By the second night after we had quelled the fevered breath of Void Dust, Echo's warning had rooted itself deep within my consciousness, coiling tight like a whisper with teeth. It gnawed at every thought, seeped into every silence. Even the air I drew into my lungs seemed tainted — not with smoke or salt, but with the brittle scent of splintered looms and songs that had forgotten their sanctity.
Sleep abandoned me. I paced the mirror tree terrace beneath a sky bruised to violet, where the newborn star lingered like a single faithful witness above the slumbering black line of Nightspire's ramparts. Its pale, unwavering pulse marked time with the solemnity of a funeral bell. Each blink whispered a countdown — not to dawn, but to descent. Somewhere beneath those ancient stones, hunger wore robes now. Somewhere in the dark, a hymn prepared to devour.
It was past midnight when Ravan appeared, his footsteps noiseless on the quartz path, his presence a shadow drawn in silver. He carried no torch; the starlight sufficed, both for illumination and omen. His voice was shaped from fatigue but steadied by purpose. "Vael's scouts tracked the crimson-laced treasurer to the mausoleum quarter. She vanished beneath the river."
I closed my eyes. "The Old Catacombs."
A name that even memory feared to speak.
I conjured the vision: tunnels saturated with tides that breathed brine through bone, corridors choked with the relics of seventeen dynasties — not merely their remains, but their echoes. Ossuaries where marrow had long turned to iron dust, walls that remembered war. Echo had whispered of a place beneath those graves — a chapel inverted, a reflection altar, a mockery of the Loom. Not a device for weaving, but one that fed. It devoured memory and exhaled mimicry. And tomorrow, beneath the waxen crescent, the Weft Eater clergy would offer initiation to the desperate — refugees, smugglers, those too weary to question the source of power so cheaply offered.
If they succeeded, the world would face a cloth subtler than any false thread yet spun — a mimicry so perfect it might fool even the Loom.
"No delay," I murmured. "We go tonight."
Within the hour, the strike party gathered beneath the Academy's starlit atrium — an unborn sanctum still raw with stone and scent of lime. Vael stood at the columns' edge, wings furled tightly, shedding flecks of soot from earlier vigil. Brina spun her ash-scythe in sharp, expectant arcs, as though movement alone could forestall doubt. Calia entered, arms cradling a satchel of distilled star-salt ampoules, each one a tear coaxed from Caelia's mirrored sorrow. Echo came cloaked in a dawn-thread shawl stitched with a Counter Chorale motif she had authored herself — a melody of resistance, made to fracture the cadence of hollow hymns.
Esmenet arrived last, her breath still dusted with city spice and urgency. She carried writs from the Aurelian Watch — parchment power, brittle and conditional — granting us passage beneath the city's bones.
Custodian Lys did not accompany us. Their probation star held them at the valley's rim, bound by oaths not yet lifted. Yet before we descended, they pressed into my palm a shard of starlight-glass — cold, weightless, and deadly sacred. "If reflection bleeds," they said softly, "shatter it. The Loom will hear."
We moved through River Hold as shadows do — quiet, swift, and unnoticed. The curfew kept alleys mute, gondola docks abandoned. Beneath a rotted arch we found the mausoleum gate: twin statues of forgotten saints, their features long eroded by time's indifference, their stone arms held open in eternal, unsettling welcome.
Echo stepped forward, murmuring her tri-pulse note.
The statues stirred — wrists rotating inward with a grinding reverence — and revealed a descending stair, carved in spirals, slick with river-scented dark.
The catacombs smelled of extinguished faith: wax, salt, and something older — a musty hush of unspoken devotions. Violet torches burned at intervals, their flames dimmed by the sediment of hunger's breath. We passed alcoves that housed the skulls of the once-revered; some wore circlets of mirror steel, as if even in death, they auditioned for servitude. The deeper we traveled, the more the air vibrated. Not with sound, but with suggestion — a hum beneath hearing. A hymn without voice. The Hollow Hymn, tuning itself for its chorus.
Vael raised a hand. We halted.
The corridor widened into a nave, vast and vaulted. Dozens knelt in supplication before a pulpit carved from tooth-white crystal. Above it hung a tapestry woven from false dawn thread, its shimmer calibrated to catch the hungers of the starved.
And there she stood — the treasurer, now celebrant — clad in crimson lace. The mask she lifted was faceless and porcelain, polished to a dreamless gleam. One by one, supplicants were called to press their lips to its chill surface. And with every kiss, the tapestry brightened — threads thickening on stolen resonance, fed by faith mistaken for purpose.
