The morning after the well-binding, Kael's body was raw, his fingers shaking from the effort. A second thread, barely stabilized, curled beneath the skin of his forearm like an inked serpent. His vision still pulsed with afterimages—fractured glimpses of futures that never solidified. He had to move. The forest called, but not for gathering. Not this time. He needed a corpse. Kael knew where to find one. In his twenty-third cycle, a traveling merchant had fallen victim to a wolf attack just beyond the river path. The man had died screaming, teeth gnashing through cloth and bone. His caravan never arrived, and the village mourned quietly—he wasn't one of theirs. But his body had remained, untouched, cloaked in silence and rotting under bramble shade. Kael followed the winding trail past the whispering birches until he saw it: a half-sunken cart and a sprawled human figure, limbs awkward in death's frozen choreography. The corpse had mostly decomposed—scavengers had done their work—but something deeper remained. Kael knelt, pulled free the merchant's torn satchel, and found what he truly sought. A shattered contract seal. Pathbound. The man had once carried a Thread—low rank, judging by the glyph fragments—but still connected. Still touched by the Loom. Kael laid his palm across the corpse's chest. "You failed," he murmured. "You died forgotten. Let that not be the end." The air thickened. His threads twitched. Kael whispered the Invocation of Hollow Remnants, a rite stolen from a necrosage he had dismembered in cycle seventeen. The body jerked. Black ichor bled from the mouth. But that wasn't the goal. Not reanimation. Kael felt it: a buried thread, severed and twitching beneath the ruin of the man's spirit. He didn't want the soul. He wanted the scar it left behind. The broken thread surged upward, desperate to be claimed. Kael bit his thumb and drew a circle in blood. "Hollow claims the forgotten. By will and thread, I bind." The corpse collapsed inward, and the thread shot into Kael's palm, fusing with the others. Three now. Three paths denied. Three possibilities reclaimed. Kael rose. He turned toward the east—toward the Loom Temple. Far beyond the mountains. Guarded by Keepers. A fortress of light and law. He smiled. Let them come. The Hollowbinder had begun to weave.
