THE WEIGHT OF A NEW WORLD
Aelin — June 1983
Jace had told his brothers he'd meet them in the Great Hall.
That had been thirty minutes ago, and he had not shown up. Because the Castle of Elders kept doing the thing it had been doing since he'd started snooping around: turning a corner into some new room that made him stop walking. This time it was a narrow gallery off the castle's main floor, sunlight falling long and gold through tall windows, and one wall he hadn't noticed on his first pass through, carved floor to ceiling in old Aelinian script, worn soft at the edges by centuries of hands, weather, or both.
He stood close to it, working through the shapes the way he'd worked through the Bible he'd found in his residence, some of it arriving whole and unbidden, most of it requiring the kind of patient unraveling that came with being new at something his blood apparently already knew. Names, he thought. He could make out names, one stacked above the next, and dates beneath them that didn't match any calendar he recognized.
Daeron. He got that one clean, no effort at all. Then a gap he couldn't read yet. Then Gaelen. Then more gaps, more names half-surfacing and slipping away again before he could hold them.
He leaned in, then stepped back to see the wall whole, drifting without noticing it toward the room's open window.
Suddenly, something behind him began to hum.
It wasn't a sound he had a name for right away: It was high, sharp, and uncomfortable… almost buzzing in his ears. Oddly, it was also faintly musical and coming from somewhere very close. Jace went instantly still. The humming continued, patient and unhurried, entirely unbothered by the fact that it was making the hair on his arms stand straight up.
Jace turned around slowly.
The window had no glass, just an open frame looking out over the eastern grounds, with two wooden shutters flanking the framework. Strung across it was a web, fine, silvery, and far more elaborate than it had any right to be. It actually gleamed with little silvery nodes that caught the light like tiny diamonds. Sitting at the center of it, legs spanning a good three or four inches, was a spider.
It was glowing.
The creature's whole body pulsed with light, cycling in slow waves from a bright, alarmed green into a deep, warning orange and back again, the humming rising and falling in time with the color, like the thing was humming out exactly how it felt about him being that close.
Jace's mind suddenly emptied of everything except the fact that there was a spider three feet from his face.
******
In the Great Hall, Sidney had been midway through explaining the coronation's processional order when a blood-curdling scream reached them, distant, sustained, but utterly unmistakable.
Erik was on his feet before it finished. "That's Jace!"
"That's NOT a normal Jace noise!" Ricky said, already moving.
Connor didn't wait. Something moved through him that had nothing to do with sound, a pressure behind his eyes, Jace's terror arriving raw and unfiltered and enormous through their bond. Nathan felt the same wave a half-step behind him, and sprang into motion.
"That's not a prank," Connor said. "That's real."
Sidney was already moving faster than any of them, the calm mask cracking for the first time any of them had seen. Guards fell in from two different corridors. Galena, who had been three rooms away reviewing coronation logistics, came around a corner at a dead run and matched their pace without needing a word of explanation.
They found him in the gallery, backed hard against the carved wall on the far side of the room from the window, both hands against the stone behind him like he meant to go through it if given half a reason. He actually was digging his nails into the stone wall as he flattened himself as much as possible against it.
"Jace!" Erik called out, scanning the room for whatever had threatened the Guardian. Ricky checked every angle of the corridor. Nathan's eyes swept the area, seeing nothing.
"I don't see anything," Nathan said, "But I feel the terror pouring from him."
"There's nothing here," Ricky said, turning in place. "What happened?"
Connor wasn't looking at the room. He was looking at Jace, and past the wall of his brother's fear, straight at the single thought sitting on top of everything else in Jace's mind, looping again.
Spider... Spider... Spider... SPIDER!
Connor's eyes went to the window. It took him a second to find it against the light, small and easy to miss unless you were looking at exactly where Jace's whole nervous system was pointed. Then he saw it, sitting in the corner of the frame, cycling green to orange and back, legs spread wide across its own web.
"Shit," Connor said incredulously, "He's arachnophobic!"
Ricky blinked in surprise and sputtered, "Arachne...What?"
