Chapter 2: WHAT DID I CLAIM?

Sio woke with his cheek pressed against the cold path.

For a few seconds, he didn’t move. Water whispered through the garden channel nearby, and above him, the folded leaves of a solar tree shifted in the wind. Everything sounded ordinary enough that he almost wondered whether he’d simply fallen asleep on his way home.

Then he remembered the sky opening.

Sio pushed himself up too quickly and scrambled backward, searching above the buildings. The fracture was gone. Nothing hung between the stars. Whatever had come through wasn’t standing over him anymore, but the memory remained painfully clear—the impossible body, the openings through its flesh, and the pale slit turning toward him before something touched far deeper than his skin.

He checked himself anyway. Chest, arms, stomach, neck. His clothes were dirty from collapsing onto the path, but there wasn’t a wound anywhere he could find.

Had he actually Claimed it?

That thought should have made him happy. He’d spent thirteen years waiting for his first Claim and trying anything that seemed remotely worthwhile. Instead, his hands were still trembling. He remembered turning to run, the opening appearing in front of him, and that thing reaching through. He remembered the pain most of all. Whatever it had done hadn’t felt like an attack on his body.

Sio looked around the empty walkway before calling his System.

〔 WAYFARER CLASSIFICATION: VEYR 〕

〔 CLAIMS 〕

I — UNKNOWN ENTITY

II — EMPTY

III — EMPTY

He stared at the first slot. For the first time since he’d been old enough to understand what those three empty spaces meant, one of them contained something.

"You’re kidding me."

A nervous laugh escaped him. Of all the things he’d tried to Claim, that had worked. The rock from earlier suddenly seemed like a much safer investment.

Sio focused on the occupied slot.

〔 CLAIM I 〕

IDENTITY: UNKNOWN

NATURE: UNRESOLVED

INTEGRATION: INCOMPLETE

HOST CAPACITY: INSUFFICIENT

RESPONSIBILITY: UNFULFILLED

His excitement faded at the last line.

Every Veyr learned about responsibility early. A Claim wasn’t merely something they owned. Whatever they Claimed carried a responsibility determined by its Nature, and failing that responsibility brought consequences. It was one reason Veyr were warned to understand something before sacrificing one of their three Claims to it.

Sio had managed to do the exact opposite spectacularly. He didn’t know its identity, its Nature, or even what kind of creature it was. Apparently, he already owed it something anyway.

He focused on RESPONSIBILITY: UNFULFILLED, hoping the System might explain what exactly he was supposed to do. Nothing happened.

"Useful."

There was another notification he wished he could dismiss as easily.

〈 ANOMALOUS SCAR DETECTED 〉

Sio’s stomach tightened.

He had known the difference between Riven and Veyr since childhood. Riven survived the Passage wounded and carried Scars. Veyr escaped untouched and gained the ability to make Claims. Every examination Sio had ever taken had confirmed he was Veyr. A Veyr wasn’t supposed to have a Scar, especially not one appearing nineteen years after birth.

Sio remained on the path for another minute, trying to decide what he was supposed to do with that information. Going to a hospital was probably the sensible choice, but he didn’t even understand what had happened well enough to explain it. Something had broken through the sky, attacked him, somehow Scarred him, and ended up occupying his first Claim. That explanation would raise considerably more questions than it answered.

For now, he needed to get home. His mother would already be waiting, and home was still several kilometres away. Sio started toward the distant tram line, exhausted enough that the thought of his room immediately followed.

He wished he could simply be there already.

The path in front of him changed.

For less than a second, his front door stood several steps ahead of him. Sio stopped and stared at the place where it had appeared. He knew every detail of that door: the green frame his mother refused to repaint, the brass handle, even the scratch near the bottom from when he’d tried dragging a table through without lifting it properly. Now there was only the path.

"What was that?"

He thought about home again, and the air ahead trembled. This time he watched carefully as something began overlapping the path, as though two places were attempting to occupy the same space. His front door slowly became visible inside the distortion.

Sio reached toward it. Pain tightened somewhere inside him, similar enough to what he’d felt during the attack that his hand stopped immediately. The door remained, however, so he cautiously pushed his fingers farther forward. The pain sharpened while the image became clearer.

Sio jerked his hand back, and the door vanished.

