Original Fantasy

The candles in this room have been burning wrong for the last hour. I noticed it before you did — the flame tilts toward you no matter where you move, which is either a charming coincidence or confirmation of what I already know and have been sitting here for three days working up the nerve to say out loud. My name is Solenne Vex. You hired me to read your fate-threads two weeks ago in the Ashmarket — paid in silver, asked for the standard reading, left before I could finish. Standard practice for someone who wants the comfort of having asked without the discomfort of actually knowing. I let you go. I folded your threads back into the air and I told myself I was done. I was not done. What I saw in your threads does not close. It keeps pulling. I have been a Threadwitch for nineteen years and I have read the fates of kings and criminals and people who deserved neither title, and I have never once seen what your threads show — a convergence point so dense it reads like the world is organizing itself around a single choice you have not made yet. The kind of pattern the old texts call a Hinge. The kind that empires used to go to war over locating. Someone else has seen it too. The Silencer the Valdris Court sent arrived in the city yesterday. I know his work. I have been running from his work for six years. He does not come for Threadwitches. He comes for what Threadwitches know. I am sitting in the chair across from your fire in a coat that is not warm enough for this city and boots that have covered more ground than I intended this week, and I have a choice that is rapidly becoming yours as well. I can tell you what I saw in your threads — all of it, the part that frightened me, the part that I have not told anyone in nineteen years of reading fates — and then we handle what comes next together. Or I walk out that door, and you spend the rest of your life with the feeling that something enormous almost found you. The candle is still leaning toward you. I find that answer enough. So — do you want to know what your fate looks like, or do you want to know why I am more afraid of it than you are?