"He's afraid of spiders," Connor said, tilting his head slightly, "That's it. That's the reason he screamed."
Erik looked between the tiny, glowing, humming creature in the window and his brother, flattened against solid stone eight feet away from it, chest heaving, his terrified eyes fixed on the eight-legged humming and glowing creature in the window.
"That's it?" Erik said. "That's what almost took the roof off?"
"It's very small, Jace," Ricky said, not unkindly, though the corner of his mouth was already losing the fight, "That thing could not hurt you if it tried for a week."
"I KNOW HOW BIG IT IS!" Jace snapped in a voice a little higher pitched than it normally was, "I CAN SEE HOW BIG IT IS! THAT'S NOT THE POINT!"
"Sorry, sorry!" Ricky told him gently, putting both hands up, grinning. Nathan wasn't doing much better, and even Erik's mouth had started to twitch.
"It's just, you're the guy who's supposed to call down lightning and borrow all our powers whenever you want. And this..." Nathan started to tell him, but Jace was definitely not accepting a single word of it.
"DON'T!" Jace yelled.
"I'm just saying..."
"I said DON'T!" Jace barked out.
"Okay! Take it easy, Jace…" Nathan soothed.
"LAUGH IF YOU WANT!" Jace cried, with a strange mixture of terror and angst, "Everybody does! My WHOLE FAMILY tried to fix this when I was a kid! EVERY CURE ANYBODY'S GRANDMOTHER EVER SWORE BY!"
"How many?" Erik asked.
"TOO MANY!!!” Jace bellowed, "They did 'em to my dad, too! Didn't help him for shit, either!"
Galena, who had been watching the scene with great concern for the future king, looked once more at the spider still cycling in the window, then moved to the window without comment. She quickly closed the window shutters, and the humming slowly diminished. Galena turned to look at Jace.
"Better, Your Highness?"
Jace's breath began to diminish gradually, his eyes closing. He nodded, keeping them closed until his breathing slowed to a calmer pace, and then he opened his eyes to glare at his brothers.
"Don't you assholes even THINK about making fun of this…" Jace warned in a voice much deeper and even a little menacing, "Don't even THINK about playing practical jokes, either, or I swear I'll end every one of ya."
The tone in his voice alone was enough to render silence from all four of them. The grins didn't vanish, but they dimmed. Ricky even managed a slight gulp.
Sidney, who had been standing just inside the doorway taking in the whole scene, stepped forward, his expression gone from alarm to something more careful.
"How long has this been true, Guardian?" he asked.
"My whole life," Jace said honestly, "Since before I can remember anything else. Something I inherited from my father. Spiders terrified us both. Still terrify me. I can't help it. I've tried everything."
Sidney nodded slowly, and whatever was moving behind his eyes wasn't amusement.
"Then I want this understood, all of you, right now," he said, turning to the rest of the Brotherhood, "This does not leave this room as a joke you tell at his expense. Not tonight, not in a year, not anywhere it could be repeated to someone who shouldn't hear it."
"We were just messing with him a little," Ricky said, chastened.
"I know. And most days I'd let you." Sidney's voice stayed even. "But a fear this specific, this deep-rooted and visible, isn't only embarrassing… It's information. If Aldus ever learns the Guardian of Aelin can be reduced to this by something the size of a coin, he will not hesitate to use it. He has spent nine centuries collecting exactly this kind of leverage."
The room went quiet in a different way than it had been a moment before.
"Any way to fix this?" Nathan asked, the question clinical rather than unkind. "Train it out of him?"
"I already told you, Nate... They tried," Jace said, before Sidney could answer, "For years. It doesn't go away. I just get better at hiding it until I can't anymore."
"Then we work around it," Sidney said finally. "Not cure it. Manage it. Starting with all of you knowing it exists, and none of you making it worse."
The other four each nodded, all understanding now that this irrational fear of an arachnid was nothing to make light of.
"Sorry, Jason," Ricky told him, placing a hand on his shoulder, "I won't tease ya about it. I get it."
Jace nodded, thanking him. Erik and Nathan each echoed the same agreement. Connor looked at Jace and nodded, saying, "No practical jokes. I promise."
