The Loom reached for him.
The threads, once silent, sparked awake.
Lines of jagged light.. half logic, half instinct
lashed out around him, like the world itself was trying to grab hold and force him into place.
They didn't ask.
They just pulled. Tugged. Tried to assign him.
But something cracked.
Not the weave.
Him.
He sucked in a breath. Not from pain. From something deeper.
Like his whole body had been carved out of defiance. Too real. Too present.
The kind of real that wasn't supposed to exist.
Heat burned along his skin... an itch he couldn't scratch.
The Loom was trying to write him in. But the story didn't want him.
Threads twisted and pulsed around him. Hungry. Demanding.
But none touched him.
Not one.
No path connected.
No title attached.
No fate detected.
ERROR: Nulltype confirmed.
A voice buzzed through his skull cold and detached, like an apology written by a machine.
"You weren't supposed to wake up."
He opened his eyes.
The world felt wrong.
Or maybe too right.
A sky of ink hung overhead, scrawled with shaking glyphs.
Rivers of glowing thread ran through the air, mapping destinies like veins through a divine body.
Every line had purpose. Every hue meant something.
Except his.
He didn't belong to any of it.
Not forgotten.
Worse.
Rejected.
The Loom tried again. Faster. Rougher. Desperate.
Threads shot toward him, aiming for his chest... trying to latch on, claim something that wasn't there.
They hit.
They broke.
The system staggered. Logic glitched. The air itself twisted in protest.
And still…
He stood.
Alive. Untouched.
A hum started low. Crawling. Hollow. Wrong.
He turned. Too slow.
A threadblade tore toward him, shrieking like fate turned weapon.
He dropped, rolled. Dirt and static scraped his skin.
The blade missed barely cutting a line of white through the black.
Another screamed in.
Too fast.
He couldn't move in time.
Then...
Time stuttered.
The blade stopped mid-air, flickering, glitching...
Then shattered into static dust.
Resistance Field: Active
Stability Window: 12 Seconds
Twelve seconds.
No control. No destiny.
Just freedom.
He drew a shaky breath.
"...What am I?"
No answer came.
Not from the system.
Not from the Loom.
But someone was watching.
She stood in the space between seconds.
A girl.
Eyes sewn shut with silver thread. Hair like broken constellations.
Everything about her refused definition.
She didn't move.
Didn't blink.
But she was there... rooted in the space where no thread dared weave.
Then she wasn't.
And the world convulsed.
Above him, a divine blade dropped from the sky. Absolute. Final.
But...
Threadbreak Protocol: Engaged
Lockbreaker Node: Triggered
Pattern: Disrupted
The blade fractured mid-fall, splitting into threads of pure light before vanishing.
The Loom screamed.
Not with anger.
With fear.
A rift tore open nearby.
Not a door.
Not a passage.
A wound.
Its edges bled light.
On the other side.... a city. On fire.
Crystals burned like blue embers. Shadows stretched across towers.
And through it, a name echoed, torn and fading...
"Kir…is…"
He didn't know it. But his feet moved anyway.
Toward the name.
The system panicked.
Symbols burst around him. Warnings. Glyphs. Denial.
Memory Vault Access: Denied
Rewrite Order: Failing
Containment Breach: Likely
He stepped through.
A storm of memories hit him... none of them his.
A girl under a bleeding moon.
A silent pact.
A name carved into the fabric of reality.
And one clear truth:
He was never supposed to exist.
He fell.
Not through space.
Through narrative.
Through scrapped drafts, deleted scenes, corrupted timelines.
The system tried to undo him... file, delete, rewrite.. but its code crumbled before it could reach what he truly was.
Because he wasn't code.
He had no origin file.
No assignment.
No thread.
But still...
He remained.
She returned.
The girl with the sewn eyes.
She stood above him now.
Then, her lips moved.
No sound came.
Yet he heard her.
"You were meant to die in silence."
"But silence remembered you."
Her hand pressed against his chest.
A glow spread. Not heat. Not pain.
Something older than either.
His heart stopped.
Then it started again.
And he fell once more
This time, not alone.
This time, remembered.
He woke up.
Everything was wrong again.
No threads.
No system.
Just a name, whispered in his own voice.
"...Nox."
Not given.
Not found.
Claimed.
Far above, in the trembling halls of the Loom, something ancient shivered.
It knew.
The forbidden one had survived.
And the story?
Had begun.