The shimmer of residual glyphlight still danced on their skin as Rafael's party emerged from the ruins. The anchored timeline pulsed quietly beneath their feet—its work complete, for now. But as they stepped into the morning haze, the air buzzed with a new urgency. The Loom never waited. Not for regret, nor readiness.
Bryn scouted ahead, boots silent over broken stone. A sharp wind pulled at her braid, carrying whispers from the east—hints of motion that didn't belong. She froze at the crest of a ridge, signaling sharply with two fingers.
Rafael joined her moments later. Below them, nestled in a ragged basin carved into the land like a scar, stood the once-holy site of the Verdant Crown, a temple shattered during the war long ago.
All that remained now were its overgrown spires, looped with corrupted vines that pulsed with sickly green light, like veins filled with poison.
"I was hoping this place would've healed," Bryn murmured. Her eyes narrowed, her usual steel demeanor cloaked with something like sorrow.
Rafael shook his head. "It's worsen actually. The Thread-Eaters left their marks everywhere. And something's feeding on it."
Juno arrived beside them, silver in her irises flickering like a candle in wind. "You mean it's alive?"
Rafael squinted into the basin. "Not quite. But close enough to it."
***
The descent into the basin took hours. The terrain warped the closer they got; gravity shifted subtly, and sounds echoed at the wrong pitch. Even Lira's spellbook felt heavier in her satchel, and her breath caught more than once as she traced counter-glyphs mid-step just to keep the group's threads stabilized.
"The essence here is too dense," Lira muttered, sweat clinging to her brow. "The Loom's threads are tangled. If we're not careful, we'll trip into a temporal fold."
Inside the Crown's shattered nave, time seemed to slow. Columns of petrified roots twisted toward a broken ceiling, where fractured sunbeams filtered through what remained of ancient stained-glass.
A giant construct made of thorned stone and rusted sigils loomed before them. Its chest cavity pulsed with a heart made of cracked threadglass. From its back, threads spilled like veins—some frayed, some freshly stitched, all tethered to the rootwork of the temple.
Rafael narrowed his eyes. "It's a Warden."
Juno blinked. "A what?"
"Temporal defense construct. Pre-Veil. Built to guard the Loom's access points. Most are dead. This one's... semi-functional."
Lira stepped closer, mesmerized by the slow shifting of its form. Her fingers hovered near the page of a half-finished glyph. "It's channeling essence into itself. Not from the Loom. From the local threads. It's eating the basin."
Bryn grunted. "Then we break it before it finishes dessert. Right?"
But Rafael held up a hand. "Not yet. Look."
At the base of the construct, partially fused with the rootstone, lay a figure. Wrapped in a cocoon of thread-mucus and sigils, the face was barely visible—but Rafael knew it.
"Vessel Host," he breathed. "It's one of our comrades. From loop ten. Her name was Salien. She died holding the line."
"She's alive?" Lira asked, voice cracking.
"Alive enough," Rafael said. "But if we don't sever her from the Warden, it'll fully integrate her thread. She'll become a node, a permanent glyph anchor. No coming back."
***
The Warden stirred.
A heartbeat later, the battle erupted. Threads lashed out like serpents, each strike distorting the very air. Bryn darted forward, her twin axes (her back up weapons), singing as they met stone and sigil. Every impact released a ripple of inverted time, a disorienting feedback loop that made it difficult to track her movements.
Juno backed her with a barrage of inversion sigils, painted mid-air in strokes of silver and indigo. Each one triggered temporal ruptures that caused sections of the construct to collapse inward momentarily. She gritted her teeth, her lips bleeding from over-channeling.
Lira anchored them with a stabilization field, her glyphs now complex hexagrams spinning around her fingertips. Her voice never stopped chanting, binding thread to thread in a desperate attempt to keep their timeline intact. Even a second of slippage here could mean they would be erased. Utterly.
Rafael focused on the root glyphs beneath the Warden's feet, engraved spirals that maintained its anchoring to the corrupted basin. His glyph sword glowed faintly, etched with personal runes from loops long past. Every strike chipped away at the Warden's foundation.
It roared, and time cracked.
For a moment, they stood in five different realities—each showing their death. One where Bryn was impaled, one where Lira burned out, one where Juno's thread unraveled. One where Rafael failed.
But he didn't.
Rafael's blade struck the central glyph.
The root symbol shattered.
The Warden convulsed. The air screamed. Thread-veins burst into colorless fire. The cocoon around Salien broke, releasing a surge of pure essence-thread that flickered with every color and none.
Salien gasped, eyes wide. "Which loop… is this?" She coughed, spilling some ley-like blood.
"Sixty-one," Rafael said, catching her hand. "Kidding. It's 20th. And We're not done yet."
***
They rested that night in the lee of the shattered temple. A small campfire flickered, contained by Lira's containment rune. Rafael traced new thread seals around the party, reinforcing them with essence and memory.
Salien sat between Lira and Juno, swaddled in a blanket of stabilizing sigils. She was quiet, but aware. Her eyes never quite stopped flicking, like she was watching moments the others couldn't see.
"I remember dying," she whispered. "But not staying dead."
"That's how it goes," Juno said softly, nudging her shoulder against Salien's. "The Loom's a liar with a long memory."
"Do you think it can be undone?" Salien asked. "All of it?"
Rafael looked up at the stars, to the gigantic loom floating above, his face lined with fatigue and distant anger. "Not undone. But rewritten."
From the distance, thunder echoed. Not weather. Something else. A signal. A breach.
"We move at dawn," Rafael said, rising slowly. "We need to get to Eshar's Spine before the convergence breaches again."
And in the darkness, the Loom stirred.
***