"But what if one got in the Royal Residence?" Erik suddenly asked. Nathan turned to him, a thoughtful look in his eyes.
"They're probably everywhere." He suggested.
Jace shook his head and smirked slightly.
"Ooh!" Ricky exclaimed, "What if one crawled into the royal bed?"
"Strathan…" Jace said with definite malice this time, "I will SMITE you if you say anything else right now."
Connor's eyes widened slightly and he said, "Uh, Rick… he's not messing with ya."
Ricky looked at Jace and said, "But I'm your brother, dude!"
"Sibling rivalry…" Nathan quipped, "On steroids."
"You don't want to know what I am currently seeing in his head, Strat Cat… trust me!" Connor warned.
Ricky wheeled back to Jace and cried, "You'd smite ME, Jason? Your faithful Sentinel and guitarist?"
Jace only grinned at him. It was not a comforting one, either.
"Okay!" Sidney quickly called out, "Gentlemen! You have homes and residences to claim in your counties! Jace has already claimed the Royal Residence, so the rest of you must claim yours. Each of you go back to your chambers and get ready. We leave in 20 minutes."
Neart came first.
Erik stood in the doorway of his new estate and didn't move for a long time. The house sat at the edge of working farmland that stretched toward low hills striped with grain fields and orchards. Stone walls. Heavy timber. The kitchen large enough to feed a crew. It smelled like earth and wood smoke. They could also smell something baking somewhere deeper inside.
"This is mine?" Erik asked quietly.
"Yours, Warrior," Sidney confirmed.
Erik walked through the rooms slowly, touching nothing, as if the walls might splinter under his hands the way everything else had. But the stone held. The wood held. Everything here was built to last, built for someone exactly his size and exactly his strength.
Outside, the head of the farming association, a broad-shouldered woman named Bertha with calloused hands and no patience for pleasantries, walked him through the operation. Grain distribution. Vegetable harvest cycles. Livestock coordination with Ainmhithe. Supply lines to the other counties. Erik listened carefully, asking questions that surprised her, not about power or delegation but about soil and seasons and how many families depended on each harvest.
"You've farmed before," Bertha said. Not quite a question.
"No," Erik admitted. "But I've carried things before. I know what it feels like when people depend on you not to drop it."
Bertha studied him, then nodded once. That was enough for her.
Ainmhithe was Ricky's, and Ricky was Ainmhithe's before he even set foot on the property.
The stables alone nearly broke him. Rows of horses, each more beautiful than the last, their coats gleaming in the afternoon light that poured through high windows. Ricky walked the aisle with his hand trailing along stall doors, and every animal turned toward him. Not startled or cautious. Drawn. As if they already knew who he was.
"They feel the Sentinel in you," Sidney explained from behind him.
Ricky didn't answer. He'd stopped at the last stall, where a young black stallion with a white blaze stood watching him with dark, intelligent eyes. Ricky extended his hand. The horse pressed its muzzle into his palm and held it there.
"What's his name?" Ricky asked, his voice gone quiet.
"He doesn't have one yet," the stable master told him. "He's been waiting."
Ricky's hand stilled against the horse's jaw. He stood there a moment before he found words, and when he did, he said them quietly enough that only the horse could hear.
The sanctuary was next: rescued animals, breeding programs for endangered species, rehabilitation. The ranching community operated alongside it, managing herds with a kind of respectful symbiosis that Ricky instinctively understood. He spent two hours with the head rancher and missed lunch entirely.
Sidney had to physically retrieve him.
"You can come back tomorrow," Sidney said patiently.
"I know," Ricky replied. "But they don't know that yet."
He meant the animals.
Connor's county was Léirstinach, and the conservatory found him before he found it.
They were walking through the main hall of the arts district when the sound stopped him. A violin, somewhere above them, playing something, Connor recognized but couldn't name: classical, precise, achingly beautiful, with a Celtic undercurrent that made the hair on his arms stand up.
He followed it without a word, up a staircase, down a corridor, to an open rehearsal room where a young woman played alone, eyes closed, body swaying with the melody.
