In the distant realm of Olyndros, beyond the reach of any charted stars, there floated a husk.
It was not a planet, nor a moon but something in between, as if a world had once dreamed of life and failed. Blackened stone spiraled around its hollow core like the ribs of a long dead titan. No light touched this place. No wind stirred its dust.
And at its center, encased in a cocoon of forgotten divinity, It slept.
They had named it many things over the ages.
The Starless Child. The Pale Answer. The First Dreamer.
But in truth, none knew what It was only that when the Spiral was unbound and fate reknitted itself, It twitched.
And dreaming, It listened.
Back in Veyrhalen…
The grove darkened, subtly, as if the sun had paused in its course.
Zeirion looked up.
Aralya felt it too. A shift not in the winds, but in the weave beneath the world.
"The Spiral's unmaking woke more than we knew," she said, her tone cautious but sharp.
Zeirion nodded. "Something heard it. Something… older."
Aralya walked to the edge of the grove, her hand outstretched toward the void beyond the trees. Threads of spectral silk gathered at her palm, revealing a vision fractured stars, and at their center, the husk of Olyndros.
Zeirion stepped closer, and for a moment, he saw It.
No face. No form. Just presence. A pressure like gravity made of thought.
And it was turning toward him.
Elsewhere, in the Citadel of Threads
High atop the Peaks of Myrlhast, the Weavers convened for the first time in a millennium. Clad in robes made of moments and stitched from paradox, they read the skies like parchment.
Mistress Inwyth, eldest among them, stood before the Loom of Days. Her silver eyes widened as she watched the threads fray and knot.
"A new strand moves," she whispered. "No origin. No direction. Only intent."
One of the younger Weavers trembled. "Is it the Sovereign?"
"No," Inwyth replied. "It is what watched the Sovereign. And now, it awakens."
They all bowed their heads, for even Weavers feared what had no thread.
Zeirion's Study, Nightfall
The ancient maps unfurled before him shimmered with lines of shifting energy. Most led nowhere. But one, jagged and burning silver, led outward past the edge of all known cosmology.
"To Olyndros," Zeirion murmured. "A name I erased."
"You remember it?" Aralya asked, seated across from him.
"I buried it," he replied. "Before even the Throne Wars began. It was never supposed to wake."
She rose and laid her hand upon his.
"Then we go."
He looked at her his anchor, his equal, the one soul who had stood at his side when empires bled dry.
"We may not return," he said.
"We said that when we entered the Spiral," she replied, a smile softening her gaze. "And yet here we are."
Zeirion rose.
Across the stars, something vast and thoughtless stirred.
And once again, the Sovereign would rise not to conquer, not to rule…
…but to face what even gods had chosen to forget.