Seventeen Years Later
Coastal Territory – Edge of the Northern Divide
The village of Trensil was not on any map. A crumbling cluster of wood and salt-stained roofs clinging to the cliffs above a gray sea. The people were quiet. Honest. Forgotten.
And the boy born without a thread had grown into a young man the villagers called Ash—because he arrived with no name, and left no marks.
He was a quiet one. Never smiled. Rarely spoke. Helped the fishermen in silence. Kept to himself.
But strange things followed him.
Crops near him grew in dead soil. Dying men sometimes gasped once and lived a day longer when he passed. He had no shadow in the moonlight, but animals never feared him.
The village priest, Father Helwain, had tried once to baptize him.
The holy water boiled in his hands.
Ash didn't flinch.
---
The Stranger's Arrival
It was a gray morning when the stranger came to Trensil. Hooded, limping, wrapped in sea-soaked rags.
He walked straight to the cliffside, where Ash was mending a net.
"Seventeen years," the man croaked, voice broken from salt and smoke. "That's how long it took for the weave to notice."
Ash glanced up, eyes like quiet coals.
The man removed his hood.
Callen.
Older. Scarred. Hollow-eyed.
"I don't know if you remember," he said. "Or if you even can. But I know who you were."
Ash didn't speak.
Callen dropped to one knee, coughing blood into the stone.
"They erased you. The Churches. The Orders. The threadcutters. But I kept looking. Because I saw what you did. I felt it. The world shifted when you vanished."
A pause. The wind picked up.
Callen smiled, teeth red with blood.
"You thought you broke the cycle. You didn't. You just buried it."
Ash blinked once.
And the wind stopped.
Literally—midair, the gulls froze. The waves froze.
Even the sound of the sea cut off.
Callen's breath caught.
Ash stood.
His voice came like still thunder.
"I chose silence."
Callen looked up. "Then choose again."
He held out a book.
No title. No cover.
Just thread. Twisting and coiled, pulsing faintly.
Ash touched it.
And the world resumed.
---
That Night
The book opened only for him.
Inside were no spells. No names. No masks.
Only a single sentence, scrawled in jagged handwriting:
"To choose is to begin the weave again."
Ash stood by the firelight, staring at the sea.
Behind him, the village slept.
In front of him, the world waited.
He reached into the flame and pulled a coal barehanded.
It did not burn him.
He whispered a word no one had spoken in seventeen years.
"Aldwyn."
The wind answered.
And the threads began to stir.
---
Meanwhile – Deep Beneath the Obsidian Citadel
Three thrones, long-empty, groaned under unseen weight.
The masks had returned to their altars.
Gold.
Bone.
Obsidian.
And one by one…
They cracked.
The Forbidden Churches stirred.
The dead did not rise.
But they turned.
Because fate—long dormant—was waking up.
And the boy with no thread…
was no longer a myth.
He was the beginning of something worse.
A man who could choose without consequence.
A soul unburdened by fate.
A silence that remembered everything.
Part Three: The Weave Reborn
---
Obsidian Citadel — Throne Hall of the Forsaken Thread
A storm of thought crackled through the black stone, deeper than time and more ancient than stars.
Three thrones. Empty.
But not for long.
The masks—gold, bone, and obsidian—lay shattered on their pedestals, leaking not blood, but memory. The essence of what was and what must not be.
From the jagged shards rose figures—not men, not gods. Not again.
But reflections.
Warped echoes of Aldwyn from countless timelines. Some were kings. Others monsters. One was a child screaming in a burning garden. Another was a creature of ash and wire and music.
They did not speak.
They didn't need to.
They were gathering.
Because the Weave was no longer broken.
It was rewriting itself around a new axis.
---
Trensil — Two Days Later
Ash sat on the edge of the cliff with the thread-book open in his lap.
The pages had begun to write themselves.
Names appeared—burning into the parchment one letter at a time:
> Marla Trein
Captain Rhys Elden
Callen Vasht
Torren Vale
Serynth
Some were alive. Some were long dead. Some had never been born.
He turned to the next page.
It was blank… until his own name etched itself into the bottom.
But not Ash.
Not Aldwyn.
A third name.
> Nullgrave.
He closed the book. Slowly.
"I didn't choose that."
Callen's voice came from behind him, weak from another coughing fit. "No. But it's what the Weave's calling you now."
Ash turned.
"I thought I ended this. Burned the cycle."
"You burned your thread," Callen rasped. "But not the Loom itself."
He pointed to the sky.
And for the first time in a thousand years, it could be seen:
The Loom.
Vast and distant, stretched like a scar across the stars—a celestial engine, weaving souls, destinies, lifelines.
It had always been there.
But now it bled.
And something moved along it. Slowly. Carefully.
Searching.
---
Somewhere in the Eastern Wastes
A small girl with golden eyes drew shapes in the dirt. Around her, twelve paladins of the White Flame Order lay dead—swords snapped, faces frozen in terror.
The girl giggled.
"I found him," she said to no one.
The shadows behind her shifted.
A voice like melting glass replied, "Then the Silence has truly returned."
She stood, barefoot, and began walking west.
---
Nullgrave's Dream — That Night
He stood once again in the Mirror Room.