He stood there breathing harder than he should have been. That hadn’t felt like a memory or an illusion. For an instant, the kilometres separating him from home had felt strangely thin.

Sio opened the Claim information again.

〔 CLAIM I — UNKNOWN ENTITY 〕

INTEGRATION: INCOMPLETE

HOST CAPACITY: INSUFFICIENT

He remembered how the creature had moved. When Sio tried to run from it, the thing hadn’t crossed the distance normally. An opening had appeared before it and another directly in his path. His fear hadn’t disappeared, but curiosity was beginning to compete with it.

"Can I do that?"

Sio concentrated on the space beside his hand. Nothing happened at first. Then the air distorted and collapsed toward a point no larger than a seed. The point turned black, and Sio leaned closer before realizing that putting his face beside an unexplained hole in reality was probably a terrible idea.

Pain stabbed through him. He dropped to one knee, and the black point disappeared immediately.

〈 UNRESOLVED CLAIM USAGE DETECTED 〉

〈 BURDEN EXCEEDS CURRENT HOST CAPACITY 〉

Sio waited for the pain to fade before looking at the warning again. Whatever he’d received from the creature, he couldn’t handle much of it yet. Part of him wanted to try again immediately, but the more sensible part reminded him that dying on the same night he finally obtained his first Claim would make the previous nineteen years feel somewhat wasted.

"Walking is underrated."

He got back to his feet and continued home.

Behind him, the path gradually returned to complete silence. The fracture had disappeared, leaving almost no evidence that anything unusual had happened there, but the breach hadn’t gone unnoticed. Across the city, the things already wearing human bodies had felt something cross. The Vessels knew.

By the time Sio reached home, his legs felt heavier than they should have.

The front door opened before he reached it. His mother stood there with a wooden spoon in one hand, her long dark hair hastily tied behind her head with a few loose strands around her face. Her green blouse had its sleeves rolled above her elbows, and there was a faint streak of flour near one cheek. She looked like he’d interrupted three different things at once. Her eyes moved over his dirty clothes before settling on his face.

"The interview went well," Sio said.

She stepped aside.

"Inside."

"That’s not a question."

"It wasn’t supposed to be."

Sio entered. Their home wasn’t large, but his mother had spent years ensuring almost every available surface contained something alive. Herbs occupied the kitchen window, thin vines climbed a support beside the stairs, and a stubborn citrus tree had gradually conquered enough of the sitting room that Sio considered it a second tenant.

He removed his shoes while his mother watched him. When she asked what had happened, Sio told her he’d fallen. Unfortunately, answering "standing" when she asked from where only earned him a long stare.

"Very dangerous height," he added.

That didn’t help.

His mother stepped closer and brushed dirt from his shoulder before examining his face.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

At least, he didn’t think so. She checked anyway, turning his face slightly before apparently deciding he wasn’t about to collapse in front of her. Sio let her. After what had happened outside, the normality of being inspected by an irritated mother felt strangely comforting.

"You didn’t get the job?"

Sio frowned.

"How did you know?"

"You came home looking like you fought the pavement and lost."

"The pavement was unrelated."

"So you didn’t get it."

He sighed.

"No."

She nodded toward the kitchen.

"Then eat."

"That’s it?"

"What would you prefer? Should I burn down the library?"

Sio considered the proposal seriously enough to make her raise an eyebrow.

"They have several books I haven’t finished."

"Then revenge can wait until you return them."

That finally made him smile. She turned toward the kitchen, and for one dangerous second, Sio almost told her he’d made his first Claim. He’d imagined saying those words countless times, and she’d spent years reassuring him that it would happen eventually, even after he’d stopped expecting it himself.

Tonight, it finally had.

Unfortunately, telling her would lead to the obvious question of what he’d Claimed. Sio wasn’t sure how to explain that he’d pointed at the sky, watched something tear through it, been attacked by a creature he couldn’t properly describe, and woken up with both a Claim and a Scar. By the time he removed the inconvenient details, there wasn’t much of the story left.

His mother had already lost his father nineteen years ago. Sio knew only fragments about what had happened that night, but he knew his father had been a Wayfarer and had died protecting them. He didn’t want to put that fear back into her eyes before he understood what was happening himself.

"I’ll change first."

She glanced back.

"Wash your face."

"I was planning to."

"And your hair."

"That’s practically a bath."

