sharpening. The axe blade caught the morning light, gleaming with the kind of edge that came from years of practice. Spencer had never learned to sharpen properly — his carpentry had been more about construction than tools — but he recognized craftsmanship when he saw it.
For a few minutes, they existed in comfortable silence. The scrape of whetstone on steel. The distant clatter of practice swords from the training yard. The normal sounds of a fortress that didn't know it had hosted the Dragon Reborn's first real battle.
Then Perrin spoke.
"You did something at the Eye."
Spencer had been expecting this. Not from Perrin specifically — he'd assumed Moiraine would be the one to press hardest. But the words carried a certainty that didn't allow for deflection.
"What makes you say that?"
"The wolves." Perrin's golden eyes met Spencer's. There was no aggression in them, only watchfulness — the patient attention of a predator assessing whether something was prey, rival, or irrelevant. "They felt it. Even here, miles south of the Eye, the wolves in the dream felt something shudder. A ripple, like dropping a stone into still water."
The saidin siphon. The Pattern resisting my intervention.
Wolves can sense Pattern-level disturbances. That's... concerning.
"The Forsaken attacked," Spencer said carefully. "There was channeling. The Eye's power was released. A lot of things happened at once."
"Not that." Perrin's nostrils flared — testing Spencer's scent for lies, probably. "The wolves didn't care about channeling. They've felt that before. This was different. This was something touching the fabric of things. And when they told me about it, they showed me... you. Not clearly. Just a sense. A wrongness that matches the wrongness I smell when I'm near you."
Spencer let the silence stretch. There wasn't a good lie for this, and partial truths had costs.
"I don't fully understand my abilities," he said finally. "That's not a deflection. It's the truth. I sense things. Sometimes I can... affect them. At the Eye, I pushed myself harder than I should have. The cost nearly killed me."
Perrin studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded once — the same nod Lan gave when he was satisfied with an answer that wasn't complete but was honest.
"The wolves don't like you," Perrin said, returning to his sharpening. "But they don't fear you either. They say you smell like a hole in the wind. A place where the Pattern should be but isn't."
"That's probably accurate."
"Are you dangerous?"
The question was simple. Spencer considered giving a simple answer — "yes" or "no," clean and decisive. But Perrin wasn't the kind of person who appreciated false simplicity.
"To the Shadow? Yes. To you? I hope not. To the Pattern itself?" Spencer hesitated. "I don't know. I'm trying to help. But I don't know what the cost of that help will be."
Perrin's hands stilled on the whetstone. "That's the most honest thing you've said since Caemlyn."
"It's the most honest thing I've said to anyone."
The blacksmith resumed his work, and Spencer watched the blade grow sharper, and neither of them spoke again until the noon bells rang across the fortress.
---
The Pattern Correction continued.
Spencer's recovery chair collapsed when he sat down for lunch — one leg had rotted through overnight, despite the wood looking sound. He ended up on the floor with soup on his shirt and a serving boy staring in horror.
"I'm fine," Spencer said, waving off the boy's apologies. "Just the universe having a joke at my expense."
[PATTERN CORRECTION: Level 2 — Manifesting. Incidents today: 1. Estimated remaining duration: 5-7 days.]
The second incident came an hour later. A serving girl tripped on absolutely nothing while carrying bread to Spencer's table, scattering rolls across the floor. She stammered apologies while Spencer helped gather them, his hands steady even as his mind catalogued the event.
Two today. Both small. Both connected to me specifically.
The Pattern is pushing back against what I took from the Eye. Not hard enough to kill me, but hard enough to make my life inconvenient.
The third incident was worse.
Spencer stood at his window late afternoon, watching the shadows lengthen across the courtyard. A raven landed on his windowsill — black-feathered, sharp-eyed, watching him with an intelligence that didn't belong to a bird.
Ravens were the Dark One's eyes. Everyone in the Borderlands knew that.
This one stared at Spencer for ten seconds, its head tilting from side to side as if measuring him. Then it opened its beak and made a sound that wasn't quite a caw — more like a whisper, almost words, though Spencer couldn't make them out.
Then it flew north, toward the Blight.
[WARNING: Shadow observation detected. Fain's network may have tracked the Pattern Correction disturbance to this location. Recommend caution.]
Spencer watched the raven disappear into the darkening sky and felt something cold settle in his chest. The Shadow knew where he was. The Shadow was watching.
And Fain is still in the dungeon below. Quiet. Waiting.
---
Spencer borrowed a needle and thread from a Shienaran servant that evening.
The soup-stained shirt needed mending — the fall from the chair had torn a seam along the shoulder. It was simple work, the kind his carpenter's hands remembered without conscious thought. Needle through fabric, pull tight, repeat. A rhythm as old as civilization.
The servant had looked at him strangely when he'd asked. Lords didn't mend their own clothes, apparently. But Spencer wasn't a lord, whatever room Agelmar had given him. He was a carpenter from a village that didn't know his name, wearing a body that belonged to a dead man, carrying a system that was slowly changing the nature of reality.
Sometimes simple work was the only thing that felt real.
The mended shirt dried on the windowsill next to where the raven had sat, and Spencer counted the Pattern Correction incidents like a weather report — three today, each smaller than yesterday's thread-burn agony.
It's fading. The Correction will run its course, and then I'll have the saidin and the new abilities and a chance to do something meaningful.
But first I have to survive Moiraine's investigation. And whatever the Shadow is planning with Fain.
Outside, a messenger rode through the fortress gates. Spencer tracked the man's thread through walls — Thread Tracing was becoming easier with practice — and watched as he dismounted and ran toward Lord Agelmar's chambers.
News from somewhere. Important enough to require a hard ride.
Spencer would find out what it was soon enough. Lord Agelmar would summon the group to hear it. That was how things worked here — crisis, council, action, repeat.
The Pattern kept moving, whether Spencer was ready for it or not.
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