Her lips, parched and cracked like scorched earth, parted at last."Echo," she breathed, the name barely surviving the air. "Valke called me Echo. Said I'd… become mirror."Tears did not fall; they transfigured — hardened into glistening crystal droplets, slipping silently down her cheeks like shattered time.
My heart clenched, caught in invisible thorns."Echo, the hunger can sleep. Come. Come away."I unraveled the skein — threads of dawnlight, spun from promise and prayer.
The guards hesitated, instinct whispering warnings.Then shadow erupted. Ravan's silhouette tore from the void, disarmed one with bone-breaking grace, his glass pike crushed beneath ghost-strong fists.The second guard raised his weapon — too slow. Esmenet drove her ledger like a blade into his visor. Mirror cracked.Brina and Vael emerged from the mist, doorways forged in their wake.
Echo stared at the powder bowl as if it whispered, then turned to me."Thread… can it hush the noise?""Yes," Calia answered, voice a melody of ash and flame.She drew forth the phoenix vial, dripping fire-blood into the threads of dawn. They rose, not like ropes, but like vines — sentient and soft.They kissed Echo's wrists. She did not flinch.The bowl fell.Shattered.Something ancient whimpered.
The iron basin pulsed once. Then stillness.But above — the forest screamed.Fissures blazed like opened eyes; the pillars groaned, ice sheaths splitting with shrieks too sharp for mortal tongues.
"Now!" Calia cried. "The lullaby!"She thrust the spool into my palms.I hummed. A hymn older than the stars. Wove it into the threads.Ravan poured shadows into the song — a bass of tremors.Echo closed her eyes. From her lips, a breath… then soprano.The dawn thread soared, weaving itself across the cave like a sentient loom. It clung to broken stone, calmed the furious earth.Teal light softened the jagged edges.The ice… sealed again.
Silence returned.But it was no longer dead.It was alive — fragile as breath in winter.
Echo collapsed. I caught her.Her pulse was a whisper — faint, but steady.Mask fragments scattered on the stone, ringing like wind chimes in a crypt.One shard caught my eye.Its edge matched the sigil embedded at the mirror tree's root — Caelia's new mark.The Loom had known.
At dawn, we emerged.Echo slept, draped on Brina's shoulders like fallen dusk.Ravan carried the broken mask.It caught the light of a newborn star — blinking once.Welcome?The red echo was gone.
In the Academy's infirmary, Custodian Lys ran the resonance.Echo's neural lattice had entwined with the mirror's weave — separation would tear her mind apart.But the infusion threads held.She might heal.She might become a bridge — between flesh and reflection.
Esmenet watched in silence, then handed me a page."Proof. Root-iron trafficking. Rogue faction. This will exile Valke's sympathizers. If you allow, I'll take it to the Consortium."I nodded.Trust given, not owed.Lys sealed it with the Custodian mark.Esmenet left on a dawn-bound carriage.
That night, the amphitheater pulsed with echoes.Apprentices sang the hymn once used to calm the pillars.Echo, seated among them, found her line — perfect, haunting.
I sat beside Caelia's mirror.Whispered my thanks.She asked for no reward, only that her name burn brighter in bark.
Ravan joined me beneath the oculus — the sky's unblinking eye.The newborn star pulsed overhead, solitary and solemn."The forest sleeps," he said."For now," I answered. "But tonight, we gifted it a dream sweeter than hunger."
His hand found mine."Convocation in two days," he murmured. "After that… the waxen moon."I laced my fingers through his."One thread at a time."
But as the choir rose in sacred crescendo, I saw it:The Loom's shuttle, gliding across fate, weaving Echo's salvation — of glass, of dawnlight, of a love deeper than reflection.
And somewhere, far off,a red ember still smoldered.But tonight, the tapestry held.
Above, the newborn star blinked — two short, one long.Like breath.And I breathed back.
Readyfor the nextstitch.