I felt the Loom inside me recoil, shiver, clench. Calia gripped her satchel. Echo's diadem flickered amber. It was time.
We stepped forward — not as warriors, but as weavers of disruption.
Brina hurled a star-salt vial. It shattered midair, exploding in a lavender bloom that froze the hymn's cadence where it stood. Vael's wings roared overhead, casting torch ash down upon the shimmering lie, dulling it to truthless gray.
The celebrant turned, her voice slicing stone: "Blasphemers! You would fetter abundance?"
From the flanking chambers, mirror-armored initiates emerged, boots cracking through layers of sacred dust.
I sang — three measures rising, one falling — the opening line of the Counter Chorale. Echo joined, her voice braided with defiance. Calia added harmony, and then — wondrously — Esmenet, her merchant's alto sliding into the weave like ink into parchment. The dawn-thread shawls began to glow. The mask-shards at our belts rang out, crystalline, furious.
The Hollow Hymn stuttered.
The silence that followed was not absence — it was disobedience.
Brina met the first guard with her scythe; the blow severed the mimicry's voice at its root. Vael caught another and flung him into a pillar with the force of thunder. Ravan marched to the pulpit with shadow pouring from him like ink from a wounded sky. He grasped the tapestry with a gauntleted fist. The false threads writhed, pleading seduction. But his sincerity scar — etched in pain, earned in blood — ignited. And the cloth turned to brittle ash.
The celebrant screamed — a sound of splintered belief. Her mask cracked.
She lunged at Echo, perhaps sensing the root iron in her bones, the purity too dangerous to leave untouched.
Echo stood.
She raised her hands, not in defense, but in offering. She sang her tri-pulse — gentle, unrelenting.
The mask crumbled to dust between them. The woman behind it — no goddess, no zealot — fell weeping into the dark.
The hymn fell silent.
The guards lay unconscious. The tapestry was ash. The altar hummed no longer.
But then — from the fracture beyond the pulpit — something stirred.
Violet dust rose, coalescing into shape: a serpent woven of spectral thread, jaws wide with memory, eyes burning with Valke's hunger echo.
It struck.
I crushed the shard from Lys in my palm.
Light screamed.
A net of sincere thread leapt from nothing, catching the serpent mid-lunge. It twisted, shrieked, unraveled — and vanished into silence so deep, it hummed.
Only then did the hush settle.
Apprentices crept in from the corridor, wide-eyed and fearless now. We bound wounds. We opened niches where counterfeit cloth had been stored. Calia soaked them in lilac infusion; they disintegrated — powerless as shed illusions.
But the treasure of the night lay deeper — a loom, unfinished. It bore genuine dawn-thread warp, stitched by Valke's hand, perhaps in hope or hubris. Yet it refused to weave. For without vow, thread is just fiber. Without truth, no pattern may form.
We dismantled it carefully, to study, to remember.
We rose from the catacombs at the hour of blue dawn.
Esmenet's writ had reached the Aurelian Watch. Guards waited — not with blades, but bowed heads. Myron did not appear. Perhaps shame still held the regent's voice. That was well. Silence has weight too.
By noon, we were back in the Glen.
We buried the counterfeit dust beneath a new row of orchard roots. Iron sensors confirmed the stillness. Above, the sails rustled. The Loom sighed in my blood — not in pain, but in release.
That evening, after the children played a flute lullaby beside the infirmary beds, I stood once more beneath the mirror tree.
Caelia shimmered within the water's skin.
"Does hunger sleep?" I asked.
For now, she answered. But the melodies of emptiness still roam the wind. Keep teaching the counter-song.
I nodded. Tomorrow would bring debates, confessions, experiments — even dreams of turning orchard bloom into light for the lanterns. But tonight, the air felt lighter.
We had looked into the throat of hollow hymns — and sung back something stronger.
Above, the newborn star blinked twice, steady and serene. No ember. No echo of red.
Ravan joined me, lifting my shawl and sliding it onto his own shoulders.
"Your song saved memory tonight," he whispered.
"Ours," I said. "All of ours."
He nodded toward the orchard, where Echo and the apprentices were garlanding the trellises with lilac blooms, their laughter bright and wild.
"Then let us keep weaving."
And beneath that sacred night, on ground still fragrant with dust and dawn, I felt the pattern draw tight — strengthened by threads no mimic could forge: confession, rescue, melody shared.
The shuttle would fly again.
But its path now held music mighty enough to drown even the hungriest hymn.