They returned in silence.
Not out of fear or doubt, but respect.
The plunge into the under space—the story before the story—had not broken them. It had remade them without unraveling. Put new threads alongside the old ones. No one bore scars. But all bore memories.
The Fork felt it too.
As they climbed up from Rootbelow, the paths that used to twist and turn in the same old patterns began to shift.
The roads no longer repeated themselves—they changed, curling into new and unfamiliar shapes, as if the world itself was learning to move forward with them.
Places which were always familiar felt tipped slightly in tone—like existence itself striving to remember the shapes of itself it had misplaced in forgetting to be.
It was not a reboot.
It was evolution.
And the Fork had chosen to keep it all.
They had reached the southeastern edge of Threadfall, a place where the Mirrorthread no longer rushed like a river but spread thinly across the bare stone.
