Far to the south of Needlepoint Hollow, past the cracked bones of cities swallowed by threadrot, three figures moved like ghosts through the ash-laden wilds.
Stanley, Calyx, and Lira had lost track of time—days melted into nights, and the sky no longer kept a faithful rhythm.
Since parting from Rafael's group after the breach at Embercoil Bridge, they had followed a splintering path of signals, anomalies, and faint echoes of the Loom's deeper magic.
Their separation hadn't been by choice.
It had begun in chaos—when the breach ruptured the bridge, the Loom twisted wildly, creating overlapping folds of space. One moment, they were together. The next, each of them had fallen through a different tear in reality.
Stanley had landed in the rusted husk of a drowned city, where threadbeasts hunted by smell and sorrow. The buildings wept salt. Memories flitted in the mist like moths. For a week, he navigated the flooded corridors of memory, watching fragments of Rafael's past dance like specters along the submerged ceilings.
Calyx woke inside a clockwork sanctuary that had no door, only riddles. She had survived by solving loops of logic left behind by extinct artificers, her days marked by the slow rotation of brass heavens above her cell.
Each night, she whispered Rafael's name to the ceiling, hoping it would reach the thread.
Lira had been cast into a forest where the trees whispered her name using her dead sister's voice. It was a place that fed on grief, shaping illusions from the heart's rot.
She almost stayed, lulled by the memory of safety. But when the trees tried to mimic Rafael's voice and failed, she realized she had to leave.
And somehow, against every odd, they had found each other again.
Stanley was the first to emerge, driven by fury and loyalty, his sword battered but steady. He had tracked Calyx by the flare of her Anchor device, finding her standing atop a collapsing spire surrounded by ticking guardians. He carried her out just before the tower folded in on itself.
Lira found them two weeks later—by then gaunt and fevered from psychic storms—but still holding the tattered flag of their Order. The reunion had been quiet. No words. Just a shared silence, an embrace, and the firelit understanding that they were stronger together.
Before the fall at Embercoil, they had stood with Rafael atop of something similar to the cliffs, watching the sky split open as the Uncore's tendrils slithered through the breach.
Calyx had warned that the bridge would collapse under the weight of the spatial anomalies, but Rafael had insisted they push forward. Then the fold snapped. Screams. Light. And nothing.
They hadn't seen Rafael since.
They didn't speak often even now. There was too much to say, and not enough that words could fix.
Lira paused at the edge of a threadscar—a ravine that shimmered with unstable timelines and screaming light. "It's louder today," she whispered, brushing her fingers against the raw air. "Can you hear it?"
Stanley frowned. He could. The Loom screamed here. The kind of scream that spoke of memories unraveling, people becoming ghosts of themselves, or worse—memories becoming people. "Something's changing. We're closer to it."
"Or it's coming to us," Calyx muttered. The young tinker's silver-threaded hair was pulled back beneath her scavenged helm. Her hands were black with soot and grease from constantly repairing their broken gear. Her device, the Pulse Anchor, blinked erratically with violet warnings.
Their last known location with Rafael had been the western cliffs of Embercoil, where the Uncore's influence had torn open a breach in the sky itself. During the chaos, Lira had been separated in a collapse, and Stanley and Calyx were forced to pull back while Rafael's group pushed onward. But they hadn't stopped searching.
The three had become their own thread—frayed but tenacious. Some memories from loops ago flewed right to their heads.
That night, they found shelter inside the ruin of a collapsed Watcher's Eye. The enormous sentry construct lay half-buried in the sand, its single glass lens cracked like a blind eye. Inside, the walls hummed faintly with remnant data.
"I've been analyzing the pulse patterns," Calyx said while adjusting the Pulse Anchor. "Something big hit the network three days ago. A force spike near the Weftwild basin, threaded with Rafael's signature."
"Threadfire?" Lira asked.
Calyx nodded. "And something else. A null-sequence wrapped in adaptive feedback. Whatever happened to him there—it changed him."
Stanley clenched his fists. "He's still alive, right?"
"I'm assuming yes," Lira said. "But for how long?"
They all stared at the Anchor's trembling light.
"We need to reach Needlepoint Hollow," Stanley decided. "Before the splinters catch him."
"But we're days away," Calyx warned. "And the scarfields between here and there are getting worse."
"We've crossed worse," Lira said. "We're not leaving him behind."
She didn't say the rest out loud—that Rafael had once (probably in loop 8 or 9), pulled her out of a collapsing threadtrap in the Lower Veins, or that Calyx had followed him out of exile when everyone else called him cursed (loop 7). Or that Stanley had once sworn on his father's broken blade that he'd never let another commander die alone.
The next morning, they stepped back into the threadscar, their gear humming, hearts resolute. The Loom twisted above, screaming louder.
But so were they.
They moved fast, avoiding the worst of the reality shears and gravity wells. In a moment of eerie calm, they found a collapsed caravan along the scar's edge.
Among the ruins, Calyx scavenged a shard of preserved map data. It showed an uncollapsed channel—a forgotten tunnel of the Threadsingers that led, if the patterns held, straight toward Needlepoint Hollow.
"We can use it," she said breathlessly. "It's a risk, but it cuts the time in half."
"We'll take it," Stanley replied without hesitation.
The tunnel was half-buried and veined with dormant sigils. As they entered, ancient machines stirred—recognizing something in them. Perhaps remnants of Rafael's mark. The machines let them pass.
Underground, as the faint glow of the Pulse Anchor led them forward, the three finally spoke again—of regrets, of futures imagined, of the cost of chasing a man caught between unraveling fates.
Calyx recalled the first time Rafael showed her how to disarm a thread trap—how he trusted her trembling hands when no one else had. Stanley remembered the way Rafael had stood firm against the Council, defending a broken cause with words that shook the Hall. Lira, who once thought herself forgotten, still wore the scarf Rafael had given her during the starving winter of the Red Blight.
And above them, far ahead, Rafael stirred in his sleep—his dreams haunted by names he hadn't spoken in days.
Stanley. Calyx. Lira.
They were coming.
And the Loom would bend, or break, for them to reach him.
***