Chapter 25
Raime didn’t feel like resting at all. The thought-knot had opened a door in him that refused to close. Images climbed through that door like ivy—languages, rituals, gestures of attention and courtesy, rules of breathing, and the wondrous connection between thought and will. Even in the dark, he could feel them unspool. He didn’t know how much time passed anymore. He took two more beads from the case. He did not simply hold them; he set them one after the other upon the flat of his palm and lay down on the bed, his psionic thread a quiet tremor beneath the skin of his skull. The room smelled of the stone while the Tetra Unum floated in the air and the armor hugged him like a lover.
He touched the first bead and opened his thoughts. The bead answered like a bell.
Understanding poured in without a filter. There were no sentences but impressions that built themselves into pictures: maps that unrolled like scrolls inside his mind, the names of rivers pronounced with inflection he could feel at the back of his throat, the angles of ridgelines on the far side of Ithural’s tallest mountain. The bead did not teach him by lecturing; it let him stand in a place and understand its weather, the scent of its grasses, the way the wind cut small songs into the stone. He saw trade routes in the way the rivers braided, saw where caravans liked to ford and where they avoided, felt the smell of the ports in his sinuses.
The geography lesson folded into mathematics without fuss—geometry as the language of place, the numbers used not as abstract digits but as measures between space and mind. He understood how to pace a step so that the energy beneath his feet would hold a thread steady; he learned approximate calculations for distances that a mind could hold without paper. It was practical math: estimation, proportion, the kind of quick arithmetic that let you judge whether a throw could reach its target or not. He could already feel it helping him plan routes through the Rift, the Eye of Xethz mapping invisible eddies of energy into paths his feet could trust.
Then the bead offered botany—how to read a leaf like a codex. The vines in the temple had secrets in the pattern of their veins; the Rift’s trees carried sap that would explode if cut in the wrong season. He could now tell, through touch and smell and a memory of structure, which buds held poisons and which ones hid salves. Useful, his Earth-educated survivalist thought supplied dryly. Useful and dangerous.
History came then—not the dry spines of dates and rulers, but a sweep of motive and consequence. Faces. Fires. The slow learning of a people that had bent mind into form. He recognized the same pattern over and over: an innovation born from need, followed by a period of unbalanced application, then collapse, then reinvention. He saw the tragedies—the tyrants who had created hive-webs of thought, the warlords who used the mind as a lash, the small towns emptied of souls by those who trafficked in slavery of will—and he saw the fierce corrective that followed. They knew their tools could be used as chains. The thought-knot did not sugarcoat.
Literature washed over him as well: parables and songs that were not quaint but tools of moral calculus, short scenes carved like blades describing what one ought to do when faced with corrupt power. The songs contained the ethic—they were memory engines so the future would not forget. This is how they taught restraint, Raime thought. Not by law only but by habit, by story.
But alongside the mundane, the beads drew him back to meditation and the basics of psionic practice. The second knot went deeper into method: posture, breath, the way attention could be like a blade or like a net. It showed him how to braid threads without tearing the skin of his mind, how to sense the natural nodes where a second thread might grow if coaxed with gentle, sustained attention. Not force, curiosity, the bead insisted. Thread grows in response to invitation, not command. He learned the small gestures of mental hygiene—how to let intrusive thoughts pass like leaves on a stream, how to anchor attention with a tiny internal mantra that felt less like words and more like a lock clicked closed.
There were practical exercises as well. The beads walked him through simple meditations that increased his psionic stamina: breathing patterns where thought met breath at a point behind the sternum; a rhythm of heartbeat and thread that allowed him to pool energy in small reservoirs—useful for carrying out sudden, precise acts without draining his core.
As knowledge accreted, something other than information settled into his bones: a cultural logic. Ithuralian practice threaded discipline into daily life. Children learned to hold attention; their games were small tests of focus. Conversations carried a meta-layer—the question behind the question, the rhythm between statements. It explained the silence of the temples, Raime thought. They were training people not to scream their wants into the world, but to listen for how others formed their wants. The lesson was obvious and unnerving: to wield these mental arts was to carry responsibility for the fragile interior lives of others.
And then the story of the hero arrived.
The bead unfurled the tale of Aelorin—Aelorin the First, Aelorin the Unifier, names folded in like cloth. He was young when he left the monastery, a prodigy whose mind bent the edges of reality before he’d earned the right to speak in the great halls. The bead showed him the ruin left by avarice and domination: entire valleys drained of people, farms worked by mind-bound slaves, cities ruled by men whose powers served only themselves. Aelorin had waved his hand and unmade bonds of mind that had, in some regions, been woven for generations. The images were not clean heroics: the bead did not hide the cost. It showed the terror of being broken from within, the agony of minds freed suddenly and left without their old scaffolding. But it showed also Aelorin’s method: he did not merely sever, he taught. He walked the lands and in his shadow came followers, who learned from him to repair the damage, to rebuild social architecture where minds could grow without being snared.
