The Pale Fringe thinned as Ahri walked.
The ash no longer clung to her—now it receded, like dust parting for something it remembered.
Ahead, a staircase of thread descended into shadow, coiled like a spiral undone mid-turn. The air grew heavier. Not thick, but weighted—the kind of air that held memory too long and couldn't breathe it out.
She knew this place without knowing.
The Martyrs' Spiral.
Not a place the Loom had built—but a place it could not erase.
The steps beneath her feet hummed as she descended. Each one whispered a name. Not spoken, but felt. Some warm. Some jagged. All gone.
She passed murals stitched into the dark—images woven in pain: a Threadseer kneeling, thread burning from her heart. Another casting a needle into the Loom's eye. Another, hands raised not in surrender, but in sacrifice.
At the base of the spiral, she found them.
Not bodies.
Marks.
As if the very air had scarred.
Silhouettes burned into the threads, outlines of those who had tried to remake fate—and failed.
She knelt beside one.
Its shape was small. Young. The thread around it was frayed, as if it had tried to unweave the world with its bare hands.
This one believed names could be unstitched, the Loom's hidden voice said.She tried to unravel all language. To return the world to silence, where truth could not be distorted.
"What happened?"
She became part of the silence.
Ahri stood, heart pounding. "Will that happen to me?"
Only if you forget why you speak.
She walked on.
Her own thread began to tremble. Not from fear. From recognition. It remembered this place as if she'd already been here—perhaps in another self, another life that had reached this far and stopped.
The Spiral narrowed. At its center stood a platform, and upon it, a single thread blazed like a star trapped in the moment of death.
It sang.
Not a melody—but a testament.
A thread that once belonged to Baek Hyun-tae.
Ahri reached for it.
The light seared her fingers. Her skin blistered, her breath caught—but she held on. And in that pain, she saw.
Hyun-tae, standing at the edge of his own Spiral. Alone. Afraid. But not silent.
He had spoken to the Loom. Not in words—but in a gesture: an outstretched hand, not to defy, but to offer a better shape to the weave. One built on trust, not control.
And the Loom had rejected it.
Burned it.
Ahri fell to her knees, gripping the thread tighter.
Tears blurred her vision—not from pain, but from understanding.
This was not just rebellion. This was inheritance. She was not the first.
But she might be the last.
Do you see why the Pattern resists change? the Loom's voice asked.Because every thread added distorts what was once whole. But distortion is the cost of breathing.
"I don't want to replace the Loom," she whispered.
"I want to give it something it never had."
Which is?
Ahri stood, even as her hands trembled, her blood singing in her veins.
"Permission to doubt."
The Spiral pulsed once.
Behind her, the threads of the fallen shimmered—not in mourning, but in witness.
And as Ahri turned back toward the surface, the path behind her did not close.
It remained open.
As if it, too, wanted to remember.