The Sanctum was a cathedral of ruin. Survivors huddled in the shadow of shattered pillars, their eyes fixed on Lira. Her new arm a lattice of void-thread and captive starlight bound by the Eclipse sigil thrummed with low, gravitational pulses. Each pulse warped the air, bending light and stone.
Veya's cultists knelt, chanting. "Scar of Infinity, Unmaker of Gods."
Yara stood apart, arms crossed. "That arm is drawing things, Lira. Last night, three scouts vanished. Only their shadows remained—burned into the glass."
Lira flexed her cosmic fingers. The Weaver's voice slithered in her mind: You are a wound in reality. They will come to mend you. "Let them try."
Alex woke screaming. His hands scrabbled at his unmarked chest no Devourer's scar, no voidfire. Only pale skin and a terrifying emptiness. When he tried to stand, his legs buckled. Starlight shimmered under his skin, pooling in his veins like liquid mercury.
Lira found him retching behind a collapsed altar. "The void is gone," he gasped. "What did you put in me?"
"The only thing that could save you." Her cosmic arm glowed as she touched his shoulder. "A fragment of pure starlight. The Weaver's opposite."
Alex recoiled. "It burns."
He is a beacon now, the Weaver'. voice chuckled in Lira's skull. A lantern for the Tapestry.
They came at twilight: crystalline shards raining from the sky. Not drones or creators seeds. Each embedded itself in the Dead Plains, sprouting structures of impossible geometry. One pierced the Sanctum's courtyard, unfolding into a spiraling tower of mirrored angles. The air around it sang, sharp enough to split eardrums.
Jarek led the rebels' charge. "Destroy it!"
Their hammers shattered on contact. Kinetic blasts ricocheted, vaporizing two rebels. The tower absorbed the energy, growing taller.
Lira stepped forward. Her cosmic arm rose.
She pulled reality around the tower, crumpling space like paper.
The tower screamed, fracturing.
Lira's human eye hemorrhaged black tears. The Weaver's voice swelled: You tear the Tapestry. They will notice.
Inside the shattered tower,reflections lied. Alex saw himself whole voidfire dancing in his palms. Lira saw her mother smiling, untouched by war. Yara saw Mara alive, nodding approval.
"Illusions," Yara snarled, shattering a mirror with her dagger.
A reflection grabbed her wrist—Yara's own face, sneering. "Coward. You let them all die." The mirror-Yara yanked, pulling her into the glass.
Lira's cosmic arm shattered the wall. The reflections howled, retreating. Yara fell free, her forearm scraped raw by phantom fingers.
"Focus!" Lira ordered. Her voice echoed with unnatural harmonics. "The core is below."
The core pulsed a knot of woven light, humming with the same song as Lira's arm.
Alex staggered, veins blazing. "It's calling the starlight in me!"
Void-thread lashed from Lira's arm, binding the knot. I know you, she whispered not her voice, but the Weaver's. You are Thread 7-Alpha. Report.
The knot shivered. Images flooded their minds:
A trillion threads weaving infinite realities.
The Weaver, just one severed strand.
The Tapestry itself a living entity devouring dying universes.
Earth, marked Reality Scar: Quarantine Imminent.
Containment protocol activated, the knot hissed.
The tower collapsed inward
She anchored reality with her cosmic arm, holding the collapsing tower in a bubble of warped spacetime.
Void-thread whipped, slicing crystalline shards.
Her human skin cracked. Starlight bled from fissures. The Weaver's voice became her only thought: Tear. Consume. Dominate.
He plunged his hands into the core-knot.
The starlight in his veins surged out, overloading it. His hands charred to bone. Screams tore from his throat as the light ate him.
Yara dragged Alex back as the knot exploded. The tower dissolved.
The Tapestry's Gaze
Silence. Then—pressure.
The sky folded like origami. A single, colossal eye opened—not of flesh, but of woven galaxies. It fixed on Lira's cosmic arm.
SCAR DETECTED.
The voice wasn't the Weaver's. It was final. Inevitable.
Lira raised her arm. "Come and take it."
CONTAINMENT ENGAGED.
The eye vanished. The pressure lifted.
But on the horizon, the Dead Plains shimmered as if reality itself was fraying.
Alex's hands were ruins. Yara bandaged them, her own arms trembling. "The starlight… it's not healing him."
Lira watched her cosmic arm pulse. The Eclipse sigil flickered, dimmer. "It preserved his life. It didn't promise to spare him pain."
Veya approached, eyes. "The Tapestry fears you! We must strike its heart!"
"With what?" Jarek snapped. "Prayers? We're insects to that thing!"
Lira turned. Her human eye was almost swallowed by void. "We use what they want." She pointed at Alex. "The starlight in him is a key. And I know where it fits."
Alex met her gaze. "Where?"
"Where the Tapestry weaves," she said. "The heart of the multiverse."
That night, Alex dreamt of threads.
He floated in an ocean of light, each strand a universe. The Tapestry surrounded him not evil, not kind. Hungry.
The starlight is a tracer, it whispered with Lira's stolen voice. You lead her to us. We await our morsel.
He woke to his hands screaming. The bandages glowed, soaked through with liquid starlight. On the wall beside his pallet, words burned themselves into stone:
BRING THE SCAR.
WE WILL UNWEAVE HER.