Sylvie and Rupert led Kris through a winding path on the edge of the tournament grounds, the shadows growing longer and stranger as they walked, despite it being a bright afternoon.

The throngs of other contestants and onlookers had thinned, leaving only the echoes of distant cheers and the flicker of torchlight. Kris felt his mouth grow drier and drier with every step, his curiosity about what these two odd beings wanted with him battling with a rising, gnawing apprehension.

“Where are we going, exactly?” Kris finally asked, after the silence started to get too much for him.

“To see someone very important. Our patron. She’s been . . .anticipating this meeting,” Rupert said, not bothering to slow down.

Kris couldn’t help but notice that Rupert’s odd, squat frame seemed to move through the gloom as if the shadows parted just for him. There was something that felt almost . . . broken in the way he walked, as though he wasn’t quite present in the world around him. Like he was always glitching slightly. He’d said his class was a Temporal Berserker, which wasn’t one Kris had come across before.

But if the man was strange, his partner, Sylvie—who was striding far ahead—was even more so. She moved in a graceless and yet flowing way, her body seeming to slide rather than walk, as though the ground rose to meet her with each step. She was tall and painfully thin, almost skeletal – elongated, Kris thought - and her skin was pale to the point of translucency. Her long, dark hair fell in sheets around her face, framing sharp cheekbones and eyes that seemed far too large, the whites faintly tinged with red. One moment, he thought she was attractive, and the next he was struggling to keep down his lunch. She wore a dark, close-fitting outfit that clung to her form, but it wasn’t her clothing that bothered Kris.

It was her stillness, the way she seemed to exist on the edge of the shadows, neither fully in the light nor entirely in darkness.

He’d caught glimpses of her class in her status screen—Veilbinder—but what exactly that entailed, he wasn’t sure.

No matter how he looked at it, there was something deeply creepy about the pair of them—Rupert, broken and strange, with his unsteady gait, and Sylvie, whose presence felt like a blade pressed just beneath the surface of her skin, waiting to cut.

Well, Kris thought, I suppose a Charm Leech that has just screwed over his team probably fits right in here. Worryingly, that thought didn’t seem to cause him all that much worry . . .

The three of them had reached the edge of the tournament grounds, where the orderly lights and sounds gave way to an eerie quiet.

And then, just beyond a line of dying trees, Kris saw her.

The woman he was being brought to meet.

The woman – because it was definitely a woman, wasn’t it? – stood perfectly still, her silhouette striking even in the increasing murk. At first glance, Kris thought that she looked like she had stepped off a runway, all impossibly long arms and legs and skin like moonlight on water. She was dressed in a gown of dark, flowing silk, which looked as if it might dissolve at any moment.

For some reason, Kris felt his blood run cold. This . . . woman looked like some otherworldly creature attempting to mimic a human—a beautiful, elegant model captured in the form of flesh, but he could tell, instinctively, that something wrong.

His step stumbled slightly, and he looked at his two companions to see if they had noticed anything odd. But no, they just get walking towards their destination. Rupert turned to him and cocked his head.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Kris said, and sped up to catch up with him.

He did his best, though, not to look too carefully at the waiting woman. Each time his glance rested on her, there was the answering strange sensation of too many eyes looking at him, though her face held just two. Just behind that studied mask of elegance, Kris felt the presence of something vast and ancient, like looking into the depths of an unfathomable ocean and catching a glimpse of something enormous moving in the dark.

The abyss will gaze back also into you.

Kris wondered what made him think of that.

Rupert stopped a few steps short of her and gave a deep bow. “Moira, Weaver of Fate.”

The woman’s - Moira’s - lips curved into a smile that didn’t get within a mile of her eyes. She held her gaze on Kris with an intensity that peeled away any mental defences he might have had. “So, the wayward Healer arrives at last,” she said, her voice breathy, like an impression of Marilyn Monroe by someone who didn’t truly understand sex appeal. It made her sound more like she was in the middle of an asthma attack.

Kris cleared his throat, feeling a desperate inclination to lower his eyes. To look away. To look anywhere but at this . . . shark. But he held his ground, forcing himself to meet her gaze. “You know who I am?”

“Of course, I know who you are,” Moira said, tilting her head in a way that he sensed she felt was coquettish but, in reality, was entirely reptilian despite the graceful lines of her form. “After all, I had a hand in your arrival here. In more ways than one.” Her smile widened – too wide for a human mouth– and the glint in her eyes was knowing. “The amulet you carry—that was no random gift. It was a suggestion, carefully planted. A guiding thread to bring you where you belong. To me.”

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Kris’s hand instinctively went to the amulet hidden beneath his shirt, feeling the cool metal against his fingers. He thought of the way he had gained it. The quest on the Winding Way. The voices. The dark impulses. Now, the reality was settling over him, heavy and cold. “You gave me the amulet?” he asked, unsure if he wanted the answer.

Moira’s laugh was soft but filled the air like the chime of glass shards. “You could say that. I merely pulled a thread, and it found its way to you. Fate, after all, is woven by careful hands. And you, Kris, right here and right now, you are going to be the greatest thread of all.”

