The old training chamber had been untouched for decades—its protective wards outdated, its floor cracked with ancient runic residue. But none of that mattered now.
Ari stood in the center, breathing slowly.
The ring of raw syntax crystal he'd forged from the tombsite floated above his palm, humming softly like a tuning fork. He whispered the syntax—not Signum, but something older. Something primal.
"root:thread.invoke(Δ−Prime)→[construct:manifoldglyph]/form:respondtointentroot:thread.invoke(Δ-Prime) → [construct: manifold glyph] / form: respond to intentroot:thread.invoke(Δ−Prime)→[construct:manifoldglyph]/form:respondtointent"
No glyphs appeared. No light. No elemental surge.
Instead, the air bent—subtly. A ripple, like the world exhaled.
He reached deeper.
"layer:unbound/manifest:latticeofselflayer: unbound / manifest: lattice of selflayer:unbound/manifest:latticeofself"
From his hand, threads—not the colored ones of elemental lineage, but transparent, barely visible—emerged and spiraled. They etched into the floor, hovering mid-air in geometric symphony.
And then—
"write:codeα.etherealwill('Light,butNot')write: code_α.ethereal_will('Light, but Not')write:codeα.etherealwill('Light,butNot')"
A pulse. A soft flicker.
A construct appeared. It wasn't fire. It wasn't shadow. It was a blend—conceptual and real. A blade of radiant dusk, vibrating with impossible syntax. His System didn't try to parse it. It merely displayed:
[UNTRANSLATABLE SIGNATURE: ROOT-ORIGIN – ACCEPTED]
❖ System Response
Then something new happened.
Ari's internal system interface—once filled with mechanical menus and colored parameters—suddenly shifted. The interface broke apart and reformed into elegant, scriptive glyphs.
It was no longer giving him instructions. It was waiting.
Waiting for input.
"It's… listening to me," he realized aloud. "Not correcting. Not overriding. Just—following."
He held his hand out again.
"write:fromme,nottheworldwrite: from me, not the worldwrite:fromme,nottheworld"
And in a breath, a shard of gravity formed—a ripple of compressed space orbiting his fingertips.
Hours passed. Ari didn't stop.
He cast Threadless spells with no elemental base:
A shield of will that reflected magic without absorbing it.
A movement glyph that bent spatial vectors without teleporting.
A self-writing code that adjusted itself based on his current emotional state.
The difference was stark.
Normal Thread magic relied on affinity, translation layers, and internal limits. But Root-Origin magic was different.
It was like speaking to the world in its first language.
Far above, in the Larkveil observatory, the Matriarch of Time narrowed her eyes.
"He's breached Layer Three of the Null Code," she murmured. "Already?"
Beside her, a veiled figure in Echo Vault colors watched silently.
"He's writing spells without cost," the figure said. "If he reaches Layer Five, he'll rewrite the nature of Thread itself."
"The boy is not bound by the Weave," the Matriarch whispered. "He is the quill."
Later that night, Ari sat beneath the stars outside the Sanctum observatory, sketching glyphs in the dirt.
Cerys approached quietly, folding her arms. "You're pushing too fast."
He smiled faintly. "I need to understand it before they come for me."
She sat beside him, watching the glowing glyphs curve in ways they shouldn't.
"You're rewriting what magic is," she said quietly. "That's not just power, Ari. That's—faith."
He didn't reply.
But one glyph in the dirt pulsed brighter than the rest.
The one that meant "return."
Because Ari wasn't just casting spells now.He was remembering how to be something the world had forgotten:A Spellweaver of the Original Code—Root-Origin, the language before magic had laws.