Elias Thorne’s objective was to build a wall of thought. He stood before six dreamers, each lying on a simple cot, soft sensors at their temples connecting them to the humming biomonitors that lined the wall. The air in this cleared section of the Foundry Chorus smelled of damp metal and the faint, sharp scent of ozone from Jax’s overworked machines. His voice was low and steady, a tool he had honed for years to be a scalpel, not a hammer. He was teaching them to build shields.
— Do not think of a wall, — he murmured, his eyes tracing the jagged green lines on the monitors. — Think of a thousand threads of light. Each thread is a calm thought. A quiet memory. The taste of water. The feeling of sun on your skin. Take them, one by one. Weave them together.
He watched the biomonitors. Four of the six lines were frantic, chaotic scribbles of green. The dreamers were trying to force the construct, to build a fortress out of fear. It never worked. Two of them, however, showed progress. Their lines were smoothing into slow, rhythmic waves. A 40% success rate. It was not enough. Not for the hunt. He felt the weight of his compromise with Lena, a stone in his gut. He had agreed to this, to sharpening his flock into weapons. The price was his own certainty, a currency he was quickly running out of.
He was teaching them to weave, but the pattern was no longer his. It was a constant reminder of his failure, of a philosophy of gentle creation that had shattered against a brutal reality.
"Your shields are too slow. They are prayers."
Lena Petrova’s voice cut through the quiet hum of the training session. She stood by the entrance to the training space, arms crossed, her face a mask of impatient fury. She had been watching from the shadows. The two dreamers who had found a rhythm lost it instantly. Their biomonitor lines spiked, the calm waves turning back into panicked noise. The focus of the entire team was broken. Elias felt a flash of anger, hot and sharp. He had lost control of the room.
She walked past him, her boots loud on the concrete floor. She ignored the biomonitors, the delicate instruments of his trade. She looked only at the faces of the dreamers on the cots, their eyes closed, their brows furrowed in concentration. She was not a healer. She was a forge.
— The Coach teaches you to build a shelter from good memories, — she said, her voice ringing in the cavernous space. — The Stalkers are not afraid of your happy thoughts. They are machines. They hunt for patterns. They hunt for you. You cannot hide from them behind a blanket of old sunlight.
She stopped beside the cot of a young woman, the same recruit he had guided through her first session on the beach that never was. The woman’s face was pale, her breathing shallow.
— I am going to teach you to build a spear, — Lena said, her voice dropping, becoming intimate, conspiratorial. — You will not weave it from light. You will forge it from pain.
Elias took a step forward. — Lena, this is reckless. They are not ready.
— They are not ready to die, — she shot back without looking at him. She knelt beside the young woman’s cot. — Find the thing that hurts most. The day they took your brother. The silence in his room after. Do not run from it. Do not hide it. Find it. Hold it.
The young woman on the cot began to tremble. Her biometric line, which had been a frantic scribble, began to change. It consolidated into a single, rising spike of pure, raw energy. It was a signal of profound distress, a mind on the verge of collapse.
— That’s it, — Lena urged, her voice a low hiss. — That is your fuel. Now give it a shape. Give it a point. Aim your pain.
A low hum filled the air, different from the Foundry’s machinery. It was the sound of raw psychic energy, a discordant note that made the teeth ache. A faint, dark shimmer appeared in the air above the young woman’s chest, a needle of pure shadow, vibrating with contained grief. It was a weapon. A real one.
— Lena, stop, — Elias commanded, his voice sharp with alarm. — Her stress levels are critical. You will break her mind. Pull her back.
— No, — Lena said, her eyes fixed on the dreamer. — She holds. Control does not come from running. It comes from standing your ground. Hold it!
The dark spear of grief grew, lengthening, its edges unstable and bleeding into the air like ink in water. The hum intensified into a low growl. Elias saw the other dreamers flinch on their cots, their own unstable constructs wavering in the psychic turbulence. One of them, a young man on the far side of the room, instinctively tried to reinforce the shield Elias had taught him, his mind flooding with images of stone and steel.
It was a fatal mistake.
The uncontrolled spear of grief, drawn to the sudden coherence of the shield, lashed out. It did not travel through the air. It was simply there, striking the shimmering wall of thought the other dreamer had erected. The impact did not make a sound. It made a feeling.
A wave of pressure slammed through the room, physical and absolute. It was like the air itself had turned to lead. The overhead lights flickered violently, and the bank of biomonitors erupted in a shower of green sparks, their screens turning to pure static. The two dreamers, the woman with the spear and the man with the shield, convulsed on their cots, locked together by a feedback loop of raw, opposing energies.
The air crackled, and Elias saw it. A storm of black, snapping threads, the obscene inversion of his philosophy, a frantic unraveling of two minds at once. They had seconds before the damage was permanent.
— Lena! — he shouted over the psychic shriek that now filled his head.
She was already moving. Their eyes met across the room, and in that instant, their war was suspended. There was only the shared, immediate terror of losing two of their own. They had to speak a new language, and they had to invent it right now.
"Give the grief a shape! A container!" Elias yelled, his voice a lifeline of pure command. He was talking to both of them, to all of them.
— Don’t fight the feeling, you’ll tear yourself apart! — Lena’s voice was a blade, cutting through the panic. — Let it be the core, but build the wall around it!
— Weave the edges! — Elias shouted, focusing on the man with the shield. — Don’t make it a wall, make it a vessel! Let it be flexible!
— Use the anger! — Lena countered, her focus on the woman. — But give it a direction! A single point! Stop it from scattering!
Their words, once opposites, were now two halves of a single instruction. They were not building a shield or a spear. They were building a weapon system. They were co-designing a miracle out of spare parts and desperation, their voices overlapping in the screaming chaos.
Slowly, impossibly, the psychic shriek began to change. The discordant noise resolved, note by note, into a single, low, powerful hum. The physical pressure in the room bled away. The storm of black threads stopped snapping and began to braid itself together.
On the now-flickering biomonitors, two lines of pure static resolved. They merged into a single, stable, pulsing waveform. It was the signature of a construct Elias had never seen before. A solid, sharp core of dark energy, wrapped in layers of shimmering, flexible light. A spear sheathed in a shield.
The two dreamers on the cots went limp, their bodies slumping in unison, their breathing deep and ragged with exhaustion. They were safe.
The sudden silence was deafening. The only sound was the drip of water from the high ceiling and the ragged sound of his own breathing.
The air smelled of scorched ozone, the scent of a near-miss. The lights of the Foundry settled back into their steady, amber glow.
Elias looked at Lena. She was staring at the now-stable biomonitor, her expression a mixture of shock, awe, and something that looked unnervingly like respect. She had been willing to risk everything, and he had been there to catch it. He had been willing to hold back, and she had been there to push. They were both right. They were both wrong.
He reached into his pocket and his fingers closed around the Weaver’s Thread. It did not feel like a memory of a failed idea anymore. It felt like a component. A single thread, waiting for another, darker one to be braided with it to make something stronger.
The rebellion had a new weapon. It was ugly, it was dangerous, and it was born from the fusion of their two warring souls.
He had to teach them how to build it properly before it killed them all.
