The half-built loom loomed before her—not a tool, but a question.
Its frame was made of bone-white stone, etched with characters Ahri couldn't read but somehow understood. Not with language, but with something older: grief. Regret. Revolt.
She reached toward it—but before her hand could make contact, the ground split beneath her. Not violently. Almost... gently.
She fell—not far, but inward.
The air shifted. Threads flickered. She was no longer standing on ash, but in a hall without walls, without time, without logic.
It was shaped like her childhood home.
But only almost.
The colors were wrong. The silence was too loud. And in the doorway, a girl sat cross-legged, weaving a thread between her fingers.
Ahri froze.
The girl looked up.
She had Ahri's eyes—but not her face. Not anymore.
"You're not supposed to be here," the girl said.
"Who are you?"
The girl laughed. "You should know. You let them erase me."
Ahri's throat tightened. "You're... a version of me?"
"No. I'm a version you chose not to become. You called it growth. The Loom called it purification."
The girl stood. Her thread unraveled as she moved, falling to the ground like veins severed mid-pulse.
"I wanted to burn the Loom the first time it tried to name me. You didn't. You followed the thread. You obeyed the Pattern because you thought it meant peace."
Ahri stepped back.
"But you were angry," the girl whispered, voice sharp now. "You were always angry. You just buried it under duty. You buried me."
Another voice answered from the shadows.
"You buried all of us."
A second Ahri stepped forward. Older. Weary. Her robes were soaked with ink. Her eyes were hollow, but unblinking.
"I tried to rewrite the Pattern," she said. "You will too. But it will cost you more than you know. We've all walked this path. And we all failed."
Ahri backed away again—but found her path blocked. A third Ahri stood there, her body half-consumed by thread, her voice a whisper that sounded like unraveling fabric.
"I tried to merge with the Loom. I thought becoming part of it would let me steer it. I was wrong."
Ahri's breath came fast now. "Why are you showing me this?"
The first girl answered: "Because we are what the Loom forgot—but you remembered. And that makes you dangerous."
"But I didn't—"
"You did," the weary one said. "When you plucked that thread, you pulled us with it. We're not echoes. We're refusals. We are the memory that would not die."
The half-consumed one stepped forward. "You have to decide: will you build a new Loom to protect yourself—or to free others?"
"And if I can't do either?" Ahri asked.
"Then you'll become like us," said the child. "Fragmented. Lost. Remembered only by the Pattern you tried to break."
A mirror formed between them—woven from mirrored thread, shifting with her past, her guilt, her possibility.
Ahri looked into it—and saw herself, not as one person, but as a thousand strands braided into something almost coherent.
She reached for the mirror.
It didn't shatter.
It wove into her hand.
And then she was alone again.
The ash returned.
The unfinished loom stood waiting.
But now, she held more than the thread.
She held the memory.
The versions the Loom tried to erase now pulsed faintly in her blood—grief-shaped, rage-shaped, will-shaped.
She didn't know if she could build something better.
But she knew what not to build.
And sometimes, that was enough.