The moment Oren smiled, the cathedral's light changed.
It wasn't a sunrise or spotlight—more like a sigh of an ancient story finally exhaling. The frozen soldiers of the Ninth Echo Battalion began to shimmer, and some dropped to their knees. Their armor clanked in sorrowful relief. The weight of centuries lifted, slightly.
Bryn approached Oren carefully, as if he might flicker and vanish like the rest of this unstable memory. "You're real. This is real."
Oren's laugh was tired and crooked, like he hadn't used it in a decade. "Define real. We're standing on the ceiling of a church built by recursive regrets and failed punctuation."
Rafael leaned over to Juno. "That kid's definitely related to Bryn."
Juno nodded, already charging another null-thread bomb just in case. "Yeah. Same brand of trauma-sarcasm."
Oren looked at the battalion. "They're stuck between what happened and what should've happened. Between failure and the story that was supposed to save us."
Mira knelt by a soldier whose sword had become a rose. "They're bleeding narrative logic. Their identities are held together with bad plot glue."
Lira narrowed her eyes at Oren. "How long have you been aware?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Since the third reboot. I think. I started hearing the loops, noticing the discrepancies. I remembered Bryn. That was the anchor."
The cathedral began to groan. The echoes shifted pitch, like a tuning fork striking wrong notes. The ceiling cracked, but instead of stone, glyphs spilled from it—bleeding out like ink from a collapsing manuscript.
Bryn turned toward the heart of the structure. "We're running out of time. This place is collapsing under narrative contradiction."
Oren nodded. "The Loom buried us here to protect the larger arc. We were considered... Failure. A failed subplot."
Juno cursed. "You're telling me the meta-narrative yeeted you out of existence to tighten its script?"
"Yup," Oren said. "And now, because you came here, the system is panicking. The failsafe's fraying."
Mira traced the glyphs bleeding from the ceiling. They spiraled in recursive shapes—cascading plot holes, forgotten punctuation marks, even half-drawn question marks with teeth. "If this collapses, it won't just delete this memory. It'll unweave any event tied to the battalion."
Rafael frowned. "So, uh, basically we're standing in a ticking meta-bomb made of emotional backstory and irresponsible foreshadowing?"
Oren smirked. "Pretty much."
Lira stepped forward. "Then we anchor it. Rewrite it. Stitch a new causality that includes you and your battalion."
"You don't have the authority," Oren said. "You're not Threadweavers."
Bryn touched her mark. It flared. "Maybe not. But I was one once. Gonna explain that later. Believe me, it's confusing. The important thing is, I just need a needle."
Rafael handed her the glyph-dagger. "Stab time?"
"Stitch time," Bryn corrected, gripping it tightly. "We'll need a stable core. A rewritten moment powerful enough to ripple backward and forward."
Oren stepped beside her. "Use me. My first defiance. When I stopped obeying the loom. That's the moment that broke the narrative."
Juno planted her boots. "We'll hold the line. You and Oren make the stitch."
Rafael raised his newly picked-up shield and slammed it into the stone. "You heard her! Form ranks!"
The battalion flickered, then responded with growing cohesion. Like marionettes rediscovering muscle memory, they snapped into formation, shields interlocking, spears upright. Their hum deepened into a resonant chant, harmonizing with the echo of old oaths.
Lira conjured spectral sigils above the line, forming a canopy of defensive runes. Mira extended her mind, stabilizing the terrain beneath their feet with pulse after pulse of geometric narrative wards.
Threads began to fray from the cathedral walls, tendrils of disintegrating lore and contradictory causality. The first tendril lashed toward Rafael. He met it with his shield, which flared with the imprint of a past triumph: the duel at Threadspire Bridge. The memory burned bright and true, rejecting the unraveling.
More tendrils came, like claws of forgotten chapters. Juno hurled null-thread bombs into them, fracturing their logic. "Plot holes incoming!" she shouted, slicing through a yawning gap in the floor that tried to become a death monologue.
The battalion joined them now, not as phantoms but comrades. They roared in unison, beating shields, resisting the collapse. One soldier, his face fractured with decades of narrative neglect, stood beside Mira and channeled raw story into a glowing sigil.
"This line will hold," Lira declared, erecting a wall of frozen time—each panel a frozen scene of sacrifice from the battalion's long-forgotten campaigns.
Behind the front, Bryn carved a loop in the air. The glyph-dagger glowed, threads spilling out like red light. She cut through the false moment, reaching for Oren's act of defiance—a scene where he turned his weapon away, refused the command, and chose compassion.
Reality buckled.
The cathedral blurred.
Images smashed together. Oren as a boy, standing between two dying soldiers, choosing neither; Bryn screaming at a command panel; the battalion hesitating, trembling; and the sky cracking as the story bent.
At the line, Rafael's shield shattered. He switched to fists, punching raw narrative threads back into shape. Mira collapsed, sweat-soaked, but a dozen soldiers caught her, holding her spell firm. Juno bled from one eye, her hand fused to a collapsing glyph, but still she screamed defiance. Lira's runes dimmed—then surged as the battalion's chant crescendoed.
With a scream, Bryn slammed her Warhammer into the center of the sundial.
Everything stopped.
Then pulsed.
The light returned, softer now. The cathedral's ceiling became a proper floor. The battalion breathed. No longer stuck. No longer ghosts.
Oren swayed, caught by Bryn. He looked up at her with tears he didn't know he still had. "You stitched it. You rewrote the story."
"No," Bryn whispered. "'We' did."
***