Chapter 1: CLAIM THE SKY

The man hit the pavement hard enough to crack it. Before he could rise, an invisible force caught him and dragged him backward across the garden path.

He twisted aside just as a woman slapped her palm against the ground where his head had been. The pavement exploded. Stone and soil scattered through the flowers, and the blast sent him rolling into the grass.

He pushed himself up and looked at the two people standing between the white buildings. They looked human. The thin man hadn’t moved from his place near the road, though one hand remained raised toward him. The woman beside him flexed her fingers as smoke curled from the place she’d touched.

Behind him, his pregnant wife struggled beside their damaged transport, one arm wrapped around her stomach.

"Stay there," he told her.

The thin man pulled his hand back. The invisible force caught him again, but this time he didn’t resist. He let himself fly forward. The thin man’s expression changed too late. He crossed the distance in an instant and drove his palm into the man’s chest. The thin man barely moved, but something inside him shattered with a sharp crack.

The invisible force vanished, and he fell.

The woman stared at him for only a moment before rushing forward. He caught her wrist before she could touch his chest, but heat immediately spread beneath his fingers. He released her and jumped back as a small explosion tore open his palm.

She didn’t give him time to recover. Her hand struck a nearby wall, and it exploded. The blast caught his shoulder and threw him across the path. He landed hard, rolled, and forced himself upright before she could touch the ground again.

He understood her ability now. Whatever she touched, she could make explode. And she had understood something about him too. Her eyes moved past him toward his wife.

He moved first.

The woman touched the pavement. He threw himself across the path as the ground erupted behind him, reached her through the debris, and struck her chest. Something inside her cracked. Not enough. She staggered but remained standing. He struck again, but she caught his arm. Heat rushed through his sleeve, and he tore himself free before it detonated.

For several seconds, neither attacked. Blood ran from his ruined palm, and one shoulder barely moved. Across from him, the woman held one arm against her chest.

Then his wife gasped.

He turned. She had fallen to her knees, both hands around her stomach.

"Now?"

She nodded through the pain.

He looked at her, then at the remaining woman. He knew he wasn’t walking away from this. He returned to his wife and crouched beside her. She caught his coat before he could speak.

"Don’t."

He put his hand over hers.

"When he’s born, tell him his father was handsome."

Her eyes filled.

"Please."

"Extremely handsome."

Even now, she managed to look angry at him. He smiled, touched her cheek, and stood. The woman waited at the other end of the path.

He walked toward her.

She attacked first, striking the ground with her palm. He moved around the explosion and closed the distance before she could touch anything else. His fist struck her ribs, then her chest. Something inside her cracked again. She stumbled, and he went for the final strike.

This time, she stepped toward him. Her arms locked around his body. He tried to pull free, but she held him with everything the human body could manage. Heat began spreading beneath her skin, not only through her hands but everywhere.

He stopped struggling.

Whatever lived inside that woman had realized that if the fight continued, he would eventually shatter it. Preserving its human body no longer mattered. The Vessel began to glow from within.

Behind him, his wife screamed his name. He looked back at her one last time.

Then the woman detonated.

White light swallowed the garden. By the time the sound reached the surrounding streets, there was almost nothing left where the two of them had stood.

Their son had not been born yet.

Somewhere beyond the world, a soul was still making its way toward him. No one knew where human souls came from. Most simply arrived, crossing whatever existed between their unknown origin and the life waiting for them.

Sometimes, something intercepted them.

◇ ───────────── ◇

Darkness closed around the approaching soul. The Passage had appeared. Something stirred inside it. A shape reached from the darkness, closing a hand where the soul had been an instant earlier. Another emerged ahead, its body splitting open around a mouth too large to fit inside it.

Both missed. More noticed.

Eyes opened where there had been nothing. Long limbs unfolded from impossible distances. Shapes without recognizable bodies moved toward the tiny light passing among them. They reached. They snapped. They closed around empty darkness.

The soul continued.

One creature came closer than the others. Its hand surrounded the tiny light, fingers curling inward until there should have been nowhere left to escape. The soul emerged between them untouched.

◇ ───────────── ◇

Then the darkness collapsed, and the Passage vanished.

Beneath the damaged solar canopy, the woman gave birth alone.

Her hands trembled as she pulled the crying child against her chest. Smoke drifted through the garden while an emergency alarm wailed somewhere beyond the buildings. Her husband didn’t return. She knew he wouldn’t.

