They emerged from the glade with the ache of recursive memory trailing behind them like smoke. The floating spire still collapsed behind their backs, loop after loop, refusing to settle into any one ending.
Rafael was the last one to look back. He didn't say goodbye. He just blinked, as if forcing that failure from his sight.
The Thread tugged gently now, pulling them not along a path, but through a resonance—a hum that lived somewhere between vibration and intuition.
Juno felt it in her teeth. Mira felt it in the tension behind her eyes. Bryn simply walked as though she'd always known it would lead here.
They crested a low ridge of crumbling stone and halted.
Before them stretched a vast scar across the land, where soil had folded and warped into woven ridges, like an immense tapestry had been thrust up from beneath the earth. The Loomwake. Once a ley convergence, now something else. Rafael inhaled sharply.
"It's active," he murmured, more to himself than to the others.
Thin threads of light ran between the ridges, flickering with sigils too old to parse. They resembled filament wires suspended in motion, glowing not with heat but memory.
Between them danced small glyph-motes, fragmentary letters of a dead language trying to spell a name no one could pronounce anymore.
The Loomwake appeared like a living scar, stitched across the landscape with threadlines that hummed with ancient meaning. The ridges bulged like a coiled carpet halfway unravelled, and nestled between the folds were glyphs, symbols etched in midair, flickering with a heatless luminescence.
Some were recognizable, a curve for betrayal, a double slash for return, but most twisted into unreadable knots, shifting shapes as if shy of interpretation. The glyphs moved with intent, drifting like glowing pollen, seeping into stone and vanishing beneath the crust of the Loomwake's flesh.
Sailen stepped forward first, letting the threads lick at her fingers. They didn't burn. Instead, they shimmered briefly with a color she could not name.
"They know us," she whispered, her voice reverent.
Lira squinted at the horizon. Far along the Loomwake's tangled spine, something shimmered like a beacon.
A tower? A heart-node? A keystone?
No one said the word aloud, but all of them thought it: Convergence.
Mira gritted her teeth. "There's no stable path across. It's all overlap and collapse. One wrong step, and we're back at the start. Or worse."
Rafael stepped forward. "Then we step carefully. We map by feel."
Lira reached into her satchel and drew out a loop-compass, a cracked device salvaged. Its needle spun wildly, as if afraid, until Sailen touched it. Then it stilled, pointing true.
"Northwest. Toward the shimmer," she said. "We don't have long. The echo-wake is catching up."
They moved onto the Loomwake.
Each step was like threading a needle with their own bodies. The ground wove and unwove beneath their feet, shifting subtly, sometimes not where it had been a heartbeat before.
Time stretched and bent. They passed moments where they saw themselves ahead of where they walked, and others where their shadows lagged far behind.
Kelan touched a hovering glyph fragment and flinched. It showed his face—aged, hardened, and alone. Another future? Or a warning?
"Don't interact too much," Rafael cautioned. "The Loom doesn't always give back what it takes."
They continued, breath shallow, eyes alert. Glyphs etched themselves in air, dissolved, then wrote again in new grammar. Sigils flickered in the corners of their vision, forming symbols that felt intimate and invasive at once.
Juno nearly slipped at a fold where three timelines collided. Rafael caught her, gripping tight.
"You okay?"
She nodded, trembling. "Yeah. Just felt... like I almost remembered dying here."
Lira murmured, "That might not have been your memory."
Ahead, Bryn stopped. Her breath fogged visibly even though the air was warm.
She pointed to a rise in the woven ground. Something was growing there—like a tree made of sigils and crystal root. Its bark shimmered like prismglass, fractal and unreal. The branches reached up toward the broken sky, tangled with whispering threads.
The Loomtree towered, luminous and alive, its roots half-buried in the overlapping folds of time-soaked earth. From its limbs hung chains of fragmented runes that tinkled like glass in a breeze no one could feel. It looked less grown and more summoned, a beacon carved from temporal density.
Beneath it stood a figure, cloaked in glyphlight. He didn't move. He pulsed faintly, as though breathing in radiance.
Sailen's voice was quiet. "He was here in Seventeen. And Eighteen. Probably. Each time we came this way. He waits."
Rafael's hand hovered near his weapon. "Do we speak to him?" He almost cursed himself to forget something important like this.
"We listen first," Bryn said. "Then we remember what we're not supposed to."
Mira took a step closer and stopped. The ground beneath her shimmered and rippled like a memory trying to assert itself. The air buzzed with pressure—like a thousand unsaid words crowding to be heard.
"He's not bound to one Loop," she whispered. "He might not even be real."
"He's probably a Loomwraith," Kelan muttered. "Or worse."
Bryn shook her head slowly. "No. I think he's one of us. Or was. A memory woven too tight to unravel."
The figure raised a hand—not threateningly, but as if in greeting. Threads danced between his fingers, spelling fragments of names, of moments. One thread curled toward Salien and flicked against her wrist. She gasped.
A memory slammed into her—laughter by a riverside, a name half-remembered, the scent of burning sage, the echo of betrayal. She staggered but didn't fall.
"He knows me," she whispered. "Or the version I was."
Rafael stepped forward slowly, eyes flickering as he analyzed the weaves around the Loomtree. "He's not here to stop us. He's part of the convergence. A sentinel. An echo fixed in the stitch."
The Loomwake hummed louder with every step, as if responding to their resolve. Threads brightened. The path shifted beneath them, but they kept walking.
Toward the tree. Toward the glyphlight figure.
Toward convergence, or collapse.
***