The Archive screamed.
Not with sound, but with silence so profound it became its own kind of noise. Caelen pressed himself against the cold stone wall of the servants' passage, listening to the absence of footsteps, the void where whispered conversations should have been, the hollow echo of a building holding its breath.
Somewhere above, metal rang against stone in precise intervals. The Guards were searching systematically, floor by floor, shelf by shelf. He had maybe minutes before they reached this level.
The note crinkled in his pocket as he moved. Velkareth is not a name... it is a question.
What kind of question could break reality simply by being asked?
He'd been pondering this as he navigated the Archive's forgotten arteries — passages built between walls, maintenance shafts that predated the current structure, spaces that existed in the margins of architectural memory. These weren't marked on any official blueprint, but Caelen had spent years mapping the building's secret anatomy.
The servants' passage ended at a junction he'd never seen before.
Three doorways branched off into darkness, each carved with a different symbol:
• A spiral of seven threads (the official seal)
• An empty circle (the mark of erasure)
• And something that made his eyes water to look at directly
He chose the third door.
Beyond it lay a chamber that couldn't exist — not in this part of the building, not at this elevation, not according to any reasonable understanding of space. It was circular, with walls that curved impossibly upward, disappearing into shadow. The floor was covered in a fine layer of what looked like ash, but when Caelen knelt to examine it, he realized it was powdered parchment.
Thousands of pages, ground to dust.
At the center of the room stood a single lectern, and upon it rested an open book.
Not just any book. The book.
Caelen had heard whispers of it in the deepest archives — the Chronicle of Unbecoming, a record of everything the Loom had chosen to forget. It was supposed to be a myth, a cautionary tale told to junior Scribes about the dangers of unauthorized documentation.
But here it was, its pages glowing faintly with their own light.
He approached carefully. The book's binding was made from a material he couldn't identify — not leather, not cloth, but something that seemed to shift between states of being. The pages themselves were thin as breath, and the text written upon them appeared to be in flux, words rearranging themselves as he watched.
The War of the Threefold Crown, read one heading. The Rebellion of the Starweavers, proclaimed another. The Myth of Velkareth, the Echo-Binder.
Caelen's heart stuttered. He turned to that section.
The text was dense, written in the flowing script of ancient chroniclers:
"Time does not forget him. It dares not." — Inscription, shattered library of Thal'Saruun
Long ago, in an age before calendars could name the years, there lived a child without a past. He was born during an eclipse that never ended, in a village erased from history — not destroyed, but unwritten. No records remain. Not even the wind remembers the name of the place. Only the child survived, cradled in silence, staring into a sky that would not turn.
The priests who found him said he had no echo. No weight in the world. He cast no future. He was a fracture — a living anomaly.
They called him Velkareth, meaning "He Who Was Not."
He grew among scholars and mystics, always on the edges of time — never aging quite right, never standing in the same moment as everyone else. He could hear what others could not: voices from the future humming behind his ears, footsteps from the past walking just behind his shadow.
In secret, Velkareth began to trace these voices — not just hearing them, but binding them. He carved symbols into stone and skin, tested the flow of regret and repetition. When others slept, he mapped the echoes of their dreams and rewrote the memories they did not wish to keep.
And the world began to change.
First subtly — a tree that bloomed in winter, a warrior who remembered a battle before it happened. Then catastrophically.
It is said Velkareth stood before the Chronoscroll, the primal script that lies beneath all things, and made a single correction:
"Time is not the master. Time is the manuscript."
With that, the future cracked. He split his own soul into a hundred timelines and sent them spiraling through the weave of history. He learned from each self — the coward, the tyrant, the lover, the god — and brought them back into one being.
He emerged not as a man, but a paradox clothed in flesh.
Velkareth the Echo-Binder. Velkareth the Sigilmason. Velkareth the Fractured Scribe.
Some say he walks still, crafting glyphs in the dust of ruined temples. Others say he was undone by his own echoes — hunted by ghosts of futures he abandoned. A few whisper that he exists in every timeline, subtly editing the fate of kings, lovers, and fools.
But all agree on one truth: He is the one who remembers what time tries to forget.
And at the bottom of the page, in handwriting that seemed fresh despite the ancient parchment:
"The daughter of paradox walks in light, unknowing of her impossible birth."
Three districts away, in the modest chambers she'd been assigned beneath the Lightweaver Tower, Lyssira Elowen was having the strangest dreams while wide awake.
It had started during her morning meditation. She'd been practicing the Seven Breaths of Illumination — a simple exercise where Light Thread practitioners aligned their inner radiance with the natural rhythms of perception. Breathe in clarity, breathe out shadow. Standard training.
But on the eighth breath — the one that wasn't supposed to exist — everything changed.
The light around her didn't just glow. It remembered.
She could see echoes layered in the air like transparent photographs: herself as a child, laughing at something that had never happened. Herself as an old woman, weeping over a loss that hadn't yet occurred. And strangest of all, herself as she was now, but wearing robes of pure starlight, standing beside a figure whose face kept shifting between shadow and recognition.
"Focus, Lyssira." She spoke aloud to break the trance, but her voice sounded wrong — too deep, too resonant, as if it carried harmonics from another throat entirely.
She stood and walked to her mirror, a simple piece of polished silver mounted on the wall. Her reflection looked back as expected: yellow robes slightly rumpled, brown hair escaping its braid, eyes bright with curiosity and concern.
But when she moved away from the mirror, her reflection stayed put.
For three heartbeats, it remained motionless while she stepped backward. Then, slowly, it smiled and raised one hand in a gesture she hadn't made.
