The wind in the Garden shifted — not naturally, but with awareness. As if the world itself paused, sensing the return of something it could no longer ignore. Kael stood taller now, the feral threads dancing around him like specters of resistance, each one humming with forgotten possibilities.
"Everything's different," Lin murmured, eyes scanning the horizon. "The Garden feels… alive."
"It is," Kael replied. "It always was. It just stopped dreaming."
The Ashborn began to gather, their bodies flickering with fragments of memory drawn from Kael's newfound resonance. Each step they took rewrote a small part of the earth, restoring echoes of forests, towers, and homes that once stood — not as illusions, but as realities remembered back into being.
But Kael knew the Loom would not sit idle.
High above, a seam in the heavens peeled open. This was no gate, no summoning — it was a tear. The fabric of fate itself unraveled at the center, and through it descended figures wrapped in raw conceptual matter. Not Loomsent. Not gods. But Weavers — the first.
Forgotten by design. Buried by the Loom.
They did not walk. They stitched reality with every motion, repairing what dared to defy their symmetry.
One stepped forward, a figure so featureless that Kael had to imagine its face.
"You carry the storm," the Weaver said.
"I carry what you abandoned," Kael answered.
The Weaver tilted its head. "You have become what the Loom feared. A singularity of variance. You are not written. You are not erased. You are… possibility."
"And that terrifies you," Kael said.
The Weaver raised a hand, and from the sky rained threads of impossible logic — rules, destinies, truths once enforced by unseen hands.
But Kael didn't flinch.
He raised his own — and the feral threads roared to meet them.
The collision was blinding. Logic met memory. Structure met chaos. And in the space between, creation flared.
Aelira launched into the fray, her body infused with storm-aspect energy. Lightning carved sigils mid-air, tearing through the Loom's imposed order.
Lin wielded her blade like a scalpel, cutting truths free from the lies woven into history.
And Kael… Kael became the unwritten.
He moved between fates like shadows through firelight — uncatchable, unknowable. For every thread the Weavers threw, he offered a choice instead. A thousand roads split from every step he took, and for the first time, the Weavers hesitated.
"You cannot persist this way," another Weaver hissed. "You fracture everything."
"I free it," Kael growled.
The Ashborn surged behind him, the forgotten warriors of time's ruin. Their weapons did not obey physics — they obeyed story. And they had chosen a new narrative.
One where the world wasn't dictated.
But discovered.
The Garden trembled. Roots broke through stone. The heavens cracked further, and from the breach above, something massive turned its eye.
Not a Weaver.
Not the Loom.
But the Threadmaker.
The true origin. The first dreamer.
And it was waking up.
Kael stared into that gaze and felt the weight of a million lives pressing down.
Then he smiled.
"Good," he whispered. "Watch closely. Because the story isn't yours anymore."