He left the monks because the vows had become a cage of rigid purity, Raime thought as the bead narrated. He broke his vows to break a different kind of cage.
It was Aelorin who had travelled the continents, facing tyrants and warlords, who took followers and disciplined them into an order that was equal part warrior and clerk of the mind. This order codified restraint. Children were taught empathy as early as reading. The bead showed rituals meant to make compassion habitual: daily exercises in which citizens practiced sharing a small, harmless thread with one another so that the feeling of mutual vulnerability would become familiar and unfrightening. A society that rehearses empathy is harder to enslave, the bead whispered like a lesson in a school.
Centuries later, Aelorin’s movement unified the entire world. Ithural was not a land of violence and pain anymore. It became a beacon of civilization and enlightenment. Millennia of stagnation had given way to an incredible revolution of the arts. Be it mundane subjects, the mysteries of the mind or technological advances, the progress brought by the new world order seemed to know no bound. Aelorin the Unifier guided this world for nearly a millennium, seeing generations rise and fall, freely gifting his guidance and wisdom until he passed the burden of ruling to a council of trusted subordinates, some had been following him since the earlier days of his adventures through the lands, others were disciples of disciples, the brightest enlightened minds of their time. Even then, he didn’t rest, he became a teacher to teachers, then a voice in the margins, occasionally stepping back into public life when it was needed. At the end, the story told, he simply walked beyond the north ridge and never returned. Some said he ascended into the pattern itself; others suggested he hid, still watching over the world. The people kept his name as a talisman: Aelorin the Unifier, Aelorin who taught the world not to use the mind as an instrument of chain, but as wings to fly their civilization higher than ever before.
Raime listened, and something cold and rational inside him adjusted its gears. Aelorin unifies. Aelorin disciplined. That’s the story they tell themselves, he thought. It explains why an entire society would voluntarily bind itself with rules about mental conduct. It also explains how a leader’s charisma can become law.
He felt a bitter, human skepticism rise—an Earth-bred suspicion of myth turned government. History told like a hymn hides the creases and bones beneath the cloth, he thought. Power concentrated is still power. Even a hero can become a tyrant in hindsight if his successors learn only the violence and forget the tempering.
Yet Velthar’s memories—lent the tale an odd authenticity. The monk’s own last act had been to shelter and preserve knowledge, to lay out warnings and tools, not to fashion a successor cult that could misuse them. If Velthar had been part of the order born from Aelorin’s reform, then there was a line of cautious men and women stretching back through centuries, people who had felt the sting of misuse and addressed it with institutions. Institutions don’t prevent abuse,” Raime thought, “but they do create friction. Friction can slow a falling object.
He let the bead’s story wash over him, taking both the warmth and the doubt. Maybe Aelorin was real. Maybe he fixed things. Maybe the people who wrote the books had reasons to make the memory tidy. But myth has its uses. It instructs, it constrains, it plants ritual. The thought made him feel both closer to and further from the beings whose artifacts sat in his room. He had pieces of their craft, and now he had their caution also stitched into him. Useful, he noted. Useful and frightening.
The last thought-knot he used felt smaller in his hand but denser. It filled him with the practicalities of psionic life: rules of engagement for thought-work, the ethics of probing a mind, the particular mechanics of anchoring a thread so it would not leech away into another’s thoughts. These were not just techniques but legal precedents, the bead whispering about trials and retributions—how a man was judged if he enslaved another’s will, how communities repaired damage done by minds turned to cruelty. It isn’t just a toolkit; it’s a social code. The bead recited cases—snapshots of men broken and then remade by ritual courts, of entire villages that decided to ban certain forms of psychological coercion—and with each example Raime’s mind folded a more sophisticated map of cause and consequence.
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After a night of slow, concentrated assimilation, the lessons layered into him like sediment. He could now walk the temple corridors and picture the rituals that had once been carried out here. He caught the husk of liturgy in the layout of rooms; he could see how the temple’s architecture had encouraged certain meditative patterns.
When at last he opened his eyes from the quiet intensity of the third knot, the System pinged.
It was a small acknowledgement, not the clang of a major reward. He finally got rewarded for completing the optional objective about sustaining uninterrupted consciousness for 19 Rift-hours. The compensation was modest, a point in vigor, as the goal had been.
Honestly, I could have completed it the first day.
