"Are we sure poking it with a stick won't collapse the entire timeline again?" Rafael asked, squinting at the floating, dimensionally-impossible remains of what could only be described as a quantum skeleton.
It shimmered and blinked out of existence every few seconds, as if reality couldn't decide if it was real, dead, or a practical joke.
Mira didn't answer immediately. She was halfway through carving glowing glyphs into the air with her ritual knife, fingers working with expert speed.
Sparks danced off each stroke, tracing incandescent blue trails that crackled softly like static. "Define 'collapse,'" she murmured. "Like, small personal collapse, or full existential implosion?"
"I'd prefer neither," Rafael muttered, inching backward from the skeletal remains. His fingers twitched toward the ribbon anchor charm at his wrist.
Juno stood nearby with her arms crossed. "I hate this thing," she said through gritted teeth. "It's humming in three separate keys."
"Which just means it's extra cursed," Bryn replied cheerfully. She shifted her heavy newly gifted warhammer on her back and stepped forward, her boots squishing faintly against the unstable surface. "Maybe it hums louder if we touch it?"
"That's the opposite of a good idea," Rafael said, already backing further away.
They were in the middle of a Loom Wound—a rupture in reality where the laws of causality were frayed like an old rug. The sky above wasn't a sky, but a looping ceiling of swirling, fractal clouds stitched together by gold threadlines. The ground squished underfoot like memory foam laced with whispers.
At the epicenter of the scar floated the quantum skeleton, locked mid-pose in a deathless ballet. It hovered in a spiral of cracked glyphstones—obsidian plates etched with symbols that vibrated in sympathy with sarcasm. Which was often.
Rafael grimaced. "This thing doesn't belong in our version of causality. It's in flux. It's not alive, not dead. It's undecided."
"It blinked at me," Lira said. She crouched nearby, her long braid resting against her shoulder. "With no eyeballs. That breaks so many metaphysical laws."
"Four, minimum," Juno added. "Five if you count the one about undead shouldn't flirt."
"It hasn't flirted yet," Bryn said with a smirk. "But I'm getting mixed signals."
They chuckled, unease hidden beneath humor.
Then Juno's expression changed. Her amusement vanished, replaced by a steel tension. "It's not just humming," she said slowly. "It's singing. A war song. From the City Beneath."
A long silence fell over the group.
Rafael turned toward her, sharply. "You're sure?"
It wasn't Juno. Instead, Bryn nodded once. Her voice was lower now. "I recognize the rhythm. That's the Ninth Echo Battalion. My unit. They were wiped out during the fall. No survivors. I… I shouldn't be hearing this."
Mira's glyph hung in the air, spinning like a compass. Then, with a final pulse of light, it locked onto the skeleton's outline—and the world twisted.
Not physically. Emotionally. It was like stepping into someone else's memory—except you remembered it, too. The hum deepened into a chorus, layered voices echoing across the Loom Wound, as if the fabric of reality was mourning something it couldn't name.
Bryn stood motionless, her posture straight, jaw clenched. Her eyes glowed faintly gold. "That's them. That's the battalion's chorus. They're not gone. They've been… compressed? Folded into the scar."
"A failsafe?" Rafael whispered. "A last echo of willpower embedded into the wound?"
"Or a message," Lira said. Her pupils dilated slightly. "The spiral of glyphstones—it's a prayer wheel. A ritual lock. Something meant to be found."
The skeleton pulsed again, and a new glyph shimmered into view across its ribcage. The shape was strange—loops nested inside spirals inside jagged triangles, forming an impossible knot.
"That's narrative logic," Mira said softly. "High-tier divine structure. It means… something in the story is about to shift," she paused. "Or shifted already."
"Plot twist imminent," Juno muttered, flexing her fingers.
"It's a punctuation mark," Mira added, narrowing her eyes. "Not grammatical. Metaphysical. It's the kind of punctuation you put at the end of a prophecy."
"To over simplify it, either we die horribly or level up dramatically," Rafael concluded. "Anyone agree?"
"Or both," Juno said again.
The glyph flared, bathing the scar in deep amber light. Threads of energy spun outward from the skeleton's heart, connecting to each of them. They flinched as ghost memories fluttered across their minds—battlefields that never happened, choices never made, victories unearned.
Rafael gritted his teeth as one particularly sharp memory jabbed into his thoughts—a version of himself with blackened veins and empty eyes, kneeling before the Thread-Eater.
The ground trembled.
The glyphstones flared in sequence. A chant rose from the wound—a song not of war, but of mourning, pride, resistance. The Ninth Echo's final stand, trapped in the weave of reality.
Mira blinked away tears. "They folded themselves into the Loom. They made themselves part of the narrative. Not erased. Preserved."
"That's what the failsafe is," Bryn whispered. "If they couldn't win, they made sure the story would remember them. They became punctuation. A warning mark. A story scar."
"And we just tripped the clause," Rafael said. "We're inside the footnote."
"Correction," Lira said, stepping forward. "We are the footnote now."
A final pulse of light flared from the skeleton's chest. The threads connected to each of them burst like overdrawn ley-lines, flooding the Loom Wound with a cascade of pure intention. Not magic—something deeper.
Authorial.
"Brace yourselves," Mira said as the light rushed inward.
"What for?" Rafael asked.
"The rewrite."
And then the scar began to sing.
***