She lowered her face against the child’s head and wept. The baby screamed against her chest, alive. She held him tighter.

"Sio," she whispered.

◆ NINETEEN YEARS LATER ◆

At six, an examiner confirmed what the three empty spaces in Sio’s System meant: he was a Wayfarer, specifically a Veyr, not a Riven. For the next thirteen years, he tried everything that seemed remotely worthy of becoming his first Claim.

A favorite toy failed. His bicycle failed. A stray animal that followed him home for months failed. Even the little rooftop garden his mother gave entirely to him—one he watered, replanted, and nearly murdered with too much fertilizer before learning what he was doing—left all three slots empty.

By sixteen, Sio had stopped telling his mother whenever he tried. By nineteen, he’d stopped expecting anything to happen.

He still tried.

The library doors closed behind him.

Sio descended the steps alone. The evening had grown quiet enough that he could hear water moving through the narrow garden channels beside the walkway. The larger flowers had already folded for the night, and the solar leaves above the path were closing now that there was no sunlight left to collect.

His interview for the library’s part-time evening position had lasted eleven minutes. Eleven extremely polite minutes. They needed someone to return books, organize shelves, and help visitors find archive material. Sio practically lived in the building anyway. Apparently, that hadn’t counted for much.

We’ll contact you.

He hated how four words could sound so much like no.

Something rolled beneath his shoe. Sio stopped and looked down at a small grey rock sitting on the path.

"No."

He continued walking. Four steps later, he stopped and looked back. The rock remained there.

"This is getting embarrassing."

Sio returned and picked it up. There was nobody around, thankfully. At least the rock couldn’t tell anyone about this. He held it in his palm.

"I Claim you."

His System opened.

〔 CLAIMS 〕

I — EMPTY

II — EMPTY

III — EMPTY

Nothing changed. Sio turned the rock over in his hand.

"I’ll give you a shelf."

Still nothing.

"A good shelf," he added, as if that might save the negotiation. When the System remained stubbornly unchanged, he tossed the rock into the grass.

"Stay homeless."

Sio dismissed the System and continued home.

Three empty slots. Nineteen years. Not one Claim. If he’d been an ordinary human rather than a Wayfarer, there would have been nothing to wait for. Instead, he’d spent his entire life carrying proof that something could happen. It simply never did.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. His mother would ask about the interview when he got home. She wouldn’t be disappointed. She’d tell him there would be another job and then pretend she hadn’t deliberately made whatever food he liked most.

Sio wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. He’d wanted the job mostly for the money. Save enough. Travel again. There was always somewhere else.

As a child, he’d memorized transit maps for places he’d never visited. At twelve, he’d saved enough for his first trip outside the city. At sixteen, his mother finally allowed him to travel alone. Three days. Two cities. One backpack. Best three days of his life.

The world was simply too large to stay in one place. There were floating settlements in the southern wetlands, cities built along northern cliffs, forests where homes grew between living trees, and old regions beyond the western solar plains that he’d only ever seen in library archives.

Reading about them helped. Usually. Tonight, it had only reminded him how badly he wanted to leave again.

Sio reached a quieter stretch of the path and looked upward. A few stars were visible between the buildings. He stared at them for a while until an idea occurred to him. A stupid one. He had spent nineteen years trying things that made sense. Maybe that was the problem.

Sio raised one hand toward the sky.

"Maybe I’ve been thinking too small."

He almost laughed at himself. Then he spread his fingers toward the stars.

◇ ───────────── ◇

Far beyond them, something was running.

It had no shape that could comfortably be called a body. A vast central mass of dark, swollen flesh folded around itself, covered in uneven ridges, wet hollows, and clusters of eyes that opened and closed independently. Some were tiny enough to disappear among the folds. Others were larger than a human body. None seemed to look in the same direction.

Dozens of appendages writhed around the mass. Some were thick and muscular, lined with hooked growths. Others thinned into cords that divided again and again until their ends resembled tangled threads. A few ended in mouths. Others carried blinking eyes. And some never reached an end at all.

One enormous limb stretched outward before disappearing into a circular tear in space. Somewhere impossibly distant, another opening formed and the same limb emerged from it. Other appendages folded through similar wounds in reality, leaving it impossible to tell how large the creature truly was or how much of it occupied the place it currently fled through.

Near the center of the mass, flesh peeled apart around a vast opening. There was no throat inside. There were stars. Not the stars of one sky, but fragments of places it had crossed—alien suns, black oceans, red clouds, empty worlds—appearing and disappearing within the opening as though distance itself had become part of its anatomy.

