The field breathed.
Morning settled in with cold clarity, sunlight filtered through the shivering remnants of ley energy that still shimmered along the glyph-stones.
The aftermath of the Thread-Eater's incursion had left the air fractured. Sound of The Loom looming itself echoed oddly. Shadows didn't fall where they should. Birds refused to fly overhead. The world didn't feel broken—it felt rewritten.
Rafael stood at the perimeter, boots dug into the frost-crusted ground. He watched the distorted horizon, where traces of the Thread-Eater's unraveling lingered like afterimages burned into the world.
Even now, the sky refused to settle, a ripple pulsing through the clouds every few minutes like a heartbeat out of sync. He could feel the wrongness underneath his skin, a tremor in the threads of reality that hadn't been there before.
"You should rest," Juno said behind him.
He didn't turn. "Can't. The Loom's shifted slowly but surely."
Juno stepped beside him, arms crossed. She still bore marks on her arms, thin, glowing cracks beneath the skin where the creature's resonance had touched her. She didn't complain. But she hadn't slept, either.
"We barely survived that thing," she said. "You think it's coming back?"
"No." Rafael finally turned to face her. "Worse. I think it marked us."
***
The camp was quieter than usual. There was no laughter, no sparring. Even the wind seemed uncertain.
Lira sat cross-legged before the campfire, silent for once, sketching complex diagrams into the dirt with a fingertip still stained with ritual ash.
Mira leaned over her shoulder, pointing occasionally, her face drawn in concentration. The fire cast flickering shapes across their faces, making them seem older than they were.
"None of these ley patterns are stable anymore," Lira murmured.
"That's probably because we're in a scar," Mira replied. "We've never faced a true Loom Wound, after all."
"Scar?" Bryn asked, walking up behind them. She carried two flasks of boiled water and handed one to Mira. "As in… permanent?"
"Maybe worse," Mira said. "Self-healing. But in wrong direction."
The space around the Waypoint had changed. Trees that should have towered now bent at odd angles. The colors of nearby rocks subtly pulsed with shifting hues. Even time seemed uncertain. They'd measured an hour, only to find the sun hadn't moved. Sometimes their shadows flickered in reverse.
Juno lay on a stretcher nearby, her injuries bandaged, his breathing steady but shallow. The leyflux blade that struck her had cut more than flesh—it had unspooled part of her essence.
Lira didn't say it aloud, but she wasn't sure if she'd ever walk again. Occasionally, her body twitched with silent seizures, like something was trying to move her from inside.
Mira tended to her gently, dabbing at her forehead, whispering reassurances he might not hear.
Rafael joined them and squatted beside the sketch. "We're not in the same layer of the thread anymore."
Bryn raised a brow. "You mean the world?"
"I mean everything," he said. "This isn't just another loop. This is began to off-script."
Juno sat down, watching Rafael carefully. "So what now?"
He pulled a shard of the seal from his satchel, holding it up. It pulsed with a soft white light. A tiny thread reached from it into the air, invisible to all but Mira, who gasped.
"Where you got that?" She asked.
"I stumbled upon this mid fight yesterday," he answered. "What we'll do for now is to trace the mark," Rafael said.
***
That night, they began the rite.
Lira took position at the center, surrounded by six boundary stones Mira and Rafael had attuned. Bryn stood sentinel just outside the circle, while Juno sharpened her blade by the fire. She wasn't needed in the ritual, but she refused to relax.
Each of them wore an anchoring ribbon charm bound with blood and string. Mira made those for protection.
As Lira activated the first glyph, the stones hummed. Mira chanted low and steady, her voice winding around the stones like silk thread. Rafael poured ley essence onto the center mark, an old sigil shaped like a weaving needle nested in concentric loops. The glyph glowed.
The air inside the circle rippled.
Rafael closed his eyes, bracing himself.
And the Loom pulled.
Reality bent around them. For a moment, they all saw it.
Threads of light stretching in every direction, infinite strands of fate and time, coiled and interlocked, fraying and taut. The Loom wasn't a metaphor. It was alive. And they were inside it, exposed like open wounds.
And one thread was black.
A dark cord wound through all their strands, marked with the sigil of the Thread-Eater. It pulsed like a parasite, slithering through their fates, feeding.
Lira gasped. "We've been tethered."
"To what?" Bryn whispered.
Rafael's eyes snapped open. "To a future that doesn't want us to reach it."
The rite grew violent. Mira screamed, the chant turning guttural. One of the stones cracked. Wind rushed through the circle though no breeze stirred outside. The fire turned blue.
Mira collapsed. The chant ceased.
The rite ended with a crack of sound like snapping bone. The boundary stones turned to dust. Mira fell to her knees, breathing heavily, blood trickling from her nose.
Juno rushed forward, catching her. "What did you see?"
Mira's eyes were wide. "A city. Burned and inverted. Floating upside-down. We were there… but wrong. All of us. Twisted. Like copies made in a shattered mirror."
Bryn stepped forward, her usual calm shaken. "What does that mean? Are we corrupted?"
"No," Rafael said. "We're being mirrored. The Thread-Eater is trying to overwrite us with something else, something it could controls."
He looked up at the night sky. The stars had shifted. No constellations he knew. One star blinked twice then vanished. The loom twitching weirdly.
"We're not just off-script," he said. "We're in a place that wasn't meant to exist."
Then the sigil flared again.
Etched into Rafael's palm.
It burned like truth.
The Weaver's Mark.
They had survived the Thread-Eater.
But it had left a scar inside time itself.
***