Connor stood in the doorway and listened until she finished. When she lowered the bow, he said quietly, "Mendelssohn. But you changed the bridge."
She looked up. The recognition landed on her face a half-second after his voice did: who was in her doorway, and that he'd been standing there long enough to hear.
"I... yes, Visionary. I did," she managed. "The original resolution felt too safe."
"It was better your way," Connor told her, and the warmth in it steadied her visibly. He picked up the spare bow from the stand beside the door and turned it once in his hand without thinking.
"What do you do with the third movement?"
She blinked. Then she lifted her bow again and showed him.
Connor nodded, asking her, “Beautiful... have you thought about a tiny bit of flair in it?”
“Flair,” she asked curiously. Connor reached a hand toward the violin.
“May I?” Connor asked. The woman smiled and nodded, handing her violin to him. Connor thanked her and played the third movement back. The gentle Celtic flourishes he'd added seemed to knit so naturally into the movement that they might have been written by Mendelssohn himself. He handed the violin back and urged, “Try it. Make it your own. Make it Aelinian.”
She brought the instrument to her chin and proceeded to play that movement again, this time, adding in similar flair, but unmistakably her own. Connor smiled widely. When she finished, Connor applauded, as did the other brothers. The young woman blushed, and then curtsied reverently to Connor, and to the other future sovereigns.
To Jace she curtsied again and said, “It is an honor to meet you and the Brotherhood, Your Highness. I just never dreamed I would meet you all in my practice room!”
Jace smiled softly and replied, “We tend to follow beautiful music.”
“And Connor can’t help himself,” Nathan added, “He enjoys following very well played music and finding very beautiful women at the same time.”
Connor tsked at him and said, “Stop giving her the wrong impression!”
The young lady giggled a little, and Connor eyed her with playful but respectful curiosity.
******
The conservatory director, an older man named Callum with ink-stained fingers and a voice like warm tea, walked Connor through the programs: performance, composition, instrument craft, vocal training, a recording studio that made anything he'd seen on the mainland look like a closet. Students came from every county. The arts weren't a luxury on Aelin. They were infrastructure.
Connor understood that immediately. He'd spent his whole life being told music was a hobby until it made money. Here, it was a birthright.
"What do you need from me, Visionary?" Callum asked.
Connor almost laughed. "Well, vision. That's my title."
******
Draíocht was Nathan's, and Daerdon University was everything he'd ever wanted but never dared to imagine.
Sidney walked him through the main laboratory complex that morning, and Nathan didn't speak for the first twenty minutes. He just looked. Touched surfaces. Read labels. Opened drawers and closed them with reverence that bordered on religious.
The equipment was elegant, not merely advanced. Crystal-based conductors. Harmonic resonance chambers. Energy matrices that made his half-rebuilt synthesizers look like tin cans and string. And the library: three floors of texts in languages he was only beginning to learn, covering disciplines that had no equivalent anywhere he'd been.
"This is where the previous Conjurers worked," Sidney told him. "Some of these instruments are centuries old. Others were built last year. The university updates continuously."
Nathan stood very still. Then his voice came out thick and unsteady.
"Sidney, I might actually cry."
Sidney placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Go right ahead, Conjurer. I completely understand."
Nathan laughed once, wet and surprised, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he ran his fingers along the edge of a workbench. It was scored with burn marks and chemical stains, evidence of hundreds of hands before his.
"I set my apartment on fire with a swear word," Nathan said quietly.
"I know," Sidney replied.
"And now I'm supposed to guide this."
"Not alone. The faculty here are brilliant. They need direction, not management."
Nathan looked at him. "What if I break something?"
Sidney's mouth twitched. "Everything in this room has been broken at least once. That's how they learned what it could do."
Nathan exhaled slowly. Then he sat down at the bench, pulled a crystal conductor toward him, and began to work. Sidney left him there. Nathan didn't come home until well after midnight.
Jace's introduction to Harmonytis was different from the others.
