The sunrise broke like a blade through the haze. Light struck the remnants of the Verdant Crown, glinting off fallen spires and the scattered sigilglass embedded in broken stone.
In the ruins below, Rafael Vagathris and his companions stirred slowly, the weight of their encounter with the Warden pressing behind their eyes like an afterimage that refused to fade.
Salien sat beside the extinguished heart of the construct, her knees drawn up, staring into the dull reflection of her own eyes in a cracked shard of threadglass.
The shard shimmered faintly, catching glints of otherworldly color, as if fragments of still-living essence clung to its fractures.
Her breathing was slow, steady, like someone unsure if they'd survived or simply paused between deaths.
Rafael approached with quiet steps, the morning wind tugging at his coat, the loose ends of his thread-seals flickering and humming softly. Veins of luminous ink pulsed faintly beneath his collar, echoing the rhythm of his breath.
"How much do you remember?" He asked.
She blinked, then murmured, "Enough. Dying. Fighting. Failing. There was a voice when I was part of the Warden. Something ancient. Not Loom-born. It whispered about the Forked Path. But it wasn't just a voice, it was a pressure. Like being held in a mind too vast to understand."
Rafael exhaled through his nose. The Forked Path again. It had surfaced in fragments across several loops, mentioned in mad ramblings, glimpsed in veilstorm visions, muttered by broken seers. But never this clearly.
Lira joined them, her spellbook glowing faintly with new glyphs she'd inked overnight.
Pages bristled with resonance, the glow reflecting against her freckles like starlight. Her long brown hair was tied back in a messy braid, and ink stained the edges of her sleeves.
The glyphs etched into her wrists moved like ink floating through water, alive and deliberate.
"Your thread's stable now," she said, kneeling beside Salien. "But not cleanly severed. That Warden's integration ran deep."
"Time's always borrowed," Juno said, stepping up, voice quiet but firm. Her gaze was locked westward, toward mountains where clouds coiled like slow-moving spirals.
Her olive-toned skin glinted with residual glyph-burns from last night's spellwork. "We'll need to spend it wisely."
Juno's dark eyes flicked to Salien, not with suspicion, but understanding. She bore the memory of past loops more heavily than the others.
At the other side, Bryn's hand rested on the pommel of her axe, where she'd carved runes of vigilance herself. The wind tugged at her half-cloak, the color faded from its time spent across timelines. Her stance was still, yet alert, a sentinel honed by memory.
***
By noon, they left the ruins. Their path curved northwest, following the fractured leyline that once linked the Verdant Crown to the memory-crypts of Eshar's Spine.
Rafael led them across ravines rimmed with sigil-burned stones, through forests where the trees grew in eerie symmetry. Branches like cathedral arches, leaves veined with glyph-lines that shimmered and shifted hue like breath on glass.
As they crossed a bridge of living roots, Rafael paused. Beneath them, the river shimmered with latent essence, showing ghostly flashes of the past—stitched memories bleeding into the present. Children playing. A village aflame. A woman defying the tide with an outstretched hand.
"Don't stare too long," Rafael murmured. "The Loom leaks here."
Lira walked beside him, her fingers brushing her spellbook. "Do you trust Salien?"
"I trust who she used to be," he replied. "And I trust that her thread hasn't snapped."
"She might be more than she was. The voice she heard, if it wasn't part of the Loom..."
"That's what I'm worried about."
Behind them, Salien walked in silence, each step deliberate, as if testing whether the earth still accepted her weight. Her robes, reshaped from her Warden cocoon, were threaded with unfamiliar glyphs—neither Lira nor Mira could identify them.
The marks pulsed faintly with her heartbeat. The color of the fabric shifted subtly between slate-gray and ember-red, like memories caught between two timelines.
Bryn took the rear, her eyes constantly scanning the surroundings, occasionally whispering readings from her own thread-sense. "Sub-layer tremors. But not collapsing yet," she said under her breath.
***
By dusk, they reached a hollow carved into the trunk of a petrified tree—a safehouse from an older loop, long buried but remembered in Rafael's threads.
The inside walls were laced with dormant glyphwork. Lira activated them with a touch, casting soft orange light across the bark. The glyphs lit up in slow waves, spreading warmth like the embers of an old fire.
Kelan climbed to a perch above the hollow for first watch. He sat silently, eyes scanning the horizon, where the moon began to rise.
Bryn, sharpening her axe, broke the silence. "That thing wasn't just feeding. It was trying to replace the Loom."
Rafael knelt over a rune-stitched map. "We've seen imitations before. Nothing with this kind of autonomy. It built its own glyphs. Bled its own logic."
"And if it spreads?"
"We cut it out."
She nodded. "If it comes to it, I'll end myself."
"It should be want that," Rafael said. "But let's not get there."
***
That night, Salien dreamed.
She stood beneath a bone-latticed sky, threads unraveling around her like snowfall. Loom-glyphs spun across the air like drifting pollen, shifting colors with each passing emotion.
Something watched from beyond—not a god, not a predator. A scribe. A being that recorded without judgment. That wrote not what had happened—but what would.
The sky was a chasm of language, the stars ink droplets. Every breath rewrote a law. Every blink erased a year. She walked between ideas, through thoughts never spoken aloud.
She woke before dawn, shivering. Her hands moved instinctively, sketching runes into the stone floor. The lines glowed softly, then faded—leaving behind a memory of structure.
Lira knelt beside her, drawn by the resonance.
"You're changing," she whispered.
Salien met her gaze. "I think something wrote me back."
***
As the first light crested the horizon, Rafael stood at the edge of the hollow, eyes fixed westward. Threadlines shimmered in the sky above Eshar's Spine. In the hum of the Loom, something had begun to fray.
"We move at dawn," he said. The others heard. No one disagreed.
***