The air still shimmered with the loom's cry.
Lyraen's hands pulsed with memory, the Second Thread coiled tight against her skin like a vow not yet spoken.
Ezran walked beside her in silence, blade sheathed but heart unsheathed — both of them stepping beyond prophecy and into something older.
Behind them, the world shifted.
Before them, the Cradle opened.
A figure emerged from the roots.
She was cloaked in strands of hair, her skin stitched in spirals, eyes like voids with flickers of thread within. Her presence unraveled the distance between moments. A Seamstress of the Boneweaver.
"You've come late," she said, voice like shears through velvet. "The Second Thread stirs. But you are not the only ones who seek it."
Lyraen stood her ground. "We came for truth."
The Seamstress tilted her head. "Truth cuts deeper than any blade."
She reached behind her and drew forth the spindle they had seen in the dream, the one the hooded stranger had once lifted.
The Second Thread, deep violet and flecked with red, pulsed like a heartbeat.
Coiled within a frame of ivory and sorrow, it pulsed like a living wound—violet and red, ever-shifting, impossible to focus on for long. It breathed, not with air, but with memory.
Ezran stepped forward, jaw clenched. "What does it do and What will it show us?"
The Seamstress smiled. Her teeth were made of thread.
The Seamstress did not look at him. Her gaze remained on Lyraen.
"Not show. Weave."
"It remembers," she said. "And in remembering, it unmakes."
Lyraen felt the ground sway beneath her feet. The loom behind the Seamstress groaned as if waking. The threads upon it tensed, quivering in place like a web before the kill.
The Seamstress tilted her head. "Truth cuts deeper than any blade."
"What happens if we touch it?" she asked.
The Seamstress offered no answer—only a riddle:
"The First Thread bound the heavens.
The Second shatters names.
The Third is not yet woven."
Ezran exhaled. "Cryptic nonsense."
"No," Lyraen murmured. "It's a pattern. The prophecy. The one the Custodes tried to erase."
The Seamstress smiled. The skin around her mouth did not move.
"You were never meant to know the full Weave. Only the strand tied to your cage. The rest was cut… until now."
Behind her, the loom began to spin.
Slow. Relentless.
A shape emerged on the threads—first light, then shadow. A woman. A face. Lyraen's face.
But wrong.
Mouth open in silent scream. Eyes stitched shut. Wings broken and bound in silver wire.
Ezran stepped back, sword half-raised. "Is that her—?"
"No," Lyraen whispered. "It's what I could become."
The Seamstress turned.
"It is one possibility. The thread you follow may still fray. Or it may hold. That is not for me to choose."
She extended the spindle.
Lyraen didn't move.
"What happens if I take it?"
"You remember what the world forgot."
She pressed the spindle into Lyraen's hands. The spindle trembled in her grip as she finally reached for it. It was heavier than it looked. Cold. It writhed slightly in her grip, as if sensing her blood.
The moment her fingers brushed its surface, everything stopped.
And then the forest screamed.
Not in sound — but in memory. Visions ripped through the trees like fire.
The wind. The sound. Even breath.
And then—
Memory. Fire. Screams.
A thousand pasts. A thousand deaths. Lyraen gasped, staggering.A tower of silver glass shattering into the sea.
She saw angels burning. She saw angels burning. Vampires kneeling before forgotten kings. Threads of fate pulled and severed. The First Thread torn by a blade of glass and sorrow. A city crumbling into bone.
Lyraen—before the fall—screaming as threads of light were ripped from her wings.
A hand, once gentle, striking her down.
A voice, velvet and cruel:
"You were the pattern's flaw."
Lyraen collapsed.
Ezran caught her before she hit the ground, his arm around her shoulders, eyes wild.
She was shaking, blood on her lips.
"She saw too much," he growled.
"No," the Seamstress said, unblinking. "She saw enough."
The Seamstress did not move. "Now you've touched it. The Fraying begins."
Above them, the loom shuddered.
And then it stopped spinning.
The Second Thread had been claimed.
And the Pattern would never be the same.
Far away, beyond forest and city and stone, a figure watched.
They sat in a chamber carved from glass and bone, surrounded by books that bled ink and shelves that whispered. The scholar's hands were ink-stained. Their eyes were veiled.
Before them hovered a map—stitched with silver threads and red runes.
One thread now burned brighter than the rest.
"She has touched it," the scholar murmured.
A flick of the wrist.
The thread on the map pulsed.
