The mist swallowed their footsteps as Rafael and his companions followed the violet-blue thread deeper into the unknown. The Weftway was gone, and in its place stretched a narrow path suspended in fog, the air thick with the scent of distant storms and old ink.
The thread beneath their feet thrummed with every step Rafael took, singing in quiet harmony. Occasionally, the mist would part just enough to reveal silhouettes—maybe ruins, maybe watchers—but they vanished before anyone could speak.
"This is too quiet," Stanley muttered, adjusting the strap of his pack. "I liked the harp-floor better. At least that made sense."
"Nothing about this path will make sense," Calyx replied, her eyes glowing faintly as she scanned the haze. "Not until we reach its memory-point."
"Memory-point?" Rafael asked.
Lira nodded. "A convergence. Where a thread's purpose is revealed. Until then, we're walking blind."
*That was encouraging," Rafael said.
The path narrowed again, winding like the curve of a question mark, then widened abruptly. The fog parted to reveal a platform—woven from the same luminous threads, but darkened and frayed around the edges.
It floated in an ocean of mist, tethered to nothing but the thread they'd followed. In the center stood a loom, vast and ancient. Its beams were carved from fossilized bone, and its threads shimmered like bottled stars, woven in impossible angles that hurt the eye.
A figure stood at the loom. Not the Loomkeeper from before, but another. Taller. Wrapped in midnight blue cloth, draped like a starless sky. Where the Loomkeeper had worn a mask, this one wore nothing. Its face was a swirl of mirrors, each reflecting a different sky, some storming, others frozen mid-lightning.
"I am the Loomshadow," it said without moving its mouth. "And this is the memory you chose."
Rafael stepped forward, hesitant. "I didn't choose anything. I just followed the thread."
The Loomshadow tilted its head in a motion that felt more like ritual than curiosity. "All following is choosing. All choosing is echoing."
Calyx reached out to stop Rafael, her fingers brushing his shoulder. "Wait—"
Too late. The threads surged, reaching like vines and wrapping around Rafael. He didn't struggle. There was no time to.
His vision collapsed.
He stood in a ruined field.
Ash drifted through the air. Burning echoes lay in the dirt—flickers of people repeating their final moments, over and over. Laughter. Screams. A lullaby.
Each sound played in discordant loops, overlapping until it became unbearable. The sky was torn, stitched together with red lightning, and the ground was cracked like a shattered mirror.
At the center of the devastation was a child, kneeling over a shattered instrument. A recorder.
"Echo?" Rafael whispered.
The child looked up—and he saw his own face. Younger. Eyes wide with confusion, grief, and a growing fire.
"This is where he was born," said a voice beside him.
The older Rafael from the Weftway.
He hadn't seen him arrive, but there he was again, standing just beyond the child, watching the scene with hollow eyes.
"You left me here," the child said, though it wasn't clear to which Rafael he spoke.
"I didn't mean to," the older one whispered. "I just... wanted to skip the pain. But it grew in the dark."
The child stood, recorder crumbling to dust in his hands. "Skipping pain isn't healing. It's forgetting. And I never forgot."
The Loomshadow's voice returned, distant and overlapping like broken echoes. "All shadows are truths left untended. All unchosen paths fester."
The field twisted.
It became a courtroom.
Rafael stood on trial. Figures from a hundred memories lined the benches: Calyx weeping, Lira bleeding, Stanley furious. His father. A woman he didn't recognize—but her eyes matched his.
"You were given the thread," they said as one. "And you wove ruin."
Then the courtroom burned.
Rafael screamed.
He snapped back into his body, gasping. The loom flared, burning blue, then black. The path ahead trembled, threads fraying.
Calyx grabbed his arm. "We have to go. Now."
Lira slashed a line through the mist with her blade, and a new path opened—narrower, raw, unfinished, quivering like a wound.
They ran.
The platform collapsed behind them.
But the Loomshadow did not pursue. Its voice lingered, stitched into the fog. "You cannot outrun what you've abandoned."
As they moved, Rafael could feel the thread on his chest tighten. The pendant pulsed like a second heartbeat. A new awareness bloomed behind his eyes: every step he took now affected not just himself, but every Rafael who had ever been—or might be.
And some of them wanted him to fail.
The path bent downward, spiraling like a thread being pulled too tight. The mist thinned, replaced by glowing runes etched into stone, humming with old intent. They emerged into a cavern that pulsed with light—not threadlight, but something older. Dark gold. Alive.
Cracked runes lined the walls. And in the center of the chamber stood a pedestal.
On it sat a map.
But not of a world.
Of timelines.
Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Tangled together like spiderwebs in collapse. Some glowed. Others flickered. A few bled light that screamed silently.
Some one Rafael couldn't remember her face and name, once said that nothing could read the Map of All Ifs. That even the Uncore feared its secrets.
But Rafael reached for it anyway.
The moment his fingers touched it, he screamed.
Every timeline shivered.
And the cavern vanished.
He was falling again.
But this time, the thread sang a different song.
***