They came at twilight.
Silent. Shimmerless. Threadless.
Dozens of them.
Their faces were pale beneath the branches, eyes glassy, some trembling like children lost in a memory they couldn't escape. Others looked calm—too calm—like they had long since stopped feeling.
No footsteps. No rustling of leaves. Just presence.
And every single one of them stared at me.
"Is this what you wanted?" Kael muttered, one hand on the hilt of his blade.
"I didn't call them," I said.
But I didn't have to.
They had found me because I was the first of them to survive the break.
A girl stepped forward—maybe fifteen, maybe older—her Mark nothing but a faded scar on her collarbone.
She knelt.
And behind her, one by one, the others did too.
Riven shifted beside me. "They think you're their queen."
"No," I whispered. "They think I'm their hope."
I stepped forward.
"Why are you here?" I asked them, voice carrying through the hush like a thread being drawn through cloth.
The girl lifted her chin. "We heard the Pulse. We felt your thread—cut, but strong. And we followed."
"You want guidance?" I asked. "Or power?"
Another voice—this time from the shadows.
A boy, tall, wiry, with hollow cheeks and a burning gaze.
"We want freedom. From the Veil. From the Courts. From anchors that made us slaves."
I hesitated.
And they saw it.
The way my hands trembled. The way the thread-pool echo still shimmered beneath my skin.
"You've tasted it," he said. "The silence. The clarity. Don't lie."
He was right.
There was freedom in this state. Unwatched. Untethered. A voice that wasn't borrowed from the weave.
But there was something else too.
Loneliness.
And danger.
"I won't lead you into darkness," I told them. "But I'll show you how to walk without falling."
They stirred—hopeful, uncertain, desperate.
Kael stepped closer to me. "If you go down this path… there's no turning back. The Courts will hunt you. And the Veil might never let you back in."
I looked to Riven.
His eyes searched mine.
And slowly, he nodded. "Where you walk, I walk."
I took a breath.
Then I turned to them.
"Come," I said. "Not as a queen. Not as a god. As one of you."
And as they rose, a wind swept through the grove.
But it wasn't natural.
It was threadless wind.
Born from the breath of something ancient waking beneath us.
Something… that wasn't done with me yet.
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