Above them, the sky unraveled.
Not with violence—but with sorrow.
Ahri had never seen the stars weep before, but now each thread that shimmered overhead fell gently, like tear-lined silk drifting from a torn veil. The shrine behind her was quiet, but the charm in her palm—the fox bell—rang faintly with every falling thread.
Sol stepped back into shadow. "It's begun."
"What has?" Ahri asked, her voice low.
"The Loom is measuring you," he said. "All those chosen by thread must one day pay the price of being remembered."
Ahri turned slowly. "I didn't ask to be chosen."
"No one ever does. But now you've touched the Forgotten Loom. You've seen what it's tried to bury. That makes you dangerous."
"To who?"
"To everyone who believes fate must stay fixed."
The ground trembled, and the shrine cracked.
From behind the altar, threadlight poured in—shifting like smoke, but bright as the moon. A form began to rise, cloaked in remnants of old weaves, face hidden behind a veil of knotted fate. Its voice was layered—child, mother, fox, and something else. Something older.
"The price is not death," the figure said."The price is becoming the story."
Ahri's grip on the bell tightened. "What does that mean?"
"You will never live for yourself again," the voice replied. "Only through memory. Through fate. Through others."
A second figure stepped forward, wearing the same veil. But this one bore a mark across their chest—Ahri's family crest, burned into thread.
"My mother," Ahri whispered.
But the figure shook its head.
"No longer. She gave her thread willingly. She became ink in the Loom."
"Then who am I?"
The chamber trembled again. The fox spirit's thread around her wrist burned with new intensity.
"You are the final thread woven by her hand," the first figure said. "Her last hope. Her last sin."
The shrine erupted in a chorus of memory.
Visions spun in circles around Ahri—her mother running through a collapsing temple, her father shouting her name as a thread was cut, Baek Hyun-tae kneeling over a fallen comrade, and Miran, watching it all from a mask of cold mercy.
And in the center of it all… the fox.
It stood, real at last, nine tails trailing stars, eyes unreadable. It said nothing.
But Ahri understood.
The fox had never been guiding her.
It had been bound to her—a thread sealed to her bloodline, waiting for someone who could carry both fate and fracture.
"I'm not just a weaver," Ahri said. "I'm the stitch left behind."
The figures nodded.
"And now you must choose," they said."Do you wish to continue the tapestry……or tear it free?"
Ahri looked to Sol, who stared at her not as a protector, but as a witness.
She stepped toward the altar.
The bell in her hand rang a final time.
"I'll finish what my mother started," Ahri whispered."But I'll weave it my way."
The shrine collapsed into a thousand threads of light, cascading upward.
And the Loom whispered a name that hadn't been spoken in generations.
Ahri Seo—Threadbearer of the Unwritten Pattern.