The door creaked open, but there was no hand to push it. Rafael stepped through the threshold, his breath caught like a lie in his throat. Behind him, the hallway unraveled into curling smoke and frayed threads.
This world—this memory—was too fluid, too conditional. It didn't obey reality. It obeyed emotion. Someone suddenly appear and said that he's late, and in the exact sudden, she's gone. Kind of.
He now stood on a battlefield locked in eternal twilight. Ash fell like slow snow, thick enough to choke. The sky overhead was a dull bruise, lit occasionally by flashes of silent lightning.
Shattered buildings jutted from the earth like broken teeth, and the wind stank of ozone and rust. The entire landscape felt heavy, as if grief itself had laid down and died here.
The ground trembled beneath his boots. Somewhere in the distance, a metallic groan echoed, low and mournful, like a god dying in its sleep.
Rafael whispered, "This isn't just a memory. This is a scar."
Each step forward was a negotiation with resistance, the air thick like molasses. Memories clung to his clothes like cobwebs. He moved through them anyway. Then he saw her (again)—Dasha Woodbanks—standing alone in a scorched garden surrounded by twisted iron fencing.
Her back was turned, her stance rigid. A rifle, broken down the barrel, hung in her grasp like a relic.
She didn't turn around. "I know you're not real."
Rafael blinked. "I'm real enough, tho."
"That's what the ghosts say, too."
Her voice was dry and exhausted. He moved closer, careful not to startle her.
"Beatrice sent me. Or someone with that kind of name," he said. "She said you remember too much."
Dasha shifted slightly, just enough to look over her shoulder. Her eyes burned like dying coals—low heat, long pain.
Her face was streaked with soot and dried blood. Her tactical gear was torn and hanging by straps, the armor on one shoulder carved with ancient sigils glowing faintly.
"Beatrice," she said, her voice cracking. "She's dead."
Rafael hesitated. "Maybe. Maybe not. Things are—complicated, right?"
Dasha lifted the rifle, not aiming it at him, but testing its weight, as if checking to see if it remembered how to kill.
"This place? It's my last stand. It loops. Again and again. I fall. I fight. I forget. But each time, something changes. It's… wrong. I was supposed to die here. I did die here. So why am I still feeling it?"
'Sounds familiar.' Rafael thought.
"Because someone tampered with the thread," Rafael said. "Maybe you. Maybe the Uncore. Even I didn't know who was he, or she, or it. I'm sure that they were the one weaving your situation."
Her eyes narrowed. "The Uncore. I hunted them once. Parasites. Thread-weavers who feed on potential. They infect memory, rewrite identity. They turned me inside out."
Rafael glanced at the blackened garden. Names were etched into the soil in ash and char. Not gravestones—just impressions. Grief without closure.
"This place," he said, "it isn't just a memory. It's feeding someone. Or something."
Dasha stiffened. "It's here again."
The wind dropped. The ash stopped falling. Time paused like a held breath.
Then came the giggle.
High-pitched. Shattered glass. A thousand voices speaking through a single child's laugh. The shadows twisted and collapsed inward, forming something that should not have shape.
The Loomshadow.
It moved like oil on ice, like a smear across dimensions. No face. Just long, grasping hands—dozens of them—each digit flickering like static. In its chest was a knotted core of fraying threads, shrieking with potential futures denied.
Rafael stepped between Dasha and the thing. "We fight this. Together."
She looked at him, eyes flaring. "You sure you're not part of it?"
"If I am, then help me break it. If I'm not, then let's make this the last time you replay this hell."
A sharp grin broke across her face. "Fine. One last 'last stand.'"
The world shifted with her words. The ground solidified, the ash paused. Her rifle sparked and sealed its crack in a burst of violet fire. Rafael's arms glowed with thread-light, the patterns from the Loom etched into his skin.
The Loomshadow shrieked.
Dasha charged, silent and furious.
Rafael followed, drawing power from the truth he had woven—'I am Rafael. I didn't choose the thread, but I will choose what happens next.'
As they collided with the thing, the battlefield shifted again. Time shuddered. The memory fought back.
But so did they.
---
After the clash, when the Loomshadow had scattered into nothing more than static and whispers, Rafael and Dasha stood amid the silence. The battlefield stilled, the twilight softening just slightly.
"You're not the same," she murmured. Something strucked her memory after that battle. "You've changed since... Saint Redra. Since before the threads unraveled."
Rafael turned his gaze toward the bruised sky. "Saint Redra? Wait, I think that word ring a bell," he furrowed. Something flowing inside his head, a memory he can't remember before. "You were there, weren't you?"
Her laugh was soft, bitter. "We both were. You were younger. You still had that ridiculous jacket with the phoenix patch. You kept offering to fix my radio even though you had no idea how it worked."
"Back then, I liked the sound of your voice," he admitted. "Well, maybe it's the same this time around. I don't really know. Every single thing I encountered in this loop seems to shatter my mind," he sighed. "It feels like I'm Fever-dreaming."
That made her pause.
Dasha sighed and sank to one knee, brushing ash off a half-buried satchel. "That day. When the sky cracked. You ran into the collapsing tower to save a kid. You got caught in the blast. I thought you died."
"I thought you did."
She looked up at him. "But now we're here, stitched back into something not-quite-real (or related), not-quite-dead (nor alive)."
"It's enough," he said. "Enough to fix it."
Dasha stood again, more steady this time. "Those time around, I think I never stopped wondering why you disappeared. Why you never looked for me."
"I couldn't," Rafael said. "Something… rewrote my thread. My memories. I didn't even remember my name for years. But now I do. And I remember you. Kind of."
A long pause stretched between them.
Then Dasha stepped forward and pressed her forehead lightly against his. "Don't lose me again, Rafe."
"I won't," he whispered. "I hope I won't."
In the distance, the garden began to regrow. Color returned in scattered patches. The sigils on Dasha's armor brightened. The memory was healing.
But in its place, new shadows stirred far beyond the horizon—silent watchers, waiting for a thread to fray.
Rafael looked back only once before the thread snapped and the memory faded into dawn.
***