The Archive burned.
Not with fire, but with unraveling—light fraying into colorless strands, walls dissolving into unmapped possibility. Threads that had once been stilled by time now danced and whipped like storm winds, freed from the symmetry that had caged them.
Ahri and Sol sprinted through the collapsing corridors, ducking beneath falling frames of thread and dodging bursts of glowing sigils that shattered like glass.
"The scroll—!" Sol shouted over the chaos. "It's still active!"
Ahri clutched the last scrap of her mother's scroll, the words on it bleeding into the golden thread on her wrist. It felt like holding a living storm, yet she couldn't let go.
They burst through the final veil of memory-light and collapsed onto stone.
Behind them, the Archive of the Unnamed crumbled into the Hollowed dark.
For a long while, Ahri lay on her back, staring at the flickering sky above—if it could be called a sky. The Hollowed Realm had no sun or stars, only echoes of them. And now even those were dimming.
Sol knelt beside her. "You forced the Judicator's hand."
"I didn't mean to," she said, voice hoarse. "But I think it would've erased me if I hadn't."
He didn't deny it.
"You bought time," he said. "But now you've pulled the Loom's full attention. The Other Eye will open again. Next time, it won't come as a voice behind a mask."
Ahri looked down at her wrist.
The golden thread now pulsed with faint white threads interwoven—like new veins.
"What is this?" she asked.
Sol studied it. "Memory-stitch. Fragments from the archive. They've taken root in you. You're more than a threadseer now, Ahri."
He hesitated.
"You're becoming something… else."
They moved quietly through the Hollowed streets, returning to the Weftborn sanctum Jin had helped restore. When they entered, Ahri half expected everyone to look at her differently—but they didn't.
Jin just offered a soft smile and warm tea.
The Elder, pale but composed, stood with his hands behind his back.
"You've seen it," he said.
Ahri nodded. "The Loom's Other Eye. The Judicator."
"And the archive?"
"Gone. But not lost. It remembers—inside me now."
He breathed slowly. "Then it has begun."
That night, Ahri sat outside beneath the shimmer of not-stars.
The fox's voice was quiet again, just a thread on the wind.
But something else stirred.
A faint tug in her chest.
She followed it to the western edge of the sanctum, where a crumbling wall opened into an overgrown path. Vines of silvery thread coated the stone, and in the distance… she saw it.
A door.
Tall, ancient, and cracked—but alive.
Its surface rippled, reflecting her not as she was, but as she had been: a frightened girl outside Gyeongbokgung Palace, the first time she'd seen the threads.
And below that reflection, a name etched in fading ink.
Seo Nari.
Her mother.
The door remembered.
Ahri stepped closer.
The golden thread vibrated.
And the door whispered—not in a voice, but in recognition.
It opened.
A pulse of starlight spilled out. Inside, not darkness—memory. Not just hers, but countless others.
Footsteps echoed in the hall beyond.
And from the threshold, a familiar voice murmured:
"Ahri?"
She turned sharply, heart pounding.
A silhouette stood there—hooded, cloaked in gold-thread shadow.
Eyes glowing faintly violet.
"I've waited so long to meet you."