Selection Begins
1929 Words
Jack… Jack, wake up."
The voice sliced through the heavy fog in his skull. Too sharp, too crystalline to be a dream.
Jack's eyes snapped open. He didn't see gold-leafed ceilings or marble arenas. He saw the familiar cracked, dark expanse of slate. The suffocating weight of the Ash Region pressed down on his chest like an old, unwelcome blanket.
He sat up slowly, breath hitching in the stagnant air. Silence. No glowing mists. No aristocratic whispers. Only the dull, gray stone fused to his palm.
He stared at the rock. “…A dream,” he muttered, his voice a dry rasp.
But the phantom sensation lingered a low hum of ancient magic that didn’t belong in a slum. A flickering image burned behind his eyelids: a translucent wing, small and delicate. A fairy.
"Oi! Jack!"
The shout from the street dragged him upright. By the time he stepped into the square, the crowd had already thickened. Children stood at the front, eyes wide and hungry. Behind them were the workers, faces etched with the grime of endless shifts, and the elders who had long ago traded belief for bare survival.
Jack climbed onto a splintered crate without a word. He raised his hand, letting the weak gray morning light catch the cracked surface of the stone. It didn’t glow. It didn’t hum. It just sat there — a jagged piece of mountain.
“See this?” Jack’s voice cut through the damp air.
The children leaned in, their breath catching.
“This,” he continued, tilting the stone so the light caught its fractured edges, “is what the High Priests call… useless.”
A ripple of disappointment moved through the crowd. Murmurs of “I knew it” and “Typical Ash luck” began to rise.
Jack smirked. It was a jagged, unapologetic expression. “Good thing we’re from the Ash.”
The murmurs died.
“We’re used to making something out of the things they throw away,” Jack said, his voice hardening into a blade. “They discard stones. They discard people. But we don’t disappear.”
That landed. Backs straightened. Eyes that had grown dull with exhaustion sharpened once more.
“Is it really an elixir, Jack?” a boy asked from the front, voice small but hopeful.
Jack looked at the boy, then down at the stone, then back. “I don’t know,” he said, honesty ringing louder than any lie. “But I know one thing. They’re wrong about the stone.”
He clenched his fist. The stone groaned faintly against his skin.
“And they’re wrong about us.”
“So what now?” a gravelly voice called out from the back.
Jack stepped down from the crate, his boots crunching through the fine gray dust of the square. He didn’t look back.
“Now?” A dangerous, predatory grin spread across his face. “Now I go to the Selection.”
The crowd froze. No one laughed. No one called him a fool. Because for the first time in a generation, someone from the soot wasn’t asking for a seat at the table.
He was going to take it.
“I don’t need their approval,” Jack said as he walked past the line of workers. “I don’t need their glowing rocks or their fake blessings.”
He stopped and turned his head just enough for them to see the fire in his eyes.
“I’ll climb anyway. From the Ash… to the top.”
There was no cheering. No shouting. Just thousands of eyes following his silhouette as it vanished into the mist. For the first time, the Ash didn’t feel like a grave.
It felt like a starting line.
The first day didn’t just defeat him. It broke him.
Jack’s grip vanished halfway up the soot-slicked cliff side. His fingernails tore against the jagged shale, a spray of dark grit hitting his eyes as his body slammed into the rock face. The impact punched the oxygen from his lungs, his vision splintering into a white electric haze.
He hung there for a heartbeat, suspended by nothing but friction and stubbornness. Then he dropped.
The ground didn’t welcome him. It punished him. Dust erupted in a choking plume as he hit the hard-packed earth, the weight of the stone dragging his arm down like an anchor.
For a long minute he didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. Then came the inhale — a ragged, liquid sound. He rolled onto his side, coughing until his chest burned.
“…Again,” he croaked.
On the twelfth night, the restraint finally snapped.
Jack gripped a rusted blade and dragged the edge across his palm. Blood welled instantly — dark, thick, smelling of copper. He let it drip onto the stone. One drop. Two. Three.
He watched with narrowed eyes, waiting for a glow, a pulse, a sign. The blood slid into the microscopic cracks… and vanished. The stone remained dull. Gray. Dead.
Jack exhaled a cold, quiet hiss. No anger. No frustration. Just cold clarity.
“Fine,” he said. “If you won’t move… I will.”
By the third week, Jack stood at the summit of the cliff.
He didn’t celebrate. He didn’t raise his arms in victory. He simply stood there, chest heaving, and looked down.
The Ash Region stretched endlessly below him — a vast sea of gray, broken and unchanged. Every cracked roof. Every soot-stained wall. Every face he had grown up beside. People who shared no blood with him, yet were the only family he had ever known.
His grip tightened around the stone.
All of them.
That was the only thought. Not glory. Not personal ambition. Just the quiet, immovable weight of every person standing in that gray sea below — the only reason any of this mattered.
