The first stitch was breath.
Nima stood at the edge of the vault, the Threadneedle in her hand, golden thread drawn from the lantern's core spiraling around her like a living thing. Each movement of her hand reconnected fragments scattered through time.
She wasn't sewing cloth—she was stitching air, echo, memory.
And the world responded.
Where she moved, broken roots flowered.
Wounds that once festered with silence bled songs.
Even the Hollowed, who had dissolved in the valley above, returned briefly as whispers in the wind—no longer tethered by sorrow, but borne aloft by recognition.
"You've begun the Looming," Ashira whispered from within the thread.
"But beware. Every thread remembers its cut."
Nima's second stitch was truth.
She rewove the timeline of a child slain during the Silence Riots—gave the girl's name to a village that had long forgotten its founders. In that moment, the village awoke from its slumber, bells ringing for the first time in decades. Mourning turned to peace.
But the reweaving did not go unnoticed.
In Emberthrone, dissent was rising.
The Council of Embers fractured. Some saw Nima's act as sacrilege—an unraveling of carefully curated power. Others—especially the younger Keepers—began carrying unlit lanterns into the streets, lighting them in solidarity.
They called her the Needle of Dawn.
But one figure watched from the shadows—hooded, robed in indigo and black, eyes hidden behind silver glass.
"She stirs the old weave," he muttered.
"Then we must cut the new one before it holds."
His name had long been lost—intentionally erased.
But his followers called him The Severer.
Meanwhile, Nima stitched her third memory: her own.
She placed her mother's laugh in the wind, her father's whispered bedtime story in the rustle of leaves, her own childhood pain in the cracks of the old well by her village.
And with it, she felt her soul begin to change.
"You are becoming more thread than girl," Morya said, eyes glistening.
Nima smiled, though her skin shimmered now with strands of light.
"Then thread I must be. Until the story is whole."
But that night—beneath the burning stars—a rupture tore through the loom of reality.
Nima fell to her knees, gripping her chest. The thread jerked from her hands, pulled by something vast and unseen.
A scream echoed across the world—not hers—but of a thread that had been stitched wrong.
"They've undone one of your weavings," Ashira warned.
"A dark hand has pulled a knot and twisted it. One of your stitches now breathes vengeance."
Morya gasped.
"What did they change?"
Nima's voice broke as she answered:
"They rewove me."
In the flicker of a vision, Nima saw the Severer holding a mirror made not of glass, but of shards of memory. He was showing the people a different Nima—a tyrant, a false savior, a weaver of manipulation.
"Let them see her not as flame," he hissed, "but as firestorm."
Now, the world teetered.
Half believed she was their redeemer.
Half now feared she was the destroyer of balance.
And with every stitch she made, another came undone somewhere else.
The loom was bleeding. The needle trembled.
Ashira's voice rose once more:
"There is only one path now.
The Final Stitch. A reweaving so bold, it might shatter the loom—or bind it forever."
Nima looked to Morya.
"Would you still follow me… even if this thread leads to our end?"
Morya took her hand.
"I would follow you… even if we unravel together."