The sky over Veyruun had torn in two.
Not like storm clouds. Not like war.
More like parchment, rent by a hand too great to perceive.
The split showed nothing—merely darkness, black and endless, streaked with gold filaments. Yet from it arose a noise.
Not a cry. Not speech.
A beat. Like something below the world had breathed for the first time in centuries.
And I could hear it speak one word.
"Return."
The shard in my hand thrummed in synchrony.
I gazed at Luro. His wounds hadn't closed. He was scarcely awake, lips blue, skin etched with time-burns from the Reminder's assault.
"You can't accompany me," I said.
He nodded feebly.
"I know."
I shook myself down under the rift in the sky.
And I allowed the shard to draw me back.
---
The world unraveled.
Not like teleportation.
This wasn't space.
This was story.
I was being unhooked from cause and effect, pulled out of order, plummeting through moments that hadn't occurred yet—and some that would never.
I caught glimpses of:
—A silent war across a glass sea
—A child constructing a Loom with bloody fingers
—A one-winged woman with no face, smiling at me as if she knew how I would die
Then things slowed.
And I landed.
---
The first thing I sensed was wrongness.
My Loop wasn't numbered. It wasn't the others'. It wasn't that I couldn't see time flowing around me.
It coiled.
Mountains suspended sideways. Trees dripped upward. The sky was a cracked mirror that shook every few seconds, revealing alternate versions of me strolling alternate roads.
I was outside the Sequence.
A Loop erased..not failed.
Buried.
"The Loop Before Zero."
The words were not spoken by a voice, but by the shard in my palm.
It was talking now. In images and memories and pieces of feeling.
I moved ahead. The ground was composed of broken story..ghosts of cities that never existed, spires that leaned into clouds resembling regret.
In front, I saw it:
A tower of obsidian, as tall as the sky.
Draped in strings of light and bone.
At its foot stood a figure.
Shrouded. Cowled. Still.
Waiting.
---
I drew near.
It didn't say anything at first. Just shifted its head, and I felt myself drawn into a vision:
Me, a child, looking at a Loom that wasn't yet broken
Luro, dying alone in a blue grass field
Kaelis, her memory erased, and choosing it
Then the figure addressed me.
"You bear a shard. That means the world still resists what's coming."
"What is coming?" I replied.
It raised a hand.
Shook me back out into the sky...splitting not once, but again and again, creating fractures in causality.
"Something that feeds on broken purpose.
The Loops were meant to slow it.
But you've lived too long.
And now it knows your name."
A pause.
"You are its anchor, Kevin. Not its enemy."
The monolith at the figure's back cracked. Light seeped through.
"Enter. Face what you were before the Loops started.
Or die repeating them forever."
---
I breathed in.
I stepped into the light.
And for the first time since this all began—
I saw who I used to be.
---