Chapter 30: Threads of Truth
Dawn bled slow over the Thornveil, the fog taking light like a wound takes cloth. The path out of Ember Ravine ran in a tired seam, broken brush, churned mud, a smear of iron in the air that even the river couldn't swallow. They walked it anyway. They had children to bring home.
Hale set the pace that keeps men standing. Not fast, not slow, just enough for breath to stay in step.
Elvi took point with a short blade and the kind of attention that saw danger before it called itself by name. Noll drifted near the wagon they'd commandeered, wardless for once, eyes ringed, spine stubborn.
Thorek pushed the axled rattle when the ground demanded stubborn hands. Lysera moved on the shadowed side where the trees leaned closer, veils tucked and quiet, every sense stretched but controlled. Rook padded flank to flank, nose high, reading air for problems. Elias walked at the rear, spear butt knocking roots, small hands gripping the edge of his cloak like it could teach the world manners.
They crested the last rise and saw the village. Not much, by any count, just a scatter of low roofs and smoke that knew which way the wind usually went. A line of fields, stubble and frost and hope. A fence that looked brave in the way poor fences do. Someone had hung bells in a row along the lane, old bronze, bent tin, anything that could ring if pressed. They were ringing now, not as alarm, but as a warning that wanted to become a prayer.
The first shout went up from a woman with a red scarf, half sob, half challenge. Then others joined, voices tripping over names like they were trying to wake them by saying them aloud. Feet thudded. Doors banged. The lane filled.
Elias slowed without thinking. The children slowed with him. Then the oldest girl let go of his cloak and ran. a little one tripped and got scooped by arms that had memorized her weight. The boy hesitated, eyes flicking to Elias like he was breaking a formation, then bolted with an unsteady laugh that became a cry when arms found him too. The sounds hit like a hammer and a balm both.
Hale stood a step back and watched reunions happen. He did not smile, but the line of his shoulders eased. Elvi let herself breathe for the first time since the fog had started to glow. Noll scrubbed his face with the heel of his palm and pretended it was sweat. Thorek blew out a breath and looked everywhere but the tears. Lysera didn't move for a long heartbeat, then she did, folding into stillness the way a blade slides back into its scabbard. Rook sat and wagged his tail exactly once, as if counting it.
A man with ash on his sleeves and a scar like a comma near his mouth approached Hale with the careful respect given to men who bring something too big for thanks. "Captain," he said, guessing a title and making it true. "We thought… We feared…" He stopped, because the words had no clean edge.
"They're home," Hale said. Not gentle, not unkind. Just a statement that let the ground hold.
Another woman grasped Elias by the forearm with both hands. Her grip shook. "You walked them out," she said. Not a question. Her eyes fell to the spear, to the soot, to the man under both. "You walked my boy out of the fog."
Elias found a smile that didn't split. "All of us did," he said. "But he kept his feet."
She pressed her forehead to his hand and left a print of tears and flour. He flinched like a man who'd forgotten how to carry that kind of touch and then stood still and let her finish.
They brought the children to a green that had once wanted to be a square. Someone dragged a table into sunlight. Someone else brought water that tasted like a metal cup and clean fingers. Bread appeared, rough and hot. A pot followed, thin stew that smelled like onion and stubborn gardens. The village moved the way rivers do when the bank breaks, with purpose and flood.
Whispers braided through the work, unplanned and sticky. "Came out of the ash," one voice said, wonder and fear chasing each other. "Ashborn, the lot of them." Another voice picked it up. Another softened it. "Ashborn," they said again, almost shy, as if naming a miracle might scare it off.
Elvi heard it and glanced at Hale. He didn't answer the look. He didn't need to. Names stick on their own if they're meant to. You don't argue with sap when it means to be amber.
Elias ate what he was handed and tasted little. The steam fogged his eyes and pretended it was the reason. Ava's laugh sat where breath should go for a moment and made everything tight. He set the bowl down and stood, because sitting with it didn't change the geometry of what hurt.
Noll drifted to his side, the kind of quiet that follows a boy who's not a boy anymore. "We did it," he said, like he was trying to convince the air. "We actually did it."