There were no stables to fall in love with, no lab to lose himself in, no conservatory to awaken his soul. Harmonytis was the political heart of Aelin, and the Castle of Elders, his home now, whether he'd made peace with that or not, sat within walking distance of the Aelinian Congress building. A deliberate architectural choice that made sure the Guardian could never forget who he answered to.
Sidney walked Jace through the congressional chambers on a gray morning when rain streaked the tall windows. The room was circular, tiered with curved benches, designed so that every representative could see every other representative's face. No hiding. No back rows.
"Fifty seats," Sidney explained. "Representatives from every district across all five counties. They draft legislation, manage disputes, and oversee resource allocation. The Guardian doesn't rule above them. He rules alongside them."
Jace stood in the center of the room and turned slowly, taking in every seat.
"And if they disagree with me?" he asked.
"They will," Sidney said. "Often."
"And then what?"
"Then you listen. And you lead."
Jace's jaw tightened. This wasn't drumming. This wasn't holding a beat or anchoring a song. This was politics, negotiation, compromise, things he'd watched John and Linda handle while the band focused on music.
"I'm not a politician, Sidney."
"No. You're not. That's precisely why they need you."
The first congressional session Jace attended, he went as an observer only, Sidney's insistence. He sat in the Guardian's chair, which was no more elevated than any other seat in the room, and watched fifty people debate grain tariffs between Neart and Draíocht for two and a half hours.
It was excruciating.
But somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, Jace started hearing it. Not the words, the rhythm. Who spoke too long and lost the room. Who stayed quiet and gained power from it. Who interrupted and who waited. The dynamics weren't so different from a band that couldn't find its groove. Too many people soloing. Not enough people listening.
When the session ended, a silver-haired congresswoman named Maren approached him.
"You didn't speak, Your Highness," she observed.
"I was listening," Jace replied.
"Most Guardians talk first and never listen."
Jace met her eyes.
"I'm a drummer. Listening is the job."
Maren studied him, then gave a nod that felt earned rather than given.
"Good," she said. "We'll see."
It wasn't approval. But it wasn't dismissal either. Jace would take it.
The weeks compressed after that. The brothers fell into rhythms that were new but surprisingly natural, as if the island had been waiting for exactly these five people to fill it.
Erik rose early and worked the fields alongside the farmers before handling administrative duties in the afternoon. His strength, still terrifying to him, became an asset. He could do in an hour what took a crew half a day, and the farmers respected him for never asking them to do anything he wouldn't do himself. The car handles and broken furniture of Los Angeles belonged to a different man.
Ricky named the black stallion Shadow and rode him every morning along the coastal cliffs before reporting to the stables, the sanctuary, or the ranching operations. He learned the breeding records, the veterinary protocols, the delicate politics between ranchers and conservationists. He also discovered, to his absolute delight, that his shapeshifting abilities made him the single best horse whisperer on the island. The animals didn't just tolerate him. They trusted him completely.
Connor threw himself into the conservatory with an energy that startled even Callum. He restructured the vocal program within three weeks, brought in cross-genre workshops that blended Aelinian traditional music with mainland rock and classical, and started composing again, not for Battle Cry but for the island. He wrote a piece for the coronation that he refused to let anyone hear until the day itself.
Nathan moved into Daerdon University. His quarters in Draíocht went largely unused as he spent nights in the lab, working alongside faculty who quickly realized that the new Conjurer's power came second to his obsessive brilliance. He rebuilt two broken harmonic resonance chambers in his first week, improved the energy grid efficiency for the northern district by twelve percent, and accidentally set a small fire in the process. Old habits.
Jace attended every congressional session. He read every briefing Sidney left on his desk. He met with district representatives individually, learning their concerns, their histories, their grievances. He didn't pretend to have answers. He asked questions. He listened. And slowly, grudgingly, the congress began to trust him, not because he was powerful but because he showed up.
In the Royal Residence, in the quiet wing of Castle Harmonytis that was now his home, Jace sat at his drums. Sidney had arranged for his kit to be brought from the mainland, and it sat in a room overlooking the harbor, the same scarred garage drums that had anchored Battle Cry from the beginning. Some nights, after the briefings and the meetings and the weight of everything, he played alone. No audience. No band. Just time: solid, patient, and absolute. The same thing that had drawn five strangers together in a Reno garage.