Rupert glanced over then, a hint of amusement in his eyes as he watched Kris process this. “Moira sees potential in those who might otherwise be overlooked,” he said. “People who can be reshaped to fit a grander design.”

Kris felt a mixture of pride and fear, a strange exhilaration at being chosen, even if the reasons behind it weren’t entirely clear. That had always been his key frustration, after all. That no one seemed to recognise his potential. All those hours on the ward. All those extra shifts seeking to demonstrate his fitness for the fast track. For the sort of attention he noticed being lavished on those . . . less than he was. It was about time he got his due.

But there was something so manifestly malignant about this woman and her two companions. Was he sure he really wanted to be part of this? “What if I don’t want to fit into this design?”

Moira stepped closer at that, close enough that he could make out every detail of her face, the sharp angles, the wholly unnatural symmetry of her features. Her eyes, deep and dark, held him in place. “Then you will break. And I will pull new threads until the design is as it should be,” she said, her voice as soft as cracked leather.

Kris swallowed at that, glancing over at Rupert and Sylvie.

They were watching him with an entirely detached interest. As if they were watching a particularly interesting dissection in a lab.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

Moira’s smile widened even further – yeah, Kris was very much not at home for this – and her eyes darkened, drowning him in the terror of her ancient presence once again. “It is simple,” she said, “I see what you could be, and I would like to help you become it. A little nudge here - a new gift there - and soon all will be as it should have always been. Providing, of course, you are willing to help me out with a trivial little thing.”

There was a part of Kris, a considerable part, that wanted to turn and run, to escape before he could be reshaped, remade into something unrecognisable. He had found a place to be with his team – not a comfortable place, for sure, and he saw now that he had taken some real liberties with them. But he had a position in the world.

Moira, though, was promising something else. And a darker, quieter part of him was intrigued, drawn in by the promise of power, the chance to become something greater than he had been—a chance to finally shake off the dependency that had kept him weak.

Because, after all, a Charm Leech only had as much power as others were willing to give him. That made him unsatisfyingly dependent on others.

“You think I have potential, then?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“Potential?” Moira’s gaze held him like a spider’s web. “Kris, as Rupert said, you are a thread of fate. You have been woven precisely into the pattern I require at this moment in time. All you need is a little encouragement to become all you can be.” Her teeth flashed and they were just a shade too sharp. “And if you follow, I will ensure that you become something far beyond what you could dream.”

Kris felt the weight of the amulet around his neck, a reminder of the path she had set him on. A path that had led to this tournament. And led to this blasted heath in the middle of a clearly haunted wood.

He looked back at Rupert and Sylvie again, noting their expressions: a mix of anticipation and something darker. Strange, for sure. But powerful. Far more powerful than anyone in his previous team.

For the first time, Kris wondered if leaving them behind hadn’t been a mistake after all, but rather a necessary step toward his own transformation.

Moira extended a hand, her eyes never leaving his. “Come, Kris. Take your place among us. Become what you were meant to be.”

A thrill of fear and exhilaration ran through him. He reached out, feeling her cool, slender fingers close around his own.

“What do you need me to do?”

Moira’s smile vanished, and Kris felt a chill that went deeper than just banal cold go through him. It was as if he could feel the threads of his future fraying and twisting under her touch.

“You see, Kris,” she said softly, “this world’s fate is already tumbling out of control. It is an integration caught up in Fortuna’s careless, whimsical grip—a world of chance, strung up and dangled from the whims of blind, chaotic luck.”

She paused, her face almost collapsing in on itself like a failed star. “It’s almost a tragedy. Almost. The threads of destiny in this place are loose and tattered. Fluttering about. Aimless. Corrupted at their very core. And in a world like that, real Fate cannot take hold. I am afraid your world is a pit of frayed threads - knotted and tangled - doomed to unravel under its own weight.”

Moira laughed then, a sound that held no joy but the soft, chilling hum of inevitability. “The only real solution here, I am afraid, is to cut it free.”

“You want me to . . . what?” Kris said. “Bring about the end of the world?”

“Yes,” Moira replied, the single word resonating. “But please, understand,” she continued, “this world is but one of many. A failed chance. Nothing more than an unlucky roll of Fortuna’s dice. The blind luck that binds it - that taints it - is nothing more than a blemish on the greater weave of existence. If we cut it away, the grander pattern can resume, free from its infection of chaos.”

She extended a hand toward Rupert and Sylvie, who watched her in silence. “They understand now. This world is a flawed gamble, an accidental bet that should never have been placed. When we bring it to an end, you’ll no longer be bound by luck’s fickle whims. You’ll be able to step beyond it—into a place of real power where your future unrolls before you like a deck of cards, all drawn to your favour.”

Kris shifted uneasily, his fingers instinctively brushing the amulet beneath his shirt, its weight a cold, silent reminder. “And . . . how exactly am I supposed to help with all that?”

Moira’s face inflated and then collapsed again, and in her eyes, Kris could have sworn he saw a vast darkness, a twisting and writhing just beneath the surface, as if she were holding back some creature too enormous to comprehend. Her voice dropped to a murmur, rich and lilting, but edged with a hunger.

“Let me tell you about a little-known reward,” she said, her voice weaving through the quiet, “that the winners of the Week One tournament receive…”