He lifted his eyes to the distant spires of the High City, gleaming coldly in the distance.
“Good,” he said quietly, to the stone, to the wind, to no one. “Stay like this.”
His knuckles whitened.
“Because when you finally respond… I won’t be the person who picked you up.”
The wind howled across the peak. This time Jack didn’t bend. He didn’t even blink.
The day Jack left carried no fanfare of a hero’s journey.
No banners. No horns. The Ash remained indifferent — the sky a bruised expanse of charcoal smoke, the air a familiar burning caress against the lungs. Life in the slums didn’t pause. It simply leaned against the ruins and watched.
Jack stepped out from his shelter, a worn canvas pack slung over one shoulder. Everything he owned — a spare tunic, a sharpening stone, a handful of dried rations — fit into that light, fraying bag. The stone rested in its usual place, a heavy gray anchor that refused to acknowledge the morning light.
They were already there.
Not a gathered crowd, but a quiet presence. Men leaned against rusted supports. Women stood in the hollowed-out doorways of collapsed shops. They didn’t call out. In the Ash, goodbyes weren’t shouted. They were understood in the shared soot of their breaths.
Jack walked past them, his boots crunching on the cinder-packed path. A curt nod to the elders, a momentary glance at the workers. That was enough.
“Still planning to walk into the High City looking like a stray?”
Lilly’s voice cut through the low hum of the wind. She was leaning against a pitted iron pole, arms crossed tight over her chest.
Jack stopped. He looked at her, then down at the dull rock fused to his palm. “Was hoping I’d grow wings overnight. Didn’t happen.”
A ghost of a smirk tugged at Lilly’s mouth before vanishing. “You’re carrying a dead rock, Jack. Not exactly the look of someone about to tilt the world on its axis.”
Jack adjusted the strap on his shoulder. “Good. Makes it easier to catch them off guard.”
A heavy silence stretched between them — not awkward, but loaded with all the things that had never been said.
Lilly pushed off the pole and stepped closer, the sarcasm dropping from her face.
“Listen,” she whispered, voice low and jagged. “The High City doesn’t break people like us. It reshapes them. And the ones who come back? They aren’t the same.”
Jack held her gaze. He knew the stories.
“That’s the point,” he said. “I’m not going there to stay the same.”
Lilly searched his face for any flicker of doubt. She found only cold, hard resolve.
“Then don’t come back polished,” she said, her voice almost lost to the wind. “Come back sharper.”
Jack let out a breath that was nearly a laugh. “Polished never suited me.”
Lilly reached forward and tapped the gray stone on his hand — light, but deliberate. “Figure it out, Jack. Or throw it away before the weight kills you.”
“If it was going to kill me,” Jack replied, “it would have tried harder by now.”
Before he could turn, she pressed a small, heavy bundle into his hand — preserved meat and hardtack, gathered from families who barely had enough for themselves.
“Don’t lose,” she said. Not a plea. A command.
Jack tightened his grip on the pack strap.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
The howling wind of the Ash cliff shrieked one last time, then vanished.
The smoke, the grit, and the twenty-one days of isolation snapped into silence. Sound rushed back in jagged fragments: the rhythmic thrum of the crowd, the scrape of boots on marble, the low predatory hum of mana in the air.
Jack stood exactly where he had been before the break. Unmoved. Unchanged on the outside.
But the eyes that now looked out at the arena belonged to someone different. The stone’s silence was no longer failure.
It was a challenge he had already accepted.
Across the arena, Leo stood apart from the other participants. He wasn’t watching the bracket assignments. He was watching Lara.
She didn’t know it. She was leaning slightly forward, her eyes moving between the burning script in the air and Jack’s still figure. That barely visible tension in her shoulders — the one she had learned to hide in noble halls — was back.
Leo’s expression didn’t change. But his eyes moved from Lara to Jack with slow, measuring patience. He filed it away without a word.
The bracket script stalled.
Jack’s name flickered into existence, standing alone. Then the second name carved itself beside it. Slow. Deliberate.
DAISY.
The air tightened until it felt sharp enough to cut. Across the arena, Leo’s lips curved into a precise, cold smile. Not triumph — satisfaction. The quiet kind that belonged to a man whose arrangements were unfolding exactly as planned.
Lara’s breath hitched. She leaned forward instinctively, but the invisible weight of noble expectation pinned her back. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t warn him. She could only watch.
Jack rolled his shoulder once. Loose. Controlled. His gaze locked onto Daisy — not as an enemy, but as a test of everything he had built on that cliffside. Then his eyes moved to Leo one last time.
Leo tilted his head, his expression settling into bored amusement. “Try not to disappoint me.”
Jack didn’t look at him when he answered.
“You already did.”
The signal dropped.
The arena exploded.
- Writer