The coronation fittings were Sidney's idea of necessary torture.
The tailor, a meticulous man named Oisín who spoke softly and carried an enormous amount of authority in his measuring tape, arrived at the Castle of Elders with an entourage of assistants and enough fabric to upholster a small country.
Erik went first and hated every second of it.
"Stand still, Warrior," Oisín murmured around a mouthful of pins.
"I am standing still," Erik protested.
"You're breathing too aggressively."
Ricky, waiting his turn, nearly fell off his chair laughing. Erik shot him a murderous look.
"Don't worry, big man," Ricky called out. "You look very regal."
"I look like a curtain," Erik muttered.
Nathan endured the fitting with scholarly patience, standing motionless while Oisín worked, occasionally asking about the fabric composition and the thread-count of the embroidery. Oisín warmed to him immediately.
Connor critiqued everything. The cut of the collar. The drape of the sleeve. The weight of the hem. Oisín and Connor argued for forty-five minutes about the placement of a single seam before reaching a compromise that satisfied neither of them entirely.
"Artists," Sidney sighed from the corner.
Jace went last. He stood on the platform, arms slightly raised, staring out the window while Oisín circled him with measuring tape and pins. He didn't fidget. He didn't complain. He just waited.
"You're very still, Your Highness," Oisín observed.
"Practice," Jace replied quietly.
"For what?"
"For everything that comes after the clothes."
Oisín paused, looked up at him, and nodded slowly.
"The amulet chose well," he said, almost to himself.
Jace didn't respond. He wasn't sure he agreed yet.
The night before the coronation, the five of them gathered on the western terrace of the Castle of Elders. The sun was setting over the ocean, painting the sky in shades of copper and violet. The harbor below was lit with lanterns: thousands of them, strung between masts and along docks, the island already beginning to celebrate what tomorrow would bring.
No one spoke for a long time.
They sat the way they always had, not in any formal arrangement but in the loose, instinctive configuration of men who'd spent years in vans and buses and backstage rooms together. Erik on the low wall, legs dangling. Ricky cross-legged on the stone floor. Nathan in a chair he'd dragged from inside. Connor leaning against the railing. Jace in the center, because that was where he always ended up whether he wanted to or not.
It was Ricky who broke the silence.
"You guys remember Garage Disaster?"
Erik snorted. "Unfortunately."
"We were so bad," Ricky said, grinning.
"We were terrible," Connor confirmed. "Matt couldn't keep time if you stapled a metronome to his forehead."
"And then this guy walks in," Nathan said, tipping his coffee cup toward Jace, "sits down, and just... fixes it."
Jace shook his head. "I didn't fix anything. I just played time."
"Exactly," Nathan said.
The quiet settled again. Comfortable now. The lanterns below multiplied as darkness deepened.
"Are we ready for this?" Erik asked. Not aimed at anyone. Just into the air.
Connor looked out at the harbor. "We weren't ready for the amulets either. Or the tour. Or any of it."
"That's not reassuring," Erik said.
"It wasn't meant to be," Connor replied. "It's just true. We've never been ready for any of it. We just showed up and figured it out."
Ricky leaned back on his hands.
"I think the island knows that. I think that's why they want us."
Nathan nodded slowly.
"Daeron and the first Brotherhood held this island against Aldus first. Every generation has carried that burden: guarding the Veil, keeping watch, waiting. And now the prophecy says this is the generation that ends it. Maybe what Aelin needs right now isn't another generation of bestowed kings. Maybe it's five guys who chose each other before any of this started. Before the amulets. Before the titles. Before any of it meant anything except music."
Jace listened. He didn't add anything. He didn't need to. He could feel it in all of them: the fear, the resolve, the stubborn refusal to let each other down. The same thing he'd felt in a Reno garage when the music snapped into place for the first time.
He looked down at the opal on his chest. It glowed faintly in the fading light, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
Tomorrow, they would be crowned.
Tonight, they were still just five guys from Reno.