When Cael opened his eyes again, the sky was gone.
They stood in a city bathed in twilight, yet no sun hung above them—only a great dome of obsidian glass reflecting a hundred warped moons. The air was thick with memory, the walls etched in scripts no longer spoken. Everything looked ancient, but untouched.
"Where are we?" Cael asked, his voice a whisper.
"Nim'Serel," Veyra said. "The City That Remembers No One."
He turned to her.
"That doesn't make sense."
"Exactly."
A City Outside Time
They walked through wide, silent streets where no breeze stirred, and no footsteps echoed.
Shadows clung unnaturally to corners. Statues of forgotten kings wept tears of gold. The marketplace was still filled with food that would never rot. No signs of decay. No dust. Just stillness.
"This city was a casualty of Time," Veyra explained. "Not destroyed—erased. The Second Thread's burden is understanding places like this… places caught between possibility and oblivion."
Cael felt the Thread inside him respond—pulling his vision outward.
And then he saw it:
Millions of lives trapped in a moment.
Ghosts of children playing. Lovers kissing. Soldiers training. All repeating the same actions endlessly in translucent loops. They didn't look like phantoms—they looked real, like reflections in rippling water.
A Memory Speaks
One of the figures noticed him.
A boy—maybe ten—wearing a crown made of driftwood. He looked directly at Cael and smiled.
"You're the one who broke it."
"Broke what?" Cael asked.
"The Pattern," the boy said."You're not supposed to be here."
Veyra stepped between them, blades drawn. The boy only laughed and vanished like a popped bubble.
"He wasn't real," she said.
"But he knew me."
The Thread Speaks
That night, they took shelter in a cathedral of broken time. The stained glass depicted wars that hadn't happened yet, and funerals for gods yet unborn.
Cael sat alone beneath a mosaic of the Weaving Star and listened.
The Second Thread pulsed, and then a voice spoke inside him—his own, but older. Tired.
"Three Threads must be bound. One to walk the Pattern. One to unmake it. One to decide."
"I don't understand," Cael whispered.
"You will. When you meet the girl of shadows.When the third Thread finds you."
The Threadhunters Are Not Far
Unbeknownst to them, far above the dome of Nim'Serel, Lady Mourn stood on a broken stairway of floating timeglass.
"Nim'Serel still breathes," she murmured. "Then so does the Pattern."
She turned to her officers.
"He will find the girl there. And when he does, we strike."