But now it was whole.
No chains.
No mask.
No prisoner.
Only a single, looming figure in the distance—too tall, too thin, its face made of dripping threads, constantly being woven and unwoven.
Nullgrave walked toward it.
The figure spoke without moving.
"You broke your fate. You chose silence. But you never chose your role."
"Now the Loom names you."
"Will you accept what comes?"
Nullgrave paused.
"I won't be a god," he said. "And I won't be a monster."
The figure leaned closer.
>"Then be the scissors."
---
The Next Morning — Trensil Burns
They came from the south—riders cloaked in white, wearing cracked porcelain masks. Servants of the Loom. Weavers of Fate. The Threadbound.
They weren't here to kill Ash.
They were here to weave him back in.
But when they found the village, Ash was already gone.
Only a burning thread was left behind, etched in the ground:
"I am not yours. I am not theirs. I am the cut between."
-Nullgrave
---
Final Scene – Deep Underground
Marla Trein stood before a hidden mirror of black ice, wrapped in ceremonial armor she hadn't worn in twenty years.
The Council had reconvened.
The silence between fate and chaos had ended.
And the one who had unmade destiny now walked again.
She drew a blade made of threadsteel, its edge humming with unborn lives.
"They think he's their weapon," she whispered.
"They forget—"
She smiled, blood dripping from the corners of her mouth.
"He's the one who chooses where the blade falls."
Part Four: The Cut Between Worlds
---
The Gray Path – A Place Between Places
Nullgrave walked through a road that should not exist.
It stretched endlessly in both directions, paved with nothing but silence and flickers of memory—bits of lives that were, might have been, or refused to be.
The sky above him was ink.
The ground below him pulsed like a dying heart.
At the edge of his vision, threads snapped and rewove themselves, trying to trap him. To fold him back into the story. But they couldn't catch his pace.
Because Nullgrave wasn't walking forward.
He was walking away.
From fate.
From purpose.
From the version of himself the world demanded.
---
Elsewhere — Tower of Binding Stars
A woman cloaked in shifting silk raised her hand over a pool of black water. She had no eyes, only a golden loom-wheel turning slowly where her face should be.
The Last Weaver.
She watched as Nullgrave passed into the liminal corridor—the Cut Between Worlds.
"This is not how the Loom was meant to break," she said.
Beside her stood a boy in cracked armor, his fingers twitching erratically.
"He's not breaking it," the boy whispered, a smile twitching at his lips. "He's threading a new pattern."
The Loom-Woman paused, wheels clicking.
And for the first time in a thousand years, the Weave asked a question:
> "What is he making?"
The boy grinned. "That's the best part. He doesn't know."
---
Nullgrave's Trail — Across the Threadscars
Every step Nullgrave took left a mark in reality—a threadscar. A place where the pattern of fate had been rejected.
They spread behind him like roots, invisible to most, but obvious to those who once governed destiny.
Marla Trein followed them silently.
She wasn't the same woman who had once assigned him to Cell 3.
The badge she wore now wasn't a serpent curled into a circle.
It was a needle piercing an eye.
The Eye of the Threadless.
A new order, formed in whispers, founded by those who remembered what he had done.
They didn't worship him.
They feared him.
Because Nullgrave wasn't a prophecy fulfilled.
He was a variable.
And now he was heading to a place that had been sealed since the first war of gods:
> The Spindle Tomb.
---
Nightfall — Campfire at the Edge of the Tomb
Callen sat across from Nullgrave, coughing into his sleeve. He looked older now—aged years in days. The threads in his soul had begun to fray.
"You know what's inside that tomb?" Callen asked, half-whisper.
Nullgrave didn't answer.
Callen nodded anyway.
"Good. Because I don't. But I know this: you weren't the first to cut fate."
Nullgrave looked up.
"You were the first to do it without hating the world for it. That's what scares them."
Nullgrave reached into the fire. Pulled free a single ember.
He held it. Whispered.
> "Choose."
And the ember became a key of thread and bone.
He stood.
"The world will ask me to be a god."
He turned to the Tomb.
"But I'd rather be the one who tells the gods no."
---
Deep Within the Spindle Tomb
Darkness didn't live here.
It rested.
And as the door opened, the Weave itself paused.
Three figures waited inside.
Not gods.
Not ghosts.
The First Scissors.
The ones who had cut the Loom long ago. Exiled. Forgotten.
They spoke together, one voice from three mouths.
> "You have no place here, Nullgrave."
He stepped forward.
"I make my own."
He raised the key.
The tomb cracked open.
And the Original Thread—the first strand that bound all realities—floated in the void beyond.
It pulsed once.
> Waiting.
For a hand steady enough…
To cut it.
---
Final Moment — A Choice
Nullgrave stood at the edge of everything.
Behind him: the Weave, the Loom, the old gods, the false orders.
Ahead of him: silence. Blankness. The true unknown.
He lifted the Scissor-Key.
But he didn't swing.
He offered it.
To you.
Yes—you, reader.
Because this story wasn't about Nullgrave in the end.
It was about the thread you follow.
The thread you ignore.
The mask you wear.
And whether, if handed the blade…
You'd cut the world too.