Raime’s mind returned to the task list: ten threads, levitation, confrontation with the Drokhar and the other major Riftborn, the Sea of Grass. Each requirement now felt less like a brute demand and more like a curriculum—first the foundations, then the techniques, then the tests. It was a tutorial, in a way.
In a way that can potentially murder you. In any case now I know the way forward. I can’t absorb more thought-knots now, I feel a strange saturation, well probably I can absorb another one, but it will be hard and potentially risky. I’d wait until I feel it doable, in the meantime is not that I don’t have anything to do... First, I need to practice.
Even after absorbing the understanding left in the knots, he still needed to put the notion to the test and to build an understanding more personal, so experimenting with his newest abilities was paramount, he needed to build a kind of muscle memory, but for the mind.
Discipline, he thought, and the word tasted like steel. They wove discipline into childhood. Until now I learned by trial and error, during stress and crisis, I have to improve differently now, through ritual, habit and repetition. He was shown the path, but walking it would be his work.
He rose slowly and moved to the small bathroom basin, where he pooled some vine sap. Tivis, he corrected himself, the knowledge he gained gave finally a name to this plant species. He looked at the dirty mirror and found that his reflection on the surface looked foreign—face hollowed by stress, eyes brighter in a way that frightened him. He cupped some sap and splashed his face.
“Ten threads. Levitate. Bond or kill. Cross the sea of grass” He spoke them aloud as if naming them might thin their weight. Start from the beginning, begin small and then build up. Don’t pretend to be Aelorin.
The last thought was almost a joke. He chuckled softly—an embarrassed sound in the empty room—and sat back on the stone bed, the armor’s metal threads humming in companionable silence. He opened the satchel and let his hands rest on the Eye of Xethz and the slate. He felt a patient optimism not grounded in bravado but in method.
First step, another thread, he told himself.
He placed the thought-knots back in their case, the beads’ lights dimming as they withdrew into the satchel’s inner darkness. Outside, beyond the temple’s high spires, the Rift suns were high up in the sky. Already midday…
He knew now that their minute was made of a hundred seconds, the hours were made of a hundred minutes and there were ten hours in a day. A beautiful time system, except that his definition of a second was not the same as theirs, it was another measure, shorter than a second from earth. That made the days in Ithural some Earth hours shorter than what he was used to.
He got comfortable on the bed and proceeded to follow the breathing pattern he knew would help him to attune to a state of deep focus, he was shown methods to open one mind to change and invite improvement. These were taught to novices and younglings, and were the foundations for harder techniques. But they suited Raime just fine, for now.
He breathed in. Long, measured. Then out. The breathing pattern from the thought-knots: slow counts, expansion into the belly, a tightening at the throat, then release. He felt for the first thread he was rewarded by the System the way you feel for a seam in the dark: a faint, humming filament shining in his mind. It was still there even after giving birth to the thread that became the bond between himself and Thunk, it had survived the franticness of his earlier exertions. Not only that, but it was ready to create more. The thought-knots lessons left an energy behind and an understanding that was already naturally crystallizing into another thread.
He closed his eyes and leaned into that seed. Creating a thread was not like moving a muscle. It was more like nourishing an idea.
He drew breath and traced inward with his mind. He pictured a filament — not a concept but a texture: cool, slightly fibrous, threaded through with faint violet sparks. The seed responded like a sleeping thing stirred by touch. It unfurled a fraction.
Technique mattered. The thought-knots had given him terms and sensations: anchor, pull, sheath. He anchored his awareness on a point in his skull. He imagined a hollow line running from that point, down his spine, and into his outstretched hand. Then he wove intent around the hollow: a ribbon of attention wound three times, clockwise, each turn smoothing the filament’s edges.
Energy followed like the water follows the riverbed. The second thread formed not with a crack but with a calm, almost satisfied click inside his head. It slid into place and hummed—small, obedient. He exhaled a laugh that was more relief than joy.
Not bad. But this was already half formed, now it’s all on me.
The third was the promise — and the trap.
He had read and felt that threads did not appear from nothing. They were braided from his attention, from the residue of will left in his body after every act of thought and motion. The lesson had taught him how to conserve, how to shape. But there was no replacing a Core; no stable, sealed well to draw from. He only had reserves in the thin trickle that slunk along the Thread he already wielded. He needed to be efficient.
He prepared the space carefully. He paced his breathing into longer arcs, expanded the hollow point in his mind until it resonated like a bell. Then, with deliberate slowness, he pulled.
The sensation was immediate. Strings of awareness peeled away from other thoughts, from the warmth of the armor, from the scrubbed scent of Tivis — and pooled like mercury. He braided them, fingers of perception twining, and felt the filament solidify into a thread.
