There was no light where Ahri landed.
Only a slow, silver snowfall of thread-ash, drifting across an endless plain of broken symbols and hollowed glyphs. The air was too still. Not dead—but paused. Waiting.
She rose to her feet slowly, one hand clutching the thread she'd torn from the Loom. It no longer glowed. It hung limp, like a regret.
Around her, the landscape sprawled in all directions—a forgotten afterthought of creation. Spires made from shattered runes jutted from the ground at strange angles. Loom fragments lay half-submerged in sand that wasn't sand, but time made visible.
This was not the Loom. Not anymore.
This was the space left behind when a pattern dies.
She walked.
With every step, the ground beneath her shifted, sometimes soft as thread, sometimes brittle like old bone. Faint echoes rose and fell—whispers caught in the folds of time. She passed a weave frozen mid-collapse, its threads tangled around nothing, still humming faintly with the memory of purpose.
The ash thickened. It clung to her clothes, her skin, her thoughts.
Then, from between two ruined spindles, a figure emerged.
Not looming. Not hidden.
Just... waiting.
An old woman, back bent with years that didn't belong to this world, sat on a throne of severed threads. Her eyes were covered by a blindfold stitched with names.
And yet she saw.
"You're late," the woman said.
Ahri hesitated. "You... know me?"
"No," the woman said. "But I've known all of you. Every Threadseer who's reached this place. You are the seventh. Or perhaps the first, depending on which pattern you believe."
Ahri stepped forward. "Where am I?"
The woman didn't answer right away. She gestured to the skies above, where threads flickered in and out of existence like stars trying to remember how to shine.
"This is the Pale Fringe. The Loom's breath—exhaled and forgotten. Where the failed patterns fall. Where the erased live on, without name, without form."
Ahri felt the weight of the silence pressing in again. "What do you mean, 'failed patterns'?"
"The Loom does not only preserve. It edits," the woman whispered. "Every question you asked that wasn't allowed. Every truth it couldn't reconcile. Every you that wasn't obedient."
She reached into her blindfold and pulled loose a name—it shimmered briefly in the air, then dissolved like mist.
"That name," the woman said, "was once yours. One version of you chose to burn the Loom itself. Another chose to become its mouth. Both were undone."
Ahri's stomach twisted. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you carry the choice again. The Loom dreams of you—still. You tore a thread, yes... but that act alone means nothing. The Loom will recover. It always does. Unless you make it remember the truths it tried to silence."
Ahri looked down at the thread in her hand. Her name. Her defiance.
"What must I do?"
The woman pointed behind her. A structure stood far off—half-formed, half-collapsing. A frame of a loom, glowing faintly with possibility.
"You must weave a counter-pattern."
Ahri's breath caught.
The woman's voice softened, almost tender. "But understand this: what you create will not be perfect. It will be incomplete. It will unravel. It will bleed. But it will be yours. And in that... it may be true."
Ahri turned toward the half-loom.
For the first time, the ash beneath her feet felt steady. Not welcoming, but willing.
And so she walked, thread in hand, toward the thing the Loom feared most:
A story it did not write.