The Loom's silence was not peace. It was the pause before a deeper wound.
Ahri, trembling from her sacrifice, felt the emptiness gnawing inside her. She knew she had lost something vital, but not what. Each thought frayed at the edges, as though her own mind had been poorly sewn.
Jin helped her to her feet, though his shadow trembled with unease. "It's not done," he muttered. His eyes were fixed on the Loom, which now pulsed erratically, like a heart too long bound that had torn itself in defiance.
And then it came.
A second rupture split across the weave—not near where Ahri had sewn, but far deeper, as if her act had forced the Loom to bleed in another place. This tear was not clean. It burned. Red light seeped out, scorching the golden strands.
"Why?" Ahri whispered, horrified.
The Voice in the Loom returned, but it was fractured, broken across registers. One stitch cannot heal the body that has already forgotten itself.
Ahri staggered back. "Then why demand the Needle at all?"
Because mercy and cruelty are the same thread, seen from different sides.
The tear widened, spilling threads like veins ripped open. Shapes emerged from it—not Hollowed, not yet, but things of thread and ash. They twitched, incomplete, as though sewn by a mad hand.
Jin stepped forward, blade in hand. His shadow rose like a wall. "Go," he said. "If you stay, it will take more from you."
But Ahri did not move. Her hand still remembered the Needle's grip, and her soul still bore the scar. She could not abandon this wound—not when she had already paid the price of one healing.
"No," she said, her voice breaking but firm. "If it bleeds twice, then I'll bleed twice."
Jin turned sharply to her. "And if there's nothing left of you to bleed?"
Ahri stared into the tear. Beyond the red light, she glimpsed something impossible: a pair of eyes staring back. Not Jin's. Not hers. But familiar, impossibly so—eyes she had seen once in the mirror of fractured selves.
Her own.
The second Ahri whispered from within the rupture: "Every stitch you make is another life unmade. Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself a thousand times to close a wound that cannot die?"
Ahri's heart thundered. She did not answer.
The Loom shuddered again, and the incomplete shapes lunged.