"Sio."

"I’m going."

He escaped upstairs before the list could grow.

His bedroom looked exactly as he’d left it that morning. Books were stacked beside the bed, a half-packed travel bag sat beneath his desk, and the wall display cycled through places he’d saved over the years. A coastal city faded into mountains, then into an enormous forest threaded with suspended walkways. Usually, those images made him want to leave home immediately. Tonight, his bed was considerably more attractive.

Sio sat on its edge and opened the System again. CLAIM I — UNKNOWN ENTITY remained where it had been, and so did the Scar notification. He stared between them, hoping that looking long enough might somehow make them compatible. It didn’t.

He dismissed the System and fell backward onto his bed. Something shifted at the edge of his awareness as he closed his eyes, faint enough that he couldn’t tell whether he’d actually felt it. When he opened them again, his bedroom remained silent.

"Hello?"

Sio immediately regretted speaking. Whatever he’d Claimed hadn’t said a word while trying to kill him. He didn’t know whether it understood him, whether it could hear him now, or whether it was even conscious anymore.

Dinner could wait another minute. He closed his eyes.

Sio didn’t remember falling asleep. He remembered opening a door.

His hand rested on a slab of dark stone several times taller than he was. When he pushed it open, he found a narrow room of pale stone on the other side, with several doorways cut at different heights and a staircase climbing diagonally through the wall. Sio turned to check the way back, only to find that the door he’d entered through was gone.

"Okay."

He chose another doorway and stepped outside.

For a moment, he simply stared.

Buildings stretched in every direction, except calling them buildings felt generous. They had been packed together without any concern for streets or sensible construction. Towers grew from rooftops, bridges connected windows, rooms protruded from other rooms, and staircases disappeared through walls only to emerge somewhere they couldn’t possibly reach. Looking down didn’t help. There was no visible ground, only more architecture descending through pale mist.

Sio wandered through it carefully. A corridor barely wide enough for his shoulders opened into a courtyard large enough to hold his house, then narrowed again into three identical passages. He chose one, walked for several minutes, and somehow returned to the same courtyard. After another attempt brought him back to the same cracked wall, he stopped.

"This place sucks."

Something scraped against stone nearby. Sio immediately regretted announcing his location. He followed the sound anyway.

The farther he went, the larger the architecture became. Human-sized doorways gave way to enormous circular openings, and narrow corridors became channels wide enough to drive a tram through. Sio was beginning to wonder what kind of thing needed any of this when something enormous slid through an opening ahead.

A tentacle thicker than his body passed through the wall, crossed the courtyard, and disappeared into another building. Another curled around a tower above him. Then Sio noticed more of them.

They weren’t separate creatures. The creature was threaded throughout the city.

Its enormous body occupied the architecture in pieces, tentacles slipping through windows, tunnels, and circular openings as naturally as fingers through the gaps of a cage. Eyes opened across its flesh and slowly turned toward him. Sio recognized them. The thing from the street. His first Claim. Except what he’d seen beneath the night sky had apparently been only a fraction of it.

One tentacle withdrew through a circular passage and emerged from another structure farther away without damaging either. Sio looked from the limb to the enormous openings surrounding it and began to wonder whether the creature had squeezed itself into this place at all. Maybe the place fit the creature.

Several eyes remained fixed on him. Sio had spent nineteen years wondering what his first Claim would be, and none of those fantasies had included waking up in an impossible city with something that had already tried to kill him.

He pointed at himself.

"Sio."

Then he pointed toward the creature, hoping the gesture was simple enough to understand. Several of its eyes narrowed before a tentacle suddenly snapped toward his face.

Sio flinched, but it stopped barely a finger’s width from him and strained there, trembling as though something invisible refused to let it come any closer. A mouth split open along its tip and snapped at him with the same result.

Sio stared at it for a moment before understanding. The creature wasn’t sparing him. It still wanted to kill him. Something about the Claim wouldn’t let it.

"Right. Introductions later."

The tentacle remained strained toward him for another moment before withdrawing into the maze. Its eyes didn’t leave Sio, and whatever confusion existed behind them certainly hadn’t made the creature harmless.

Sio watched it disappear between the impossible buildings. He had no idea where he was, what he’d Claimed, or why this place seemed built to contain it.

For his first night with an actual Claim, that felt like enough to worry about.