The Echoing Plain was unlike any place Nima had ever seen.
It wasn't land. It wasn't sky.
It was memory, stretched and stilled.
She and Morya stepped into it like stepping into breathless fog—except the fog remembered everything. Every footprint, every whisper, every forgotten name.
"This is where all unspoken truths go," Ashira murmured from the thread.
"To echo. To wait. To become."
Nima's thread unraveled slightly at her side, the Threadneedle pulsing with a soft hum. Her body had changed. Her skin shimmered like woven light. Her voice, when she spoke, carried more than sound—it carried intention.
"If the Severer has tainted the loom," she said, "then this is where I must correct it."
But not all things welcomed correction.
The echoes began to rise, not in harmony—but in opposition.
They formed around her—visages of her doubts, past choices, and alternate selves:
The Nima who had refused the lantern.
The Nima who burned Emberthrone.
The Nima who let Morya die.
They formed a circle. And they spoke as one:
"You think truth alone can save them?
But truth has teeth. It devours."
Morya tried to step forward, but was stopped by a wall of woven breath.
"She must face this alone," Ashira whispered.
Nima stepped into the center. The Final Stitch pulsed in her palm.
"I don't deny you," she said to the echoes.
"You are me. But I… am more than what I feared.
I am not perfect. But I remember. I feel. I choose."
She raised the needle. The echoes screamed.
Then came the Severer.
He arrived not with thunder, but with silence so deep it cracked the earth.
His robe billowed with threads he had stolen—threads of kings, of forgotten cities, of mothers who died without names.
He carried a blade of obsidian thread. A cutter of history.
"You would restitch the world?" he said, eyes glowing like cold embers.
"Then you will bleed it first."
He struck.
The duel between them was not of flesh.
It was weaving against unweaving.
Every thread she cast, he severed. Every truth she stitched, he corrupted.
But then—he hesitated.
Morya had stepped between them. No weapons. No power. Just her presence.
"You've cut so much," she said.
"But did you ever stitch anything of your own?"
The Severer faltered.
Nima saw it then—not hatred in his eyes, but grief. A boy long ago who had begged to forget pain… and never stopped forgetting.
"You don't have to keep cutting," Nima said gently.
"Let me stitch your name back into the world."
For a moment, the world held its breath.
The Severer lowered his blade.
And Nima moved.
She did not stitch a new world.
She stitched an honest one.
A world where loss had voice.
Where grief could dance beside joy.
Where memory was not a weight—but a wing.
And in that moment—the loom healed.
Ashira faded, whispering her final blessing.
"Well done, flame-girl."
The Echoing Plain faded.
They stood again on the cliffs above Emberthrone.
Lanterns glowed in windows. People sang—not to forget—but to remember. And the Severer, now cloaked only in humility, began walking village to village, mending what he once cut.
Nima placed the Threadneedle into a river. It floated like a leaf.
"It will find the next weaver," she said.
"If the world ever frays again."
Morya took her hand.
"And what will you be?"
Nima smiled.
"A girl who remembers."
And with that, the wind turned warm.
The ashes stirred.
And beneath the crimson sky, a new story began.