The creature was wounded. Several of its eyes had burst. Whole sections of its flesh hung loose, and some of the openings around its body flickered violently before collapsing. It could have been terrifying under different circumstances. Right now, it was terrified.

Space tore open before it. The creature folded into the rupture. Its enormous body didn’t squeeze through. Pieces simply vanished into different openings until the last twisting appendage disappeared and the rupture sealed behind it.

It needed time to recover.

Ahead stood a boundary it knew: the living world. It stopped. Entities like it did not enter that way. The Passage carried incoming souls within reach. If one of those souls died, something else could take its place and enter the waiting human body. But the entity had no time to search for one. Something was getting closer, and several of its eyes turned backward.

It struck the boundary. Nothing. Again. The surrounding space twisted around its limbs. The boundary trembled. It struck a third time, and a fracture appeared.

The creature hesitated only once before forcing its appendages into the crack and tearing it wider. For the first time, it crossed directly into the living world.

Elsewhere, the things already wearing human bodies felt the breach. The Vessels knew.

◇ ───────────── ◇

Sio spread his fingers toward the stars.

"Then I Claim the sky."

The System appeared.

〔 CLAIMS 〕

I — EMPTY

II — EMPTY

III — EMPTY

Nothing happened. Sio sighed.

"Yeah. Obviously."

Then he heard something crack above him.

He looked up. A black fracture had appeared across the night sky, his hand still raised beneath it. Sio looked at his hand, then at the fracture.

"No way."

The crack opened. Something came through.

Sio’s smile disappeared.

At first, he thought he was looking at a mass of enormous black roots forcing themselves through the fracture. Then one of them moved, and an eye opened on it. Another appendage followed, then another, folding over one another as something far larger struggled behind the opening. Dark flesh bulged through the crack, covered in scattered eyes and mouths that opened soundlessly.

Sio couldn’t see the entire creature. He wasn’t sure there was an entire creature to see. One appendage vanished halfway along its length into a black opening and emerged from another several metres away. Another curled through the fracture, split into dozens of thinner tendrils, then disappeared into openings of its own.

Something opened within the mass. Sio expected a mouth. Instead, he saw a sky. Purple clouds surrounded a black sun. Then the flesh closed over it.

Sio stepped backward. Every part of him suddenly understood something his mind hadn’t caught up with yet.

Run.

The entity was weakening. This world was wrong for it. Parts of its enormous body flickered in and out of existence while several of its eyes ruptured almost as soon as they opened. It needed somewhere to hide. Somewhere to recover. Something human enough to let it remain here without being found immediately.

Then several of its eyes turned toward Sio. There was nobody else.

Sio turned and ran.

A black opening appeared beside the creature. Another opened directly in Sio’s path, and something long and wet emerged from it. He had enough time to turn his head. Then it touched him.

His body didn’t move. Something deeper did.

Sio’s knees struck the path as pain tore through him. He tried to scream but couldn’t draw enough air. Something was inside. Not his body. Him.

The entity didn’t speak. It couldn’t. There were no words between them, only a violent intention Sio somehow understood. It wanted his soul gone.

The entity struck once. Something stopped it. The force of the collision ripped through Sio instead, and he screamed.

The System opened without being called.

〈 SOUL DAMAGE DETECTED 〉

The entity recoiled. It had expected Sio to die. He hadn’t.

A burning line spread somewhere beneath his flesh, although when Sio clawed at his chest, there was no wound there. Another notification appeared.

◇ PASSAGE SIGNATURE DETECTED ◇

Then another.

〈 SCAR FORMATION DETECTED 〉

Sio stared through watering eyes. No. That couldn’t be right. He was Veyr. A Veyr couldn’t carry a Scar. Scars belonged to the Riven.

The interface shifted, and his Claim window opened beneath it. For nineteen years, every space had remained empty. The first one changed.

〔 SCAR DETECTED 〕

〔 CLAIMS 〕

I — UNKNOWN ENTITY

II — EMPTY

III — EMPTY

Sio stared. A Scar and a Claim. Riven and Veyr. Two outcomes of the Passage that should never have existed in the same person.

The last visible mass of the entity folded inward. Eyes vanished, appendages disappeared, and the impossible opening at its center collapsed as whatever remained of the creature sank into him.

Sio saw the words one final time.

〔 CLAIM I — UNKNOWN ENTITY 〕

Then he collapsed.