The flicker pulsed again.
Not light.
Not even memory.
Just a suggestion—
a ghost of a whisper from a voice that had lost its sound, but not the recollection of his name.
Nox moved.
One step. Then another.
His boots sank into soil that felt too damp, too quiet, as though it remembered being alive and resented him for walking on it.
Threadcutter throbbed in his palm.
A filament of refusal.
Unmade, and waiting.
Before him stretched the Unwritten Expanse.
Broad. Lifeless. Still.
Not vacant.
Silent.
The kind of silence that doesn't come from peace, but from a scream so immense the world could never voice it.
Above, the Loom hung like a corpse across the torn sky.
Its threads dangled loose, unmoving.
Not condemning. Not forgiving.
Not mending.
This place was not recovering.
It had simply… stopped.
System Feed: Offline
Threat Logic: Unavailable
Sense Anchor: Default To Instinct
You are beyond fate.
You are alone.
And yet—the world still watches.
He walked across cracked stone that was not stone, each step whispering over sigils that had never been carved.
The sound should have felt empty. Instead, it clung to him, as if the ground remembered what it had lost.
To his left stood trees, but only the husks of them hollow outlines, stripped of their meaning, shadows of what "forest" once was. Their silence pressed against him, heavy, accusing.
To his right stretched a field of sunflowers. Their heads did not follow light. There was no light to follow. Only a ceiling of suspended threadlines, drawn taut across an unseen frame, trembling as if they bore the weight of a forgotten sky.
And in the middle of the field—
a shape.
A girl?
No. Not human.
But wearing the shape of one, like a memory forced into flesh.
Nox stepped closer, Threadcutter humming in his grasp, a low tremor that seemed to recognize the strangeness before he did.
The girl did not move. Her head tilted back toward the web of threads above, as if waiting for something that would never come.
Her flesh if it deserved the word was a veil of translucent fabric, stitched through with strands of living code. No lungs rose beneath that skin, yet her frame rocked faintly, a marionette swaying to a phantom pull.
And on her chest, scorched deep into the fabric, burned a symbol.
Not a Loom glyph.
Not born of system hands.
Something older, lingering like a whisper that refused to die.
A spiral wrapped around a crossline—a forbidden pattern.
He recognized it.
From Kiris's memory shard.
The Seal of Rejection.
His chest tightened. The humming of Threadcutter felt heavier now, as if the air itself resisted his step.
He stepped into the circle of sunflowers.
The girl moved. Not violently.
But… deliberately.
Her head tilted, slow, unnervingly precise. Her eyes opened.
They were full of static.
She spoke.
But it was not speech. It was intent, recorded and replayed, vibrating through the air.
"…you came too soon."
A pause. The glitch stuttered, flickering like bad light.
"... or maybe you're late. Either way, this path isn't ready."
"This was intended for her. Not you."
"But she's not here, is she?"
"She failed."
Nox's teeth ground together. A chill crawled up his spine. "What are you?"
She blinked.
And for a fraction of a heartbeat, just a fraction, he saw it: her real face.
It was Kiris.
Or, more precisely… a fractured render of her, stitched together from discarded memories and prototype blueprints.
The air felt thinner here, almost vibrating under the weight of what had been lost and what was not meant to exist.
Warning: Threadsignature
Reconstruction - Corrupted Memory Ghost Detected Role: Failed Interface Fragment
She wasn't real.
But she had not forgotten him.
"If you recall her name," the fragment whispered, "then you are still dangerous."
Even here.
A wind stirred.
Though there was no wind.
And all the sunflowers at once turned toward him. Their dark centers pulsed like eyes, glyphs blinking in synchronized observation. A pressure built in Nox's chest, as if the field itself were holding its breath.
Then something fell from the sky.
A star? No. A coffin.
Thread-bound metal, tumbling through the invisible web above, slamming into the soil meters away. The impact rattled his teeth, shattering the ground in concentric fractures, dust and echo rising like a scream.
The girl-fragment stepped back, dissolving into the fractured air.
"You weren't supposed to see that… yet."
"But the system… it remembers you now."
"And it's beginning to send its ghosts."
The coffin shattered its silence.
Steam or code—hissed from the crack.
Inside, a figure crouched, shrouded in black. A cracked mask hid her face. Wires ran down her spine, pulsing faintly like veins of data.
Another hunter?
No. Not yet. This one hadn't moved in centuries.
Her eyes opened. Red. Not crimson, not glowing—just… recording.
They locked onto Nox.
"Threadsignature: Null_01 - Verified."
"Loom Response: Manual Initiative Authorized."
"Protocol Designation: Echo_Zero."
And then she smiled.
A smile that never reached her eyes, yet it felt like the world had tilted slightly toward danger.
Nox stepped back. Threadcutter pulsed against his palm, a heartbeat that tried to anchor him. But the girl-fragment had already vanished, leaving only a residue of static in the air.