"And the Loom begins to fray."
They turned a page.
The last page.
And smiled.
From the edge of the forest, a new presence arrived.
The hooded stranger.
But now the hood was down.
And where their face should have been, there was a mask of flesh and silver thread — the same from the dream. Their voice echoed from within and beyond:
"She carries the Thread. He carries the wound. The Pattern cannot hold."
Ezran raised his blade, but it pulsed with indecision. It remembered something. Or someone.
Lyraen stepped forward, spindle still glowing in her hands.
"Then unmake the Pattern," she said.
The masked figure extended an arm, and the loom shuddered.
The Cradle had awakened.
And it wanted more than memory.
It wanted sacrifice.
The Cradle pulsed with hunger.
Thread sang through the air in unseen patterns, weaving itself into shapes that dissolved before the eye could hold them. The masked figure raised both hands, and the loom responded — not as a tool, but as a living thing waking from centuries of sleep.
Lyraen felt the Second Thread in her palms thrumming like a warning. The more she held it, the more she remembered things she had never lived: cities built of song, wings burned to ash, oaths made on dying stars.
Ezran's blade drooped slightly, not from fear, but confusion — like it no longer knew what to strike.
The masked weaver spoke, voice like unraveling cloth.
"The First Thread was torn in arrogance.
The Second will fray in truth."
Then they pointed at Lyraen.
"You are the Echo of the Broken Pattern.
Will you stitch it whole, or pull it apart?"
Lyraen looked to Ezran. "If I use it… if I weave, what do I become?"
The Seamstress answered instead.
"What you were always meant to be.
Not a curse. Not a monster.
A Threadborn sovereign."
She held out her hand.
Behind her, the loom twisted — revealing not a tapestry, but a mirror of memory. In it, Lyraen saw her true fall: not just cast from the heavens, but cut from them, severed like an unwanted thread. And standing over her in that memory — the first Custodes, eyes full of pity and steel.
Ezran turned away.
"I was taught we were sealing darkness," he said softly. "But we were only hiding it."
Lyraen took a step forward — and placed the Second Thread on the loom.
The forest screamed again.
In Nytheralis, Saint Audric's bells rang without hands. The sound echoed hollowly across the city.
Blood ran from the cathedral's oculus again, but this time it did not stop.
In the War Room, Custodes scribes shouted over one another as maps curled and sigils flickered. One by one, the ancient protections woven into the city began undoing themselves. Glyphs reversed. Light dimmed. The Pattern itself began fraying at the seams.
Alaric stood at the edge of the chaos, eyes fixed on the sky — where cracks of silver-light split across invisible fault lines. "It's starting," he whispered. "She's touched it."
A younger Custodes officer rushed in, breathless. "The wards at Velin's Reach are collapsing. And—sir, reflections are moving on their own."
Alaric didn't flinch. "Summon every able Custodes. Lock the vaults. Seal the Sanctum. And for the love of the Veil—pray to whatever will still listen."
Far below, in the catacombs beneath the city, something began to climb toward the surface — not with limbs, but with memory.
The loom spun.
Not thread — but fates.
Images surged through the clearing in a cyclone of memory: a child in a ruined town holding a sigil-shard, an ancient vampire weeping in a mirror that no longer reflected him, a woman with raven-black eyes standing before a torn altar whispering a name that was not hers.
Ezran screamed as the blade in his hand shattered — not in metal, but in meaning. It no longer wanted to cut. It wanted to remember.
The masked figure turned.
"You understand now," they said. "To unravel the world is to reveal it."
And Lyraen — no longer angel, no longer monster — stepped forward into the heart of the loom.
"Then I will weave what was denied."
The Second Thread burned violet in her grasp.
The forest exploded with light and voice — not sound, but song.
A crack ran through the center of the city — a rending, as though the streets themselves had been stitched and now rebelled against their seams.
The sky turned violet. The stars disappeared — replaced by threads.
And in the heart of the Sanctum, the great Weave Sigil flared… and shattered.
The Pattern had been changed.
But no one yet knew what it had become.
...Visions flooded their minds like a dam breaking.
The sky inverted.
Trees wept blood-ink. Stone crumbled into script. Lyraen stumbled back, but her hands refused to let go of the spindle. It had bound to her—its threads lacing into her scars, her veins, her self.
Ezran tried to reach her, but the Weave snapped taut between them. Threads unfurled like a web, suspending her in midair, her eyes wide with unspoken understanding. The Seamstress did not move. She merely watched—part priestess, part executioner—as the Second Thread wove.
