The threads frayed further.
Needlepoint Hollow was under siege.
Not from outside.
From within.
The Loom's tremors intensified, echoing like a maddened heartbeat through the ruined foundation stones. Rafael stood over a shattered glyphstone, blood dripping from his left hand. His fingers trembled—not from pain, but from the resonance that wouldn't stop.
Every breath he took sent ripples through the threadlines surrounding him. The Loom was no longer responding—it was retaliating.
"Another breach opened in the southern basin," Dasha called out, racing back toward him with her cloak tattered and one arm slick with ink-like corruption. "This one isn't closing."
"Because someone's holding it open," Beatrice spat. She limped behind Dasha, her sword glowing a dull violet, chipped from too many deflections. "Echo wants us surrounded."
"They're trying to cleave us away from the Threadline entirely," Rafael muttered. "Sever the last link we have to the Loom's unbroken strata."
Beatrice knelt beside him and began redrawing a counterglyph in the dirt, her movements mechanical from exhaustion. "Then we need to cut our way back to the Anchor. Or we die here."
"Death would be too kind," Dasha said grimly. "The Uncore doesn't kill quickly."
Rafael stared toward the jagged horizon. The corrupted spire at the Hollow's heart pulsed like a beacon. It had changed shape since Echo's emergence—as though it now mimicked the very mask the Echo wore.
He whispered, "He's turning the Hollow into another Loom-node. One bent entirely to the Uncore."
A crash behind them.
They spun—swords raised, spells summoned.
It wasn't threadspawn.
It was Stanley.
And he wasn't alone.
Calyx, breathless and still wearing her frayed cloak, stumbled in behind him. Her arms wrapped around a barely-conscious Lira, who looked half-drenched in a mixture of soot and stardust.
"You made it," Rafael breathed.
Stanley offered only a curt nod before lowering his massive hammer. "You didn't leave much of a welcome."
"Where have you been?" Beatrice asked, not unkindly.
"Trapped," Calyx said. "Somewhere between. A fault-line between Loom and shadow. We think Echo planned it. Splitting us from you during the last resonance quake."
Lira finally opened one eye. "We weren't just trapped. We were studied."
Rafael's heart sank. "By who?"
"By something older than the Echo," she said. "Something that watches him."
That chilled the group more than the Hollow's wind.
Stanley stepped forward, wiping grime from his forehead with the back of his wrist. "The thing we met in that liminal space—it didn't speak. It didn't move like us. It was woven, piece by piece, from collapsed memories. It knew our names, Rafael."
Calyx nodded. "It showed us what might have been. Threads of lives we never lived. Futures where you never touched the Loom. Where Dasha never took the witch's oath. Where I—" she faltered, glancing at Lira. "Where none of us mattered."
"They're trying to unravel our intent," Lira whispered. "Not just our bodies. Our purpose."
Rafael exhaled shakily. "Echo's not alone. He's being guided."
The realization added weight to every step, every decision.
Rafael turned to them, urgency rising. "How did you find us?"
Calyx exchanged a glance with Stanley. "We followed the resonance bleed. Once Lira stabilized, we could feel the Hollow calling. Or maybe warning."
"We almost didn't make it," Stanley added. "The veil between the threads was thicker than anything I've seen. It twisted our path, showed us lies. Calyx kept us tethered."
Lira smiled faintly. "She sang the old names of the Loom. That's what brought us back."
"We'll have to talk later," Rafael said. "Right now, we need to reseal the Hollow. If Echo twists this place into a permanent breach point, the Loom won't survive."
"And neither will we," Dasha added.
The group moved quickly now, instinct stitching their movements together despite exhaustion. Beatrice led the glyph-repair teams while Calyx amplified the anchors with resonance stabilizers. Lira moved like a shade, whispering counter-chants into the cracked air, her voice mending gaps no spell could see.
Stanley stood guard at the Hollow's western reach, repelling the twisted remnants of threadspawn still crawling from rifts.
"I can feel it," he growled to no one in particular. "The ground's bleeding."
It was. Thin filaments of corrupted threadline had begun to sprout like roots through the soil. They pulsed with malignant rhythm, snaking toward the Loom's fragments embedded in the Hollow.
"Cut them off," Rafael barked. "Now!"
He and Dasha moved together—threads blazing from their palms as they severed the corrupt growths. A backlash of noise followed, like the Hollow itself screamed in agony.
Then—
A low, rhythmic sound began to rise from the Hollow's spire.
It was singing.
But not human.
Not threadborn.
It was the sound of the Loom weeping.
The spire cracked open at its peak. Something stepped through—a shape wrapped in veils of memory and shadow, its face shifting through a dozen familiar visages: Rafael's childhood mentor, Dasha's first love, Stanley's long-dead brother.
"No," Rafael whispered. "That's impossible."
"They're not real," Lira warned. "They're illusions. Woven from what it stole from us."
Still, they hesitated.
The figure raised a hand and spoke in Echo's voice.
"You still don't understand. The Loom was never meant to bind. Only to reveal."
And then the false faces wept threadblood, collapsing into a storm of whispering cloth and claws.
The battle began anew.
And as Needlepoint Hollow shuddered beneath their feet, as truth and lies twisted into one another, the end whispered its name.
But the threads?
They were not done fighting.
Not yet.
***