The white faded slowly, like snow melting under a silent sun.
Ahri awoke on a surface that wasn't ground but wasn't sky—an expanse of pale thread stretching in every direction. The Loom was gone, its vast structure vanished, yet something lingered. A tremble in the weave beneath her, as if it had absorbed the conflict, the memory, and her choice.
She sat up, breath shallow, fingers still warm from her mother's echo.
Sol's lantern flickered beside her. He had followed—though she hadn't seen him enter.
"You survived," he said, kneeling beside her. "That alone is something I never expected."
Ahri blinked. "Did you see the Loom?"
"I saw a glimpse," Sol replied. "But it was… quieter for me. The Loom speaks loudest to those it remembers."
Ahri looked down. Her golden thread was still wrapped around her wrist—but now it was braided with a fine violet filament. The fox spirit's thread. It didn't pulse wildly anymore. It breathed with her.
"I heard a voice," she said.
Sol's expression darkened. "You're not the only one. Something's waking. You've stitched yourself to a force that's older than fate. That thread… it won't let go."
She looked into the distance. "And Miran?"
"Gone. For now. She tried to attack the Loom. It rejected her. It remembered her, but it didn't want her."
Ahri stood, slowly. "Why not?"
"Because she doesn't believe stories should be told," Sol said. "And the Loom only weaves those who still want to be known."
As they walked forward, the threads beneath them began to shimmer—like constellations hidden beneath silk. Symbols blinked in and out: the fox mask, the broken moon, the three towers of the Severed.
And one more—a shape Ahri didn't recognize.
A spiral, made of overlapping stitches. Constantly weaving inward.
Sol stopped. "That wasn't here before."
"What is it?"
He didn't answer.
Because something was watching.
From the far edge of the weave, just beyond where color faded into silence, a figure stood.
Not Miran.
Not Hollowed.
A child.
Draped in grey robes too large for their body, face hidden behind a mask made entirely of stitched thread.
They didn't speak. They simply pointed to Ahri's chest.
Her thread pulsed.
The fox's thread pulsed.
And a new voice—not the Loom, not the fox, not her mother—whispered:
"There is a stitch the Loom refuses to finish. A stitch that sings of silence."
Then the child turned and vanished, dissolving into the weave like mist unraveling.
Ahri stared after them, unsure if she'd seen a warning—or a prophecy.
Sol finally spoke.
"That was one of the Weftborn."
"What are they?"
"Spirits created when a story is cut too early," he said. "They aren't born. They echo."
"And why did it show itself to me?"
"Because the Loom doesn't just want you to remember," Sol said carefully. "It wants you to complete something it never could."
Ahri felt the full weight of it then.
She wasn't just tethered to fate anymore.
She was being asked to rewrite it.