Tracing the Rewritten Threads of a Life
I didn't realize how long I'd been standing there until my knees buckled. The journal felt heavier now, like the words had passed through me instead of the other way around.
I could feel myself reliving her life as if it were my own, walking that path along the wildflowers as if I'd been there before. The air had tasted of rain and wild honey, a sweetness that didn't belong to this cold, sterile basement.
I ran my fingers across the faded date, nearly two centuries past. There was no way I could have been to this place, yet it was vivid in my mind.
Hasley Liora wasn't just a name etched into a hologram plaque or whispered in Entwinement lectures. She was the beginning of it all.
She was honest. Bare. Terrified to keep living on her own, but she pulled through—she would have had to if I weren't standing here today.
She was my family. Not a statue or symbol that Atropa made her out to be. A woman whose story stirred awake the moment I touched her words.
I closed the journal gently, fingers lingering on the worn leather. I had to take it with me and read more. Her sorrow clung to the pages like a song I already knew by heart.
Reading it wasn't just uncovering the past—it was waking something long asleep within me. Her grief had threaded itself into me, waiting for a name.
Perhaps it was memory returning, or a silent strand passed down through the thread, only now stirring.
I tucked the bangs left from my French braids behind my ears and took a step back.
The journal didn't just stir emotion—it stirred recognition. It ignited a drive I'd lost months ago, a need for answers.
There was no record of this. No file, no mention, nothing. Why would this be hidden from me, her descendant? Somehow, that felt heavier than her grief.
She is being remembered, but her voice has been forgotten.
My mind reeled with questions, but my body moved on instinct, matching up the files I'd come down for and correcting the flagged error. Each motion felt distant, mechanical, as if I were watching someone else's hands move.
I needed to act normal, at least until I figured out what I'd just found.
Whoever didn't want this to be discovered would be looking for it—but there had to be someone who did, someone who lured me down here. If so, they already knew more about me than I was comfortable with.
Or maybe it was just found, checked for resonance by Cali, then stored without ever being read. No—I usually get everything after her.
Maybe it made its way to Levi, but would he leave it here for me? Or would he hand it up the chain of command instead? Or maybe someone else entirely from another wing?
I had to keep this quiet and watch for anyone who might be watching me.
First, I needed a company directory, which might be hard to obtain, but I can worry about that problem later.
I filed the last document away. Nothing about this morning was normal anymore.
"Normal was just an illusion anyway."
Morning had fully broken, but I couldn't tell from down here. I walked alone through the museum's sleeping halls. Shadows shifted as I passed—unsettling in their retreat, like even the walls could sense something had changed.
I decided to take the stairs back up.
At the landing, a motion-triggered poster lit up—a couple with their hands pressed together, eyes closed like they were holding the future itself.
True love deserves eternity.
Check your compatibility score.
Connect your souls forever.
Merge your consciousness today.
I paused. We never got that moment. Never saw a score. He died before we had the chance. The memory came as a flash, replaying his death in my mind. I watched him bleed out, and I was left with a choice I couldn't undo—one I carried quietly every day. This would stay with me for the rest of my life. Trying to do it myself with the help of that stranger only messed things up, and now I don't know where my love ended up after death. I just wish I knew if he moved on to a better place—a realm with no limits, where everyone he ever loved is, if he's not here with me.
He told me he knew a way to merge without the center's help as long as I had Emberlinks to do it. I had no time to get him anywhere, and I had what we needed, so I said yes.
He brought us inside, and I did everything he said. After that, we called the first responders. I rode with them in the goldweaver to the center, where they pronounced him dead. I knew he was dead on the drive over when he wouldn't wake up. But hearing them calling it made it hit harder. They asked if we had ever been merged, and it was the first time I wasn't sure whether I was telling the truth. I said No, we haven't. But I hadn't known if the stranger made it work because I felt nothing. And I didn't want to admit that I tried to conduct a black market merger, which is against the law. So, no was the best answer to my knowledge with the least consequences, other than the loss of the only man I ever loved.
I turned away before the motion-triggered image could change into another haunting advertisement to merge or a display of love that never dies. I couldn't handle another flashback like that one. I felt it deep in my bones, the ache for him. The pain of not having him.
My mother used to say the city was made of promises. Merges, consciousness woven together, creating one soul. But promises held no value when the other person never made the promise in the first place. He didn't agree to be one; I didn't have time to ask, and it didn't work anyway.
Eternity isn't our destiny.
The hallway ahead was quiet, lit by soft panels embedded in the walls. Each step echoed faintly, the weight of what I carried pressing harder the closer I came. It wasn't a long walk, but it felt like one.
And then there she was—Hasley Liora, suspended mid-sentence in flickering blue light. Her hologram stood frozen as it always did, but somehow, it felt different—like her eyes lingered a second too long, or her lips wanted to finish a sentence that wasn't there.
The words still echoed in my chest, the final line I'd memorized so long ago: "I never wanted to let you go, and now I don't have to."
The first Thread, by Hasley Liora. I'd known those words for years. Only now did I hear them woven with mystery, and the fragile heart that held it all together—the mystery of how she ended up merged, if Emerson was already dead in her journal, the parts the museum plaques never spoke of.
I used to think it was so romantic how she felt for Emerson. But now I wonder if those are her words at all, or where they came from, because her journal entry so far comes from a place where she is unaware of any form of Emerson being alive.
I must've read that passage on that plaque a hundred times since I started working here as the Soul Archive Specialist, and it never gave me more questions than this journal would.
I looked back up at Hasley's shimmering hologram, just in time to catch specks of dust drifting through it as sunlight cut across the room. The morning light lingered around her, steadying the unease she'd left behind.
The journal in my bag felt like a secret, one I wasn't sure I was meant to find—or keep. But I was keeping it either way.
I moved on autopilot, letting familiar routines steady me. There was comfort in repetition, even if it only kept me stagnant. I was never ambitious for more—except maybe to run this place one day, but that was a dream I let go of long ago, when I lost Thayer.
I was just the caretaker of all Merged Soul history in this museum—the largest in Solence, the only one preserving both physical artifacts and digital memory archives of soul-bound pairs. Close enough, if not better. I'd been fascinated by Soul-Woven history since I was a child.
My mother's stories echoed in my mind, telling of my ancestors, Hasley and Emerson Liora—two people who changed everything by reuniting separated soulmates through the first merge.
Though I'm still working out how it came about.
They called it the Era of the Soul Woven. People latched onto it because love—strong, intense, consuming—could make you believe in anything or anyone. Maybe love itself was a cult. Losing one changed your thoughts on the subject.
"You can't think like that. Love itself isn't selfish. Trying to hold onto someone too tightly is."
I lingered a moment longer, the museum silent around me, trying to reconcile my conflicting thoughts. The silence felt sacred, both seeing and isolating.
Then a voice cut through the quiet. "Valley!"
I jumped, spinning toward the sound.
My first thought was that someone had followed me here—and that they knew what I'd taken.