The Severance Protocol began at exactly noon, when the sun cast no shadows.
From the highest chamber of the Dome of Golden Bells, Threadwarden Cassian Thorne watched as reality began to fray at the edges. The Protocol was not mere erasure — it was surgical forgetting, a precise excision of troublesome elements from the world's memory.
Buildings in the affected sectors started to become translucent. People walking the streets flickered like candleflames in a breeze. Children playing in courtyards faded to outlines, then to impressions, then to nothing at all.
The Loom was eating its own creation to protect itself.
"Phase One complete," reported Patternmaster Sevarin, her voice steady despite the enormity of what they were witnessing. "Temporal anchors established. Beginning selective consciousness removal."
Thorne nodded, though his stomach churned. Twenty-three thousand people lived in the affected area. In another hour, they would never have existed at all.
But at precisely 12:17, everything stopped.
Not slowed. Not paused. Stopped.
The fading buildings hung in mid-dissolution. People caught between existence and nonexistence remained frozen in that terrible liminal space. Even the light itself seemed trapped, creating impossible tableaux of half-remembered lives suspended in amber.
Thorne felt his blood turn to ice. "What's happening?"
Severin's instruments were screaming with readings that shouldn't be possible. "Sir... temporal flow has ceased entirely in the affected zones. Not just slowed — completely arrested."
"That's impossible. The Loom controls—"
"The Loom controls nothing here," a voice said from behind them.
Both officers spun around. The chamber had been sealed, guarded, warded against intrusion. Yet a figure now stood where no one had been moments before.
He was tall, draped in robes that seemed cut from the twilight between day and night. His face was neither young nor old, but carried the weight of countless years in eyes that held depths like starless skies. His hair was the color of snow that had never fallen, and when he moved, reality seemed to bend slightly to accommodate his presence.
"Lord Velkareth," Thorne whispered, the name escaping him like a prayer or a curse.
The figure inclined his head slightly. "I have not worn that name in some time. But yes. I am what remains of him."
"You're supposed to be a myth—"
"Myths have power, Threadwarden. Sometimes more than the truths they replace." Velkareth's gaze swept over the frozen scenes of erasure visible through the chamber's windows. "Did you truly believe you could erase a quarter of a city without consequences?"
"The Protocol is sanctioned by the Loom itself—"
"The Loom." Velkareth's voice carried infinite sadness. "Always the Loom. Tell me, do you even remember what existed before your precious weaving? Or have you forgotten so thoroughly that you believe your construct is all there has ever been?"
Before Thorne could answer, the air in the chamber grew cold. Not the physical cold of winter, but something deeper — the chill of finality, of endings that could not be undone.
Far from the city, in a place that existed outside the boundaries of any map, something ancient stirred.
The Blood Womb had no location because location was a concept that came after its creation. It simply was, existing in the spaces between known and unknown, in the pause between heartbeats, in the silence between death and whatever comes after.
Here, in a chamber carved from crystallized blood and bone, Morveneth opened his eyes for the first time in seven centuries.
His awakening was not gentle. It was the violent resurrection of everything the world had tried to bury.
Across continents, in graveyards both ancient and new, the dead began to remember their names.
In the Cemetery of Forgotten Kings, skeletal fingers punched through centuries of earth. In the plague pits beneath Luminas, the long-rotted stirred with sudden purpose. In battlefield graves from wars the Loom had erased from history, warriors rose with the memory of their final moments burning in empty sockets.
They did not shamble or stumble. They walked with dignity, with intention, converging from every direction toward a point that called to them like a lodestone calls to iron.
Morvenethstood slowly, his joints protesting after centuries of stillness. His black hair fell to his shoulders like liquid night, and the white blindfold across his eyes bore a single red stain — not blood, but something older. Something that had soaked through from dreams of what death truly meant.
"So," he said to the empty chamber, his voice like wind through a mausoleum. "The Loom grows desperate enough to tear holes in its own tapestry."
He could feel it — the massive wound the Severance Protocol had opened in reality. The Loom's custodians, in their fear, had created exactly the kind of gap that allowed things like him to slip through.
"Thank you," he whispered to the distant architects of their own undoing.
And then he was no longer alone.
The figure that materialized before him was familiar, though it had been centuries since their last meeting. Velkareth stood in the Blood Womb as easily as if he had never left, his twilight robes untouched by the chamber's oppressive atmosphere.
"Morveneth." Velkareth's greeting carried neither warmth nor hostility. "You wake at an interesting time."
"I wake because it is time to wake." Morveneth turned toward him, though the blindfold hid his eyes. "The living have had their chance to shepherd reality. They have chosen order over truth, control over freedom. Now it is time for those who understand endings to take their proper place."
"And yet you wake not in triumph, but in a world more constrained than the one we knew. The Loom has succeeded where we failed."
"Has it?" Morveneth smiled, and the expression was terrible. "Look around you, Echo-Walker. The dead rise. The living cower behind protocols and procedures. Even now, your beloved chaos stirs in the spaces between their certainties. I would say the Loom has won nothing but time."
Velkareth was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of accumulated regret. "Time was all it ever needed to win. Each generation that grows up under its rule believes this constrained reality is natural. They cannot even imagine what came before."
