The vial touched her lips.
Not by her will—Kael guided her hand. A trembling sip. Barely enough to taste.
But that was all it took.
The world exhaled.
It wasn't loud. No roar. No lightning crack. Just a shift—like the click of a lock finally giving way, like the hinge of fate creaking open on rusted doors.
Sera gasped. Her back arched, fingers spasming as if lightning surged through her bones. The shard in Kael's hand pulsed violently, burning his palm with an otherworldly cold. He didn't let go.
Violet light coursed along the veins of her wrist, trailing up her arm, vanishing beneath her skin. Her breath hitched—once, twice—then steadied into something deeper. Stranger.
Then came the scream.
Not hers.
The air tore.
Kael turned just in time to see the first of them: Loomshards—wraithlike guardians of the balance—descending like moths born of stars and static. Their forms shimmered between real and imagined, more suggestion than substance. Cloaked in strands of light, their faces blank, empty except for burning slits where eyes might have been.
One landed inches from Kael. Its presence choked the air. Cold radiated from it, not of winter, but of negation—an erasure of warmth, of time, of meaning.
Sera's body convulsed again. The seventh thread—the forbidden one, the one Kael had always sworn never to bind—began to wrap around her like a noose of woven flame and shadow.
The Loom was responding.
And it was angry.
Kael rose between her and the Loomshard. He held the broken shard of the Loom like a dagger. "She chose."
The being said nothing. But the weight of its gaze was unbearable.
"She drank willingly," Kael said louder. "The weave was broken long before me."
Still nothing.
And then—
The Loomshard moved.
No weapon. No spell. Just a flicker.
Kael flew backward, his body skipping across the clearing like a thrown doll. He hit a tree with enough force to split bark, the shard flying from his hand and skittering into the dark.
Pain exploded across his ribs, his spine. He tried to rise, but the world spun.
He saw three of them now—three Loomshards circling Sera, threads winding around their limbs like puppets. Her body was lifted from the ground, limp but glowing, the seventh thread now fully integrated, pulsing with a terrible beauty.
They're going to take her.
No. Worse—they're going to unmake her.
Kael gritted his teeth, dragging himself forward. Every movement was pain. Every breath tasted like iron. He reached for the shard, but one of the Loomshards turned, lifted its arm, and time around him slowed—threads freezing midair, grass bent in mid-motion.
A trap.
A punishment.
He knew this punishment. In cycle twenty-three, he had tried to rewrite his own death by capturing an echo-thread. The Loom had answered then too.
But this time—he wasn't trying to cheat death.
He was trying to save someone else.
That had to count for something.
He roared, tearing himself free of the temporal snare with a surge of raw will. The act burned through his reserves—flesh blackening at the fingertips where he forced energy into form. His vision dimmed.
But he moved.
He found the shard, buried half an inch deep in dirt. It pulsed when he touched it—recognizing him, perhaps, or simply hungry.
Kael didn't hesitate.
He stabbed it into his own chest.
Pain. Agony. Understanding.
For a moment, he saw everything—the threads of every person in the village, in the world, stretching out into endless possibility. A spiderweb of causality and choice. A breathing tapestry. He saw his own: knotted, blackened, trimmed short.
He was never meant to live past nineteen.
He laughed bitterly.
Then he reached out—not physically, but through the shard, through the bond of threads—and grasped Sera's fate.
It fought him.
Seven weaves, tangled and sealed.
He gritted his teeth and forced them to obey.
Bind.
One thread burned away—sacrifice. Another screamed—a future lover, lost. A third curled in like a snake devouring itself—her guilt, her shame. One by one, he untangled them, not to destroy but to remake.
He did not sever them.
He rewrote them.
Sera gasped again. Her eyes opened—clear, vivid, awake.
The Loomshards stopped.
They looked at Kael—not as a threat, but with something approaching caution.
Then, one by one, they began to unravel. Threads unwinding into stardust, fading into nothingness.
Kael fell.
Not unconscious. Not broken.
But emptied.
He lay in the grass, chest heaving, skin pale and slick with blood and sweat.
Sera crawled toward him. Her movements shaky, uncertain. Her eyes wide with fear—and something else.
"You…" she whispered. "You changed everything."
He chuckled weakly. "You're welcome."
A pause.
"Are they gone?" she asked.
"For now," Kael said. "But not forever."
She touched his chest—where the shard had pierced. The wound was already closing. Not healing, exactly. More like the thread of his life refused to break.
"You stole from the Loom," she whispered.
"I've stolen from worse."
She looked at him. "What are you, Kael?"
He wanted to say something clever. Something terrifying. Something grand.
Instead, he said the truth.
"I'm what's left when destiny runs out."
She didn't smile. She didn't cry.
She just sat there, beside him, as the night began to unfreeze.
The stars above shifted—no longer cracked, no longer watching.
Just… quiet.
But Kael knew this wasn't victory.
It was just the first step into a new war.
The Loom was watching now.
And it knew his name