They left the broken clearing behind, silent save for the rustling of burned leaves beneath their boots. No one spoke of the Threadless or the names it whispered. No one dared ask Salien what she'd seen in its eyeless gaze.
The forest felt thinner now, as if the very memory of trees was unraveling. Time flinched around them.
"Don't look up," Rafael warned.
Above them, the sky remained stitched with thin, gleaming scars, wounds in reality that pulsed faintly with impossible colors. Where sunlight should have filtered through, there was only that strange, oily shimmer. Lira kept glancing up regardless, her brow furrowed.
"It's beautiful," she murmured. "But wrong. Like the light from a dead star."
"That's because it is," Rafael said quietly. "That shimmer is echo bleed. The light of forgotten timelines, still falling. Still burning."
Salien trudged behind them, pale, silent. The shard-glyphs etched into her robe still glowed softly, their hues flickering between recognition and refusal.
Rafael kept close to her, watching for any sign she might falter again. There was something frayed in her now, not just exhausted, but strained at a level deeper than flesh, like she was walking alongside herself, out of sync with reality.
They followed a path that wasn't a path, moving along fractured ley-lines that buzzed just beneath the surface. Stones whispered in forgotten dialects. Roots pulled away from their boots. Time faltered. One moment the sun was overhead, the next it dipped low. Sound arrived out of order.
Eventually they reached a glade ringed by crystalline trees. Their branches moved in loops, repeating wind patterns that no longer blew.
The leaves shimmered, freezing and unfreezing mid-fall. In the center of the glade stood a relic: a tower broken in half, its upper spire suspended midair, frozen in collapse. Glyphs pulsed around its edge like a memory trying to hold.
"This is a known place," Lira said, something —a memory, flew inside her head. She touched her fingers to a floating shard of stone. "We tried to make a sanctuary here some loops ago."
"It failed," Juno said, her voice low.
"That was loop three. Everything failed there," Rafael added. "But maybe something survived. Maybe some fragments are worth remembering."
They stepped carefully into the ruins. Fragmented echoes greeted them—not voices, but emotional residues: the feeling of hope before betrayal, the sting of a pact broken, laughter that never fully faded.
Kelan knelt and pressed his palm to a glyph etched into the fallen floor. It lit up, not red or gold, but a stark silver. "Someone re-inscribed this recently," he said. "This glyph isn't from past loops. It's newer. Or older in a looped sense."
Salien finally spoke. Her voice was a breath. "Not newer. From farther. Loop Seventeen, maybe Eighteen. Maybe... both."
Rafael stiffened. "You remember that far back now?"
"Only in flashes," she whispered. "But this... I carved this. I think. I think I was trying to warn us."
Lira moved to another fragment and activated a projection, a sigil-map of interlocking loops, splintering off from a central point like a star. In the middle: the Tower. Or what it once was.
"What were we trying to do here?" she asked. "Why build a sanctuary on top of a collapse point?"
"Because we were trying to stabilize the Thread," Rafael answered. "This was one of the anchor sites. If we could fix one node, we could force the loops to converge. That was the plan back then."
Juno glanced up at the floating spire. "Looks like it didn't work."
"Or it worked too well," Salien said faintly. "And then something broke it. Something outside the plan."
A tremor rippled through the glade. The silver glyphs pulsed. Then came the sound—a low, resonant hum, like glass singing under pressure. The spire began to shift. Not fall—replay. It began collapsing in slow, endless repeat.
"We should go," Bryn said. Her voice trembled.
Salien shook her head. "No. This is where it fractured. We need to remember. Or we'll just walk into it again."
The hum intensified. The tower shivered and looped, time reversing and repeating its shatterlight fall. Threads writhed through the ground. The sky peeled a little wider. The wind stopped moving.
Rafael grabbed Sailen's shoulder. "Then make it fast. Whatever broke here is still breaking."
They stood in the middle of the echo. The glade pulsed with recursive memory. The past screamed through vibrations in the air. The tower fell again. And again. Each time, slightly different. Slightly worse.
Juno planted her sword in the ground and traced a sigil of anchorment. "This will hold us for a few cycles. Maybe."
Lira pressed her hands to the air and began weaving a binding ritual. Not to stop the loop, but to ride its edge. To remember from within.
Salien stepped toward the glyph-map. She reached into it, pulling something intangible—a memory shard. Her eyes flared white. "There was another piece," she said. "A second site. We built two anchors, not one. We lost the other in the fold."
Rafael's hands shook. "The twin locus. The one we buried on purpose."
"Yes," she said. "Because it saw too much."
The tower above began to crackle. Silver lightning danced along its edge. Time howled. The glyphs surged.
They did not run. Not yet. Instead, they watched as their past died again. And again.
And together, they chose to remember.
The shatterlight raged—but they endured.
When it finally faded, the tower fragment hung still once more. The sky above flickered and dimmed, its wounds still raw but momentarily dormant.
Bryn let out a breath. "We can't fix this. But we can trace it. Maybe we need to follow the thread."
Sailen nodded. "We need to find the second anchor."
Mira looked around, her voice hoarse. "And what if it's worse than this?"
Rafael answered with cold certainty. "Then we break it. Or let it break us better."
They left the glade behind—not unchanged, but more whole in knowing how broken they'd been.
Behind them, the tower waited for the next loop.
***
[Narrated by the outer being called The S*****r.
[And they stayed, caught in the requiem of shatterlight, daring to remember what they'd once chosen to forget. Hoping memory might mend what recursion could not.]
***