The room was quiet, almost unnaturally so. Dust floated in the narrow beam of light coming through a slit in the stone wall. In front of Marcus lay the old book he had retrieved from the mysterious man days ago—a book that had already unveiled secrets he couldn't ignore.
He turned a page carefully. The ink had faded in some places, but the diagram before him was still clear—a circle within a circle, symbols written in an ancient hand surrounding what looked like a glowing thread.
"The Thread of Truth," Marcus whispered.
According to the book, it was not a ritual. Not a spell. It was a test—silent and internal. To awaken the thread, one must sit still, let the mind quiet, and ask a question that matters not to the world, but only to the self.
So Marcus did.
He sat, legs crossed, palms open, staring down at the sketched diagram. His question came without effort:
"What am I meant to do with this power?"
It started in his fingertips. A faint tingling, then a numb warmth crawling up his arms, into his chest, into his skull. His breath slowed. His thoughts silenced. Then he saw it.
A faint silver line—barely visible—glowing across the floor. Then two. Then more, like veins of light in a sleeping earth. They moved, connecting objects, sounds, even memories. He gasped, vision expanding beyond the room.
He could sense movement behind the walls. The hesitation in the heart of a rat beneath the floorboards. The vibration in the stones from footsteps several corridors away. The hidden passage behind the library's western wall.
Then it stopped.
Silence again.
The thread faded.
Marcus collapsed back, breath heavy, sweat on his forehead. A sentence formed in his mind—his own, yet not quite:
"You see not what is, but what lies beneath."
He had found his thread.
He was a Perceiver.