And what it wove was truth.
A battlefield not of this world, soaked in unlight and sorrow. Angels—winged and radiant—falling like meteors. Vampires not born, but forged in betrayal and divine fire. The First Thread, ripped asunder by hands that swore to protect it.
The Custodes—Ezran's ancestors—were not just guardians of the Pattern.
They were its breakers.
And Lyraen... she was never meant to Fall alone. There had been others. A chorus. One by one unmade, their threads lost to time.
But hers had endured—rewoven, hidden, Threadborn.
The spindle screamed through her blood. Her knees hit the ground.
Ezran caught her as the threads finally slackened. She looked up, breath shallow, and met his gaze.
"I saw it," she rasped. "The war before memory. The lie that became the world."
Ezran's voice cracked. "Then what are we standing in?"
She turned toward the Cradle. The loom still thrummed, waiting.
"A ruin," she said. "And a beginning."
The Seamstress stepped forward, her void-eyes unreadable. "The Second Thread has chosen. But choice is not absolution. Others will come—drawn to the echo. And not all carry memory with mercy."
The Seamstress extended it toward them. "The Second Thread is not bound. Not yet. But it has begun to unravel — and once it does, nothing stays woven."
Ezran stepped forward. "What happens if we take it?"
The Seamstress did not smile. Her stitched face was incapable of softness. "You will carry the weight of its choosing. The pattern it remembers. The ruin it was meant to mend."
Lyraen's eyes locked onto the spindle. It thrummed in her bones, a song she almost recognized. Her scars pulsed.
"And if we don't?" she asked.
The Seamstress turned, motioned to the loom. Threads moved on their own — twisting into scenes half-formed: cities burning, skies cracking, a river of blood running uphill.
"Then the Weave frays. The Pattern breaks. And all that was bound becomes wild again."
Ezran's fingers brushed the hilt of his blade. "And the Custodes?"
The Seamstress looked at him then — truly looked. Threads flickered in her gaze like dying stars.
"Your order sealed the first rupture. But you never understood what it cost. You only inherited the silence."
Lyraen stepped closer to the loom, heart pounding. "I saw the Boneweaver. She said the Loom drinks memory. What happens when it drinks mine?"
The Seamstress offered no comfort. "You were woven from unmaking, child. If the Loom drinks your memory, it may not return it whole. Or it may remember for you."
The Seamstress watched as the Loom dimmed.
"It has begun," she said. "May the Pattern have mercy."
She turned to leave, vanishing into the roots as if she had always been part of them.
Silence fell.
Ezran turned to Lyraen. "We can walk away. Delay it. Find another path."
She didn't move. "There isn't another. This was always the thread we followed."
She reached out — fingertips grazing the spindle.
And the Loom screamed.
Reality fractured.
They stood nowhere — and everywhere. Floating among threads that stretched into eternity, each glowing with a different shade of fate. Visions assailed them: Lyraen as she once was, wings outspread, falling through a sky on fire. Ezran, burying a brother who bore the same brand upon his chest. The Seamstress whispering names into the bones of unborn worlds.
One thread pulsed violet-red — the Second Thread. It writhed. Seeking. Choosing.
It wrapped around Lyraen's hand.
And she remembered.
Not just her own life — but hundreds. Thousands. Fragments of every soul who had touched the Weave before her. Every unmaking. Every lie stitched into the Pattern.
She gasped. And the Loom stilled.
Ezran caught her as she collapsed.
Her voice came, ragged. "It's… choosing me."
He held her close, trembling. "Then I choose you too."
Above, the sky trembled again. Somewhere in Nytheralis, Saint Audric's spire bled once more. The city felt it.
So did the stranger in the archive, their hand tightening around a third spindle—its thread black as the void between stars.
So did the Boneweaver, watching from beyond the Pattern's edge.
And so did the darkness that was not yet named.
Ezran helped Lyraen to her feet. Her hands were still glowing. The Thread still pulsed inside her.
"We go back?" he asked, though he already knew.
She shook her head. "We go forward. To where the Pattern fractures."
He nodded, and together, they walked into the heart of the loom's shadow.
In the sky above the Cradle, a single spiral of silver light unfurled — and broke.
Far away, in the darkened heart of Nytheralis, the masked figure stepped from shadow to shadow — the violet thread now gone from their hand.
They whispered a single word.
"Fray."