The sunflowers had burnt to glass.
A shiver ran through the air; the sky pulsed once, like the world exhaling a warning.
Far beyond sight, impossibly far, something began to turn. Not the Loom.
Worse. The original spindle.
Nox's fingers tightened on the thread. It vibrated faintly, a subtle warning that dug into his bones. He whispered to the silence, or maybe to himself, or maybe to the world itself:
"You want me to play your game.
But I'm not a piece anymore."
The air hummed, thickening with pressure.
Echo_Zero rose, deliberate, methodical, her movement a lesson in inevitability.
The ground answered her presence.
Stone cracked and realigned beneath her feet, as if calculating the weight of every step. Threadlines above twisted, rerouting through the sunless abyss, knitting themselves into the coffin that still hissed with residual code.
Each breath she drew sent a ripple through the air, asserting authorship not command, but undeniable claim. The world obeyed her memory as if it had always belonged to her.
Nox did not step back.
But every nerve in him recoiled.
Not with fear. Recognition.
A pulse in his chest, ancient and familiar, thrumming with something unfinishim
something that belonged both to Kiris and to him.
He had seen eyes like those before—in the memory-tinted rooms Kiris once inhabited, during the initial Loom sync tests. Eyes of a construct, failed but still feigning obedience.
But Echo_Zero wasn't feigning.
She moved with authority granted from Old beyond reckoning.Hidden beneath the layers. Its keys lost to time.
"Your designation should have been wiped," she said, her voice clinical, flat—yet layered beneath with a childlike doubt that made the words itch in Nox's mind.
"Null_01 was never meant to live past divergence."
Nox didn't respond.
He let Threadcutter speak instead.
The red strand pulsed, brighter than ever, straining across the void, as if correcting the world itself.
The sky above quivered—not visually, but deep inside perception, semantically. Every line, every thread, felt like a pulse against his bones.
The Loom's corpse shifted. Not alive. But aware. Something ancient, embedded in obsolete system-code, stirred. It tried to intervene, reaching through layers long abandoned.
Nox tightened his grip on Threadcutter, feeling the subtle vibration scrape against his palm. His chest hummed in resonance. He knew, even before thought could form: this was no longer a game of protocol.
Conflicting Directives Found
Echo_Zero: Confirmed Purge Order
Null_01: Deprecated But Immune
Override Protocols: INSUFFICIENT
Resolution Required: By Pattern Combat
Threadcutter felt heavier in his hand.
Not with weight possibility. If he swung it now… it would not only strike Echo_Zero.
It could cut the path forward.
Possibly even the sky.
Echo_Zero raised a hand—not to attack, but to signal.
From the cracked earth behind her, three more coffins crawled upward, dragged by invisible hooks. Glitch-coffins.
Each bore the scars of failure.
One marked Prototype Echo_One.
Another: GODTHREAD INCOMPLETE.
The last blank. Red.
"You were never the only anomaly," she said, voice even, clinical.
"Just the one that got away."
Her smile never wavered.
And yet the mask along her jaw trembled, as if remembering how to scream.
The field burned.
Not with fire, but light. False sunlight poured down, diagnosing, scanning, tracing—touching everything without warmth.
Nox tightened his grip. Every muscle recoiled. Every nerve thrummed with warning. He didn't move. Yet the world pressed against him, asking: how far would you go to survive this?
The system measured all living threads—and came up short.
Anomaly: Null_01 - Thread Signature Not Aligned.
"He does not bind," whispered an echo of the Loom.
"He unravels."
A gust swept through the Unwritten Expanse.
This time, real.
The kind of wind that presses against skin, rattles bones, and heralds arrival… or erasure.
The sunflower field shattered to ash.
The trees dissolved into nothingness.
Only Nox remained, standing in the silence among futures yet to be fought.
Threadcutter flared.
Red. Living.
Screaming against the system.
Too bright to look at.
And then, she spoke.
Not Elira. Kiris.
But not as he remembered her.
A fragmented echo, buried deep in the spine of Threadcutter.
"This thread wasn't made for battle," she whispered.
"It was made to choose."
The vibration of her voice pulsed through his bones. Every fiber of Nox recoiled and resonated at once.
He moved forward.
The sky bent slightly around his choice.
One step. Two.
Echo_Zero's eyes narrowed, tracking not his body, but his intention.
Thread Path Opening.
New Domain: Red Fractal
System Response: Stopped
Permission: Pending
Then the coffins erupted. Forgotten wars poured out with them: static fused with nursery songs, boot code intoned like gospel, weapon logs recited by voices without throats. Nox stood in the center, one thread in his hand.
No fate. No script.
The vibration of Threadcutter clawed at his bones.
"I don't need your permission," he whispered to the system.
"I'm not your story anymore."
Echo_Zero lunged.
The world didn't hold its breath.
It screamed.
Threadcutter screamed with it, red and alive, shredding the silence, shredding expectation.