"Then perhaps it is time they learned." Morveneth gestured, and the chamber's walls became transparent, revealing the vast host of the dead making their pilgrimage toward the Blood Womb. "The dead remember everything, Velkareth. Every injustice, every moment of beauty cut short, every dream that died with its dreamer. They are not bound by the Loom's rules because death is the one thing the Loom cannot truly control."
"Death ends things, Morveneth. I seek to unbind them, to restore the possibility of infinite becoming. We walk different paths."
"Do we?" Morveneth tilted his head. "You wish to return the world to its state of unlimited potential. I wish to give that potential to those who paid the ultimate price for the living world's limitations. Are we not both seeking justice for the forgotten?"
"Justice." Velkareth considered the word. "Perhaps. But your justice would make the world a graveyard."
"And your chaos would make it a madhouse. Yet here we both stand, awakened by the same crisis, opposed to the same enemy." Morveneth's smile widened. "I propose we each follow our nature, Velkareth. I will raise the dead and give them their due. You will unweave the Loom's certainties and restore the old freedoms. If our paths cross..."
"We will not hold back," Velkareth finished. "Neither of us."
"Exactly." Morveneth extended his hand. Not in friendship, but in acknowledgment. "May the most fundamental truth win."
Velkareth clasped the offered hand briefly. The contact sent shockwaves through the spaces between worlds — two primordial forces acknowledging each other across an unbridgeable philosophical divide.
"The game begins again," Velkareth said.
"The game never ended," Morveneth replied. "We simply stopped playing."
Then Velkareth was gone, leaving Morveneth alone with his gathering army of the forgotten dead.
In the Merchant Quarter, Caelen sat in the corner of a tavern called The Dreaming Bell, nursing a cup of memory-wine and reading by the light of a stolen glowstone. The Chronicle lay open before him, its pages now thick with new text that seemed to write itself as he watched.
The section on the Ten Lords had expanded dramatically:
"Morveneth, called the Lord of Rotten Blood, was the first among the Ten to embrace the philosophy of endings. Where others saw death as transition, he saw it as liberation — the freedom from the constraints that bound the living to their fears and limitations.
In the time before the Loom, death was not final but transformative. The dead did not rest but evolved, becoming something greater than what they had been in life. Morveneth served as their advocate, their voice in the councils of the living.
When the Loom rose and imposed its rigid structures upon reality, death became a wall rather than a doorway. The dead were sealed away, denied their rightful place in the world's ongoing story. Morveneth fought this change more fiercely than any other Lord, seeing it as the ultimate injustice.
His philosophy is simple: those who have paid the price of mortality have earned the right to shape reality more than those who still cling to the illusion of permanent life. The world belongs to the experienced dead, not the ignorant living.
He despises the Loom not for its order, but for its exclusion of death from that order. He neither loves nor hates Velkareth, seeing the Echo-Walker's chaos as simply another form of potential — one that might serve his purposes or oppose them, depending on circumstances.
When Morveneth fully awakens, the dead will remember not just their names, but their power."
Caelen felt a chill run down his spine. The Chronicle continued:
"The awakening has begun. Even now, Morveneth gathers his host while Velkareth moves against the Loom's immediate plans. The Severance Protocol has failed, but it will not be the Assembly's last desperate measure.
For the one who would survive what comes next, knowledge is survival. The Chronicle offers guidance to those wise enough to seek it:
First: The Assembly's power is vast but brittle. They rule through consensus reality — if enough people cease to believe in their authority, that authority will shatter.
Second: Neither Velkareth nor Morveneth is an enemy to be feared, but neither are they allies to be trusted. They pursue goals that transcend mortal concerns.
Third: She who carries the light of the between-time grows stronger. Her awakening will determine whether the old chaos returns as liberation or destruction.
The wise scribe will prepare for all possibilities."
The text ended there, but a new section was already forming at the bottom of the page:
"For Caelen Veyre, who reads these words: your role is not yet clear, but your importance grows with each page turned. The Chronicle has chosen you as its keeper not by accident, but by necessity. What you learn from these pages may determine the fate of every soul, living or dead, bound or free.
Choose your path carefully. The game of Lords has begun, and mortals who play carelessly become casualties."
Caelen closed the Chronicle with trembling hands. Around him, the tavern's other patrons continued their quiet conversations, oblivious to the cosmic forces now stirring to activity.
But he could feel it — the weight of knowledge, the burden of choice. Somewhere in the city, Lyssira was discovering her own strange destiny. Somewhere beyond the world's edges, ancient powers were testing their strength against each other.
And he sat in the middle of it all, holding a book that knew more than it should and demanded more than he felt ready to give.
But ready or not, the choosing time had come.
Caelen finished his wine, tucked the Chronicle securely into his coat, and stepped out into the night. The city around him looked the same as always, but he could now see the cracks in its facade — the places where other realities pressed against this one, seeking entry.
The dead were walking. The chaos-bringer was moving. The Assembly was afraid.
And he, Caelen Veyre, was no longer just a scribe recording history.
He was about to help write it.
End of Chapter Seven