Somewhere between endings, the soul walks a fragile line.
I finally arrived when the doors made a similar mechanical chirp to the doors at home, then slid open.
Walking along the path, it felt too fast, like I had sleepwalked the whole way.
It felt like I was living someone else's life.
But I wasn't. It was mine. Even if I did have an audience, it was still my life.
And this was the place.
Where memory would haunt me most.
Where the final tether would fall away.
I told myself I was ready. I repeated it for days.
But how do you unweave what once made you feel whole?
A tightening in my chest, and then his voice—clear and sharp—threaded through my thoughts,
"Unweave it, Valley," he said. "All of it. Don't leave even one thread to hold me here. You were whole before you ever met me."
I know I was whole once before, but how do you go on after taking away the part that filled all your empty spaces?
The space created for your soulmate.
The person you thought was your everything.
Then leaving without them.
What do you even call that?
The opposite of everything is nothing.
I waited at the entrance when my mind tried to make sense of what I would feel after it was done, if I survived.
They would ask me how I felt, and I would say I felt nothing.
Nothing sounds depressing.
But honestly, that's what losing your everything feels like.
Nothing is depression.
Nothing comes to mind when you're asked,
"What do you want to do?"
Nothing sounds good when you're given options and you don't want to do any of them.
You start living through nothing. Doing things without meaning. Existing, but not really alive.
You get lost in nothing.
And once you're lost in the darkness of nothing, it's hard to find your way out, because you need light, and you need strength to find a new light in a dark world.
You need strength to keep going because you don't find it overnight.
The truth is, you don't find it at all.
You build it without knowing, and one day, it finds you.
The light brightens the path you're on.
"Even the smallest light is enough to lead you back. But you have to want to follow it."
And suddenly, you have been walking away from the darkness of nothing and back into the light of everything once again.
"You just had to give it time." He added.
I couldn't stop the thoughts. I stood there, staring into the vast building.
My sweaty fingers twisted around each other as anxiety won.
People swirled all around me, clad in blue lab coats. Their voices tangled and collided, sharp words, clipped orders, laughter I couldn't place blending into a chaotic murmur I couldn't decipher.
It felt like drowning in noise and silence at the same time.
Were they all here for me? For the procedure?
I was unraveling, but no one else seemed to notice.
Except Levi, whose presence was one of the few steady things in my life.
Two of them I was about to lose, and one I haven't seen since I left Solence.
That made him the only constant remaining.
He noticed, and suddenly the blue coat he was wearing looked like something close to calm.
His presence cut through the noise like a steady, quiet force that held me together amid the chaos.
Like the eye of the storm, he walked toward me with his very own storming blue eyes. Reminding me, if I want any future for myself at all, this is the path to take.
And for a moment, that steadied my shaking, fragile heart.
Back in Solence, Atropa would have already sent out a search party.
For me. For Thayer.
For this whole operation.
A law would be broken here, and they don't like anyone who challenges their way of living.
Their reach was cold and relentless.
Keeping the people prisoner without their knowledge.
How they spun the threads of fate to spin the direction they chose fit.
In Thesira, every bond was sacred and influenced.
No one chose who they were tethered to, not really, when the compatibility percentages swayed their decisions.
No one was ever allowed to be severed once the weaver placed the Emberlinks in your minds and curated the paths for each thread woven.
But would they come to stop it? Did their reach stretch this far?
I felt uncertain in the pit of my stomach.
The drones already have.
Yet the council has been able to stay undetected.
But I still worried that I wouldn't complete the procedure before they found me.
Could the Threadcutter stop them if they did come?
The thought made my stomach twist at the idea that he would be interrupted in an already dangerous task.
A task that required deep attention to every thread.
"They can chase you to the ends of the threads," Thayer said, "but they can't weave you back into their pattern unless you let them."
I knew he was right, but still, they knew I had something they thought belonged to them.
Because everything in Thesira belonged to them, including the dead.
A world built on souls that never stayed gone.
And here I was, about to set mine free.
It wasn't just my life on the line.
I couldn't let them have him.
So, it's not only valid to think they will come.
The question is, when will they come?
For Thayer, whose thread still pulsed inside me like a ghost with a heartbeat. Who I needed to let go of before they did.
To save him.
For myself, and for Levi, my anchor, my quiet constant, the only one who didn't look away when I fell apart.
I knew who was waiting in the other room.
What he had to do.
What the Threadcutter had to do.
We spoke of him like a legend.
A whisper passed down in hushed tones, too sacred or too feared to name aloud.
But tonight, we will work side by side for my first and only time.
The weight of that myth pressed down on me, and I knew this night would change everything.
He walks where dreams and endings meet,
A scythe in hand, with silent feet.
He cuts the threads that should not bind.
To free the soul that tethered mine.
One slip, one thread too soon or late,
And I may share my tethered fate.
The words echoed like an old myth I was raised to fear—but myths, I was learning, have a way of being real in some form, or an altered way as it passed from person to person.
In any case, the reality was still just as terrifying as the myth. And I was terrified, not of him, but of what the outcome could be.
This ancient figure is somehow still alive, some say he's from an old world, much older than the world before mine, before Hasley's.
Others say he's from a different world entirely, capable of things no one else is, and I'm supposed to just hand him access to my mind and hope he doesn't sever the wrong threads.
The beginning to my end, or the end to my beginning?
I didn't know how much I'd lose to get here.
"You carry us both right now, but don't be afraid of what you lost or still have to lose, be brave for what you'll find."
Before I ever set foot in Noctira, before there was a night that changed everything.
Before I knew what I would have to let go of, there was a day in Solence.
A day that changed everything.