Lyssira stumbled backward, knocking over her reading desk. Scrolls scattered across the floor, their contents spilling like secrets in the lamplight. But when she looked back at the mirror, everything was normal again.
Her reflection waved when she waved. Tilted its head when she did. Perfectly synchronized, perfectly ordinary.
Except for the fact that her reflection's eyes were now silver instead of brown.
In the depths of the Chronicle chamber, Caelen found himself reading a continuation of the myth that made his vision blur:
"But the story reveals a truth the Loom would erase: Velkareth existed before the great weaving began. He was one of the primordial beings who walked in the time before time was bound, before the Loom imposed its seven-fold order upon reality.
When the first Threadweavers sought to create their grand design, they found beings like Velkareth already inhabiting the spaces between moments. Most were convinced to sleep, to fade into myth and legend. Others were bound into the Loom's structure, becoming the foundation stones of the new order.
But Velkareth refused both fading and binding. He had seen what the world was before rules were written into its bones, and he remembered the freedom that existed in unstructured time.
His greatest working was not rebellion against the Loom — it was an attempt to remind reality of what it had been before the Loom convinced it to forget. He sought to awaken the old chaos, the time when possibility was not constrained by Thread and pattern.
The attempt failed, but not completely. Like all great workings, it left echoes. Chief among these was a child of impossibility — born not from flesh but from the moment when ancient freedom touched structured time and refused to be fully contained. She carries both the light of the new order and the memory of what came before.
The daughter of paradox, born from the collision between what was and what the Loom insists must be.
When the ancient remembers what he scattered, when the echo recognizes her origin, the very foundations of the Loom's authority will be called into question."
Caelen's hands trembled as he turned the page. The next section revealed more forbidden history:
"The Loom's chroniclers would have the world believe that reality has always been as it is now — seven Threads, ordered and eternal. But this is a lie written over older truths.
Before the great binding, reality was wild. Time flowed in rivers and eddies, sometimes backward, sometimes in spirals. Cause and effect were suggestions rather than laws. Beings like Velkareth were not anomalies but natives of that primordial chaos.
The Loom was built to contain this chaos, to force reality into patterns that could be controlled and predicted. It succeeded — mostly. But it could not erase all traces of what came before.
She is one such trace, though neither she nor the ancient who inadvertently created her understands this yet.
When the pre-Loom remembers the post-Loom, when the echo recognizes the source—"
The text cut off abruptly. The rest of the page was burned, as if someone had held a candle to it and then thought better of it.
But in the margin, in handwriting that seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, a new line appeared as Caelen watched:
"The daughter learns to cast shadows with light. The ancient learns to remember what the Loom made him forget. Both paths lead to the unraveling of the lie."
Footsteps echoed in the passage beyond the impossible chamber. Heavy boots, synchronized marching, the distinctive ring of Remembering Metal against stone. The Guards had found his trail.
Caelen snapped the Chronicle shut. As he did, the chamber around him began to fade, becoming translucent like morning mist. He was standing in an ordinary storage room, surrounded by mundane supplies and covered furniture. The lectern was gone. The powdered parchment had become simple dust.
But the book remained solid in his hands.
The door burst open. Captain Seirin Vaydar stepped through, flanked by two Guards whose faces were hidden behind masks of polished brass. Her golden eyes swept the room, pausing on Caelen, then on the book he clutched.
"The Chronicle of Unbecoming," she said softly. "I thought that was just a story we told to frighten novices."
"Everything is just a story," Caelen replied, surprised by his own steadiness. "The question is: which stories remember themselves?"
Seirin's hand moved to her weapon — a blade forged from the same Remembering Metal as her armor, its edge sharp enough to cut through concepts as well as flesh.
"Hand over the book, Archivist. Some questions are too dangerous to ask."
"But this one has already been asked." Caelen held the Chronicle tighter. "The damage is done. The thread is already pulling."
As if summoned by his words, the building around them shuddered. Not an earthquake, but something deeper — as if the very foundations of reality had shifted slightly.
In the distance, a bell tolled once.
Then twice.
Then eight times, though there were only seven bell towers in all of Luminas.
Seirin's mask began to crack down the middle. Through the fissure, Caelen caught a glimpse of her true face — not human, but something older, more fundamental. A being made of rules and enforcement, of order imposed through forgetting.
"You don't understand," she whispered, and for the first time, her voice carried genuine fear. "If he fully awakens, if the question is finally answered—"
"The Loom unweaves," Caelen finished. "I know. I've been reading."
"Then you know why you have to stop reading."
But as she spoke, the Chronicle in his hands grew warm. Its pages began to flutter open of their own accord, settling on a section near the end:
"The Loom's greatest secret is not the existence of an Eighth Thread, but the truth that there was once no need for Threads at all. Reality governed itself through wild possibility, and beings like Velkareth were its natural children.
To remember this truth fully would mean the end of the Loom's authority. To forget it completely would mean the death of wonder itself."
Below that, in fresh ink that smelled of starlight and regret:
"The ancient prepares to remember what he was made to forget. The daughter prepares to illuminate what was hidden before the first Thread was spun. Both are fragments of the same forbidden truth."
The eighth bell tolled again, though no tower could be seen casting such a shadow.
And in that shadow, just for a moment, Caelen could swear he saw a figure in robes of dusk and starlight, watching him with eyes that held the weight of questions too large for any single answer.
The Chronicle's pages turned themselves to the very last entry:
"Phase One: Complete. The remembering has begun."
End of Chapter Five