They had no idea how long they walked beneath the sky of eyes. Time was different in the Maw. Warped. The sun, if there was one, never moved.
The eyes never blinked twice. The air was static, devoid of warmth or chill. It was as if the world had been caught in the instant before a scream.
Rafael kept to the left of the winding path, fingers brushing the jagged rib-wall of the canyon. Its surface pulsed beneath his touch like the underbelly of a sleeping beast.
Dasha walked beside him, her eyes constantly scanning the shifting shadows. Her salvaged blade—still etched with the runes of a forgotten faction—never lowered.
In silence, they passed relics of a battle long since consumed: a throne made of vertebrae, shattered helmets embedded in the dust, fragments of prayers etched into bone and stone. Rafael felt each sigil hum as they passed, a faint, residual echo of voices that once called this place sacred—or cursed.
Every so often, the canyon narrowed. They'd have to duck beneath tangled roots or cross bones turned brittle with age. Occasionally, they saw movement—quick, skittering flickers that stayed just at the edge of perception.
Once, Rafael turned too quickly and thought he saw a child's face reflected in the threadlight veins of the wall. It vanished before he could blink.
Dasha didn't comment on it. Maybe she saw it too.
They stopped when they reached the ledge.
Before them, the canyon dropped into a massive hollow—an amphitheater of bone and sinew, with spires rising like broken teeth. At its center stood a dais carved from obsidian and threadstone, and upon that platform, something shimmered beneath a transparent veil of threadlight.
Dasha knelt and pulled out the scavenged scope from her pack, adjusting the cracked lens. "It's not just a monument," she murmured. "It's a cradle."
"For what?"
She handed him the scope. He looked through.
A figure floated in the air, suspended in threads of gold, violet, and red. It wasn't alive—at least not entirely. It was humanoid, eyeless, limbless, its torso a lattice of transparent nerves wrapped around a single, impossibly large beating heart. The heart pulsed with the same rhythm as the threadlight in the canyon walls.
He lowered the scope. "That thing..."
"That's a Weaver Core," Dasha said. "Or what's left of one. The Uncore devours them. That's how it grows."
Rafael's hands trembled. He didn't know why—until memory flickered like static.
Once, as a child, he'd seen something similar. Buried in a classified lab in the ruins of Marianas Prime. A synthetic womb, filled with glowing nerves and failed consciousness. He'd been there during a tour with his adoptive mother, the colonel. She'd whispered, never trust what breathes without lungs.
That memory shouldn't be relevant here. But somehow, it was. The hum of the Core was almost the same. The sense of being watched, dissected, anticipated. Even as a child, he'd felt it.
He felt it now.
A low clack echoed through the chamber. Then another. Something approached.
From the far side of the amphitheater, figures emerged. Not monsters. Not echoes. People.
Five of them, dressed in scavenged armor and flowing patchwork robes, each bearing a different insignia. A man with skin like carved bronze led them, his left arm replaced with a gauntlet of gleaming threadsteel that thrummed with power. His cloak rippled as though stirred by a breeze no one else felt.
Rafael squinted. He knew that gait. That stillness. The man had the kind of gravity that bent the mood of a room. Or a battlefield.
One of the figures beside the man pushed back her hood.
A stranger yet familiar.
Someone that shouldn't be forgotten.
She looked up sharply. Her hair was shorter than he could remembered, her jaw tighter. She had a scar beneath her left eye, thin and pale, like a string of thread. Her gaze locked onto Rafael's—and she froze.
Dasha shifted beside him. "You know her?"
Rafael didn't answer. Not immediately. The last time he saw her, they'd been on opposite sides of a prison wall during the riots on Station-18. Probably loop 14. Or maybe 15. He didn't sure himself. She'd helped him escape. Then disappeared. He'd thought she was dead.
If he not mistaken, her name was Clara.
A voice thundered across the amphitheater, amplified by unseen tech. It came from the bronze-armed man.
"Pilgrims of Thread. State your pattern and intent."
Rafael stepped forward. His voice cracked, but it held. "Survival. And the truth."
The man smiled thinly. It did not reach his eyes. "Then step into the Maw's heart, stranger. But beware—the truth will cost more than you have left."
Behind him, Clara took a single step back. Not in fear.
In warning.
The canyon responded.
The amphitheater groaned. The spires of bone curled inward like ribs constricting. Threadlight surged along the walls, pulsing in time with Rafael's own heartbeat. Something in him—something dormant—thrummed in resonance.
Rafael clutched his chest involuntarily. It wasn't pain. It was memory manifesting as sensation. He remembered the synthetic womb.
Remembered how one of the failed constructs had tried to reach for him, even in its final moments. As if it recognized something in him. As if they shared a pattern.
Dasha hissed beside him. "This place is waking up."
They ran, again. But this time, they weren't running from something.
They were running toward it.
Toward Clara.
Toward the cradle.
Toward the truth, wrapped in threads and teeth and something older than either of them had words for.
The Maw had noticed them.
And it would not forget.
---
Stanley — Midshaft Redoubt
The lights flickered as Stanley tightened the straps on his arm brace. A fine mist of coolant hissed from a cracked valve nearby, making the air taste metallic.
All around him, the Midshaft Redoubt buzzed with activity—patched-together soldiers, broken exo-suits, and the kind of grim determination that only came after surviving the impossible.
The last time Stanley had seen Rafael, they'd just fought side by side against the Shriekspawn incursion near the Threadchoke. Rafael had vanished with Calyx and Clara during the Loomquake, pulled into the Core by some force none of them could explain.
Stanley had been caught in the collapse, buried under meters of detritus. When he clawed his way free, the others were gone. And he tossed to some random environment.
"Report," he barked, limping toward the war table.
A scout with thread-burned eyes saluted. "Sectors Eight through Eleven are lost. Something's threading through the walls. Not Mawspawn. Something else."
Stanley frowned. "Echoes?"
"Worse. They're synchronized."
He tapped the edge of the table. Rafael had gone quiet since the Loomwake. He couldn't hear anything from his earpiece. Calyx too. He hated being cut off, hated being left behind. But someone had to hold the line. Someone had to make sure there was a line left to return to.
Beneath his shirt, the threadscar pulsed. Not in pain—more like a signal. A message. Something—or someone—was trying to reach him.
He just didn't know who.
***