The song of the new Loom pulsed through the bones of the earth, subtle and resonant — not a command, but a question. It no longer dictated. It invited.
But Kael knew: to begin anew, some echoes still needed to be buried.
At the edge of the Riftlands, past the remnants of fractured constellations and crumbled divine statues, there lay a place untouched by time yet scarred by every cycle — The Weaver's Grave. No one had ever seen it. No one had ever dared. Because it wasn't just a location. It was a memory buried by the Loom itself.
"Are you certain?" Lin asked, her voice barely above the hush of twilight winds.
Kael nodded. "If the old Weaver lies there… I need to understand what came before me."
Aelira hovered overhead, her wings flickering like shards of thunder. "If this is a grave, something was killed. You planning to mourn it? Or finish it off?"
Kael didn't answer.
The path twisted between illusions — visions of Kael's past lives, threads fraying with regrets, the faces of those he had failed. But he walked on. The Root in his chest burned steadily, severing illusion from memory.
At last, they reached it.
Not a tomb. Not a crypt.
But a loom made of bones, colossal and rusted with time's silence. It spun nothing — only groaned with ancient guilt. Around it, echoes drifted like whispers: the thoughts of gods long extinguished, each looping over the same mistake.
He stepped closer. The loom reacted. Threads ghosted into being — spectral and broken.
One of them took shape. A withered figure, robed in threadbare silver, its face hidden behind a veil of woven regret.
"I was the First Weaver," it said. "And the last slave."
Kael felt the pressure in his mind, a tidal pull of design, intention, and inevitability.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because we believed control would bring harmony," the figure rasped. "But harmony without choice is only stagnation."
The Weaver raised a hand. A vision unfurled — the birth of the original Loom, its golden beauty, and the moment it chose to overwrite will with order.
"I tried to stop it. I failed. So I wove myself into its silence. And now you stand here, unbound, rewriting the song."
Kael walked forward, stopping just short of the figure.
"I'm not here to judge you," he said. "But your mistake can't lie buried. It must be remembered."
With a flick of the Root, Kael unraveled the skeletal loom. Not destroyed — unspun. Each bone-thread dissolved into light, carried into the new Loom above like truth finally heard.
The First Weaver nodded, smile sad but peaceful. "Then I am truly free."
And with that, the figure faded, not as a ghost, but as one finally granted rest.
The Loom pulsed in acknowledgment.
Kael turned to Lin and Aelira. "We're not erasing history. We're learning from it."
And behind him, where the grave once stood, a tree of light took root — the first branch of a future unchained.