But the third demanded payment. It drank from him in a way the first two hadn’t: not only attention but the raw fed current of psionic stamina. Energy drained from the other threads, slid like ink from a pen. The world brightened and then dulled. His limbs hummed; the seams of the armor felt heavier. The third thread snapped taut at his command, a perfect, trembling line of light suspended before his thoughts.
He tasted copper in his mouth, felt the hollow clench in his gut. The Thread existed — four now — three of them unattuned, and with them came a rush of possibility that made his vision swim with dizzy, beautiful shapes. He could feel the building of patterns in his mind, small lattices he might one day knot into constructs.
For now, creating even a modest fourth thread would demand more energy than his mind could provide in that moment.
He lay back, breath ragged, the armor’s faint pulse echoing the slower throb in his temples. The memory had warned him — creating too many threads too fast was a fantastic way to kill himself, no
different from bleeding to death, just in his mind.
So he did what the knots told him in different voices: he tended what he had.
Meditation now was not a passive thing but an active cultivation. The lessons had taught him methods of recovery — not miraculous fountains, but engineering for the interior. He would accelerate his regeneration by guiding breath and thoughts, by coaxing the small, latent wells of energies beneath his skull to pour more slowly and more richly.
He began again with breath. Inhale four counts, hold two, exhale six. In this pattern the body learned to let oxygen sink into the places that mattered — the small muscles of the eyes and jaw, the deep folds of the diaphragm. He synchronized the breath with a low hum: a soundless vibration felt in bone rather than ear, tuned to the resonance in his armor seams. The metal threads in the coat thrummed back as if answering a friend’s greeting; their sympathetic resonance shivered a warmth that settled across his ribcage.
Next came the posture technique the knots taught as Rooting. He imagined his brain and spine as a conduit of light, not merely vertical but branching downwards — minor channels like roots running into the earth, into strata of the Rift’s subtle energies. He pictured those roots winding into the stone under his bed, seeking contact with the lingering power of the world itself.
Like a man learning to play a new instrument, he tuned himself to the Rift’s hum. Tiny currents of energy crept along the newly formed threads, small at first, but regular. The thread-ends warmed.
Then he used one of the simpler techniques he’d learned — a visualization called the Slow Well. He pictured his psionic store as a deep cupped hand. When empty it was chapped and cracked. He breathed warmth into it, let the skin soften. With each breath he imagined a single, slow drip falling from the temple’s stonework into his cupped hand. Drip. Rest. Drip. Rest. Not a great downpour, but a regulated, reliable stream. He matched the drips to the hum in the armor and the slow tightening of the threads.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours — his sense of time had frayed with fatigue — but the important thing was the change. Where there had been a brittle pinch of energy, now there was a patient, usable current. His sight regained its focus. The shimmer at the edge of his mind retreated into a helpful peripheral glow.
Not enough to make ten more threads in an afternoon. He thought.
He opened his eyes to the ceiling of his room. The third thread still hummed, a taut string that felt at once dangerous and dear. He flexed his fingers experimentally; the filament answered with a small ripple of light. He guided that ripple along a tiny arc above his palm, practicing the weave taught in the knots: a braid of attention that could hold a mote or a sliver of matter.
Each small exercise returned a trickle to the Slow Well — practice itself fed the reservoir. The thought-knots had warned of this too: the act of shaping threads strengthens the channels that support them, but only when performed with discipline. Wild exertion wasted as much as it gained; slow, correct repetition built resilience. Raime repeated one sequence five times: spin, weave, anchor, stabilize. Each time the motion became less an act of will and more an act of habit.
Ultimately, he could not push farther than that. The temple’s shadows deepened as the Rift suns traveled their strange arc. His mind felt fuller, not bloated but seeded — a mind with new rooms to be furnished. Two new threads lay coiled like strings of light across his mental space. He had stretched himself thin.
This is not a race, he reminded himself with a small, tired smile. It is beautiful though. I wonder what would be of earth if everyone could do something like this?
He allowed himself a minute of gratitude for the gift of Master Velthar. The thought-knots were items composed of pure understanding, extracted by the mind of people who sacrificed entire lives worth of studying and meditation to leave a path for the future generations. The weight of carrying such priceless artifacts weighed heavily on Raime.
The lessons would take time to translate into reflex, and ten threads was not a number you built in a single frantic night. He rose from the stone bed, his stomach was growling like a beast. It was time to tend to his body after he spent so much time on his mind.
With a spring in his step, he made for the temple entrance.
Let’s see what’s on the menu today.
15 chapters ahead!
Would you have been able to finish the 19 rift hours before Raime?
