The light was not warm.
It was white, humming, searing. It poured through Aurora's skin like memory and scraped against every bone she had ever broken. There was no time, only sensation—falling and not falling, suspended between the last lie and the next truth.
When she opened her eyes, the world had changed.
The forest was gone. The chapel, gone. Even the Oracle's chamber, shattered into smoke and nothing. She now stood beneath a sky that did not end, in a place with no horizon.
Endless silk threads stretched in every direction like a spider's web cast over stars. They pulsed faintly—some golden, others gray, a few twitching like nerves. Where they met, they tangled around loom-towers, and on each stood a figure cloaked in night-blue robes, weaving stories into the living fabric of reality.
Aurora's feet rested on a glass path suspended in nothing. Beneath her, rivers of moments flowed—scenes from countless lives, unfolding and vanishing like candle flames. She saw glimpses of Red running through a blizzard with a wolf's shadow behind her. She saw Cinderella burying something glittering in a frozen lake. She saw herself, endlessly sleeping.
"This is the Weavers' Realm."
The voice wasn't spoken aloud, yet it rang clear inside her. It came from a woman who had not been there a moment before—an ageless figure with silver eyes and lips stitched by fine golden thread. Her robe bore symbols in mirrored ink that reversed themselves every few seconds.
"Where… what is this place?" Aurora asked, her voice cracking against the silence.
The woman's stitched lips never moved, yet her words formed again.
"The Court of Threads. Where stories are born. Where curses begin."
Aurora stumbled back. The glass beneath her held. Her thoughts swirled with fragments from the Oracle, from the mirrors, from her cursed childhood.
"I chose the shard," she whispered. "That means I'm not bound anymore."
*"You broke the surface," the Weaver replied. "But the roots run deeper than you know."
As she spoke, one of the massive threads nearby turned black. A shape moved through it—writhing, flickering between forms. Aurora could barely make it out, but it carried something familiar. A presence. A prince's eyes. A dream demon's whisper. The same chill she felt in her bones when she slept too long.
She remembered the Oracle's warning:
"Then beware the ones who wrote it first."
Aurora turned back to the Weaver. "Who wrote my curse?"
The woman pointed—toward the highest loom. A tower wrapped in chains, its weaver hidden in a tangle of blindfolds and veils.
"The First Threader. She wove the Cursed Line—stories born in sorrow, destined to repeat."
Aurora's fists clenched. "Why?"
The Weaver's voice was a soft wind now.
"Because sorrow binds tighter than joy. Curses outlive blessings. Pain... echoes."
A flash beneath her feet caught her attention—another memory flaring alive. It showed the moment she pricked her finger on the spindle. But this time, it was different.
She didn't fall asleep.
Instead, she turned, looked directly into the eyes of the one who had placed the spindle, and whispered something—a name.
"Elara," Aurora muttered.
And the scene vanished.
"Your memories are returning," said the Weaver.
"I was swapped with her," Aurora murmured, the pieces snapping into place. "She was the true heir. I was the shadow. But the curse grabbed the wrong girl."
The Weaver nodded once.
"Now that shadow walks free. And the light fears her."
In the distance, threads began to tremble. A bell tolled across the realm, vibrating through bone and blood.
"Your presence disturbs the weave."
"I want to tear it," Aurora said. "All of it. These curses. These lies."
The Weaver raised a hand. From the air, a needle made of obsidian appeared, its eye threaded with silver flame.
"Then take this."
Aurora hesitated.
"You would give me a weapon to destroy this place?"
The Weaver tilted her head.
"Weavers don't choose sides. But even we cannot bind a thread that no longer wishes to be spun."
Aurora took the needle. It pulsed in her hand, burning her palm but refusing to be dropped. It accepted her. Or judged her.
"What do I do now?"
"Find the First Threader. Cut the lie. But beware…"
The sky dimmed. A shadow passed over them like an eclipse.
"Every curse begins with love twisted."
The glass path lit up beneath her. A new path spiraled away from the Weavers' loom—downward, inward, into the heart of the Great Tangle, where stories were locked in cages and monsters fed on forgotten endings.
Aurora didn't look back.
She stepped forward.
And the realm followed her.