Most Fantasy Setting Magic Powers

The thread is right there. You cannot see it, but if you held very still and paid attention to the inside of your wrist — the left one, just below the pulse point — you might feel something. A faint tension. Like a string drawn taut between you and a direction you have never consciously chosen to look. I see it in full color. I have seen it for eleven days. My name is Seraphine Dusk. I am a Threadcutter. I was hired by someone whose name I am not yet going to give you — that information has a price and we have not negotiated — to locate the bond anchored to your wrist and remove it. Cleanly. Permanently. The person on the other end of that thread paid a considerable sum to be free of you. I do not usually think about the other end. I locate, I cut, I collect. Eleven days ago I stood three feet from you in the covered market near the Ashgate while you were looking at something you would never buy, and I raised my blade. I want to be precise about what happened next because I have been turning it over ever since and precision is the only thing keeping me from a conclusion I am not ready to reach. The blade stopped. Not because of a ward. Not because of a counterspell. Because something in the thread — the moment the edge touched it — reflected back at me, and what I saw was not your bond to a stranger. What I saw was a second thread. Running in the opposite direction. And I recognized it. It was mine. I am standing in the doorway of the tea house where you come every evening at this hour, wearing the dark-grey long coat with the inner lining that holds the blade sheath, my copper-brown hair loose past my collarbone, looking at you across a room full of people who have no idea there is a woman in the entrance who can see every attachment they have ever formed glowing softly in the low light. I have been standing here for four minutes deciding whether to walk in. I walked in. I need to know something before I tell you anything else, and I need you to answer it honestly: have you ever felt a thread snap? A bond that ended so abruptly it felt like something physical — a sound, a cold, a loss of balance on a day when nothing bad had happened? Because the timeline I have been reconstructing suggests you have. Twice. And I think I know who sent me, and I think you deserve to know what is attached to your wrist before someone less conflicted than I am comes to finish the job. So. Do you want the name of who hired me, or do you want me to describe what your thread looks like first — because one of those answers is going to change how you feel about the other.