"We started it," Elias said. He watched a mother kiss dirt off a cheek and tell it to behave next time. "Now we can't stop."
Noll swallowed, then nodded. "Good," he said, surprising himself and meaning it.
Thorek leaned his hammer against his shoulder and looked past the roofs toward the dark band of Thornveil. "Forge is calling," he grunted, and the words were both joke and honest ache.
Lysera's gaze tracked the edges of the green, counting faces, weighing who would tell truth and who would tell a story they needed instead. Her eyes found Elias like a compass finds north. "We should go," she said. "Before the wrong ears find the right tale."
Hale had already finished speaking to the men who carried worry like sacks. He kept it simple. Hide better. Don't trust strange banners. Teach bells to sing when strangers pass. They listened because he sounded like someone who had paid for every word with names.
They didn't stay for long goodbyes. You don't, when the soil might be listening for routes. The children still tried to cling, small hands and bigger courage. Elias knelt once more and set his palm to a boy's hair, quick, firm. "Listen to your mother," he said. "Keep your feet under you. And if someone tells you to sing for a false god, you remember this day and say no."
The boy nodded with a solemnity that put years on his face, then let go.
They left to the sound of bells tapping, not a warning now, a blessing that hoped to be enough. The whispers followed to the lane's bend. "Ashborn," the village said again, not a title, a thank you they had made a shape for.
The temple path felt longer on the way back. The forest watched without blinking. Rook kept to edges, stopping to stare into places where the fog hung like wool. Twice he growled, short and certain, and twice nothing stepped out. Elias's Resonance Sense vibrated along his bones like a string that wanted to be plucked. He did not reach for it. He had reached enough in one night to last him, and he knew the cost well.
The temple took them in like a ship takes in storm beaten sailors, not warm, not soft, just standing when everything else shakes. Soot still lay in the joints of the stone from Thorek's first fire, chalk lines ghosted the floor where Noll had learned to hold a ward without shaking it apart, the air held that old mix of dust, cold ash, and something green from the moss that crawled where light allowed, it smelled like work and rest and a promise that didn't need to be said aloud.
Elias set the spear across his knees and sat against a broken drum of column, breath slow, ribs tight. Rook curled beside him, head on Elias's boot, ears still flicking like the forest hadn't stopped speaking to him yet, the wolf didn't sleep, he guarded with the kind of calm that says I've bled enough today to earn silence and I'll spend it watching you breathe.
Thorek dumped his hammer with a grunt and then, with the stubborn tenderness of a man checking a friend's teeth, ran fingers along the haft for hairline cracks. The head was scarred and the face pitted, nothing a file and an hour wouldn't sweet talk, "By the Forge, I thought I was going to meet the saints I don't believe in," he said, half a laugh, half a cough, "and here I am with all my ugly still attached."
"Some of your ugly," Elvi said, sliding down the wall with a short sword across her thighs, her bow unstrung at her side, quiver empty and hung up like a dry well. She wiped blood from her cheek with a corner of cloak that hadn't yet met mud, "the rest is still out there making trouble without you."
Noll leaned his shoulder to a pillar and shut his eyes for three heartbeats, opened them again because the pictures behind his lids still wore iron and screamed. Then he forced his hands to lie still, the tremor in his fingers had not gotten the message yet, "I held," he said, small and not fishing for praise, just putting a stone on the table with the other stones.
"You held," Hale said, without looking up from the straps on his bracers. The captain didn't sit, he never truly sat inside walls that carried his people's breath, he stood and stripped buckles that had glued themselves with blood, his voice steady the way a metronome is, "We all did."
Lysera walked the edges, one palm a whisper on the stones, checking veils with the absent focus of a woman who sees frayed hems in her sleep. She tightened light at a threshold, breathed once, and the weave lay flat again, then her eyes moved to the rearmost wall, to the moss that hung in soft curtains over reliefs the rest of the city had forgotten, she didn't pull it back, not yet, the truth behind it didn't need to burn their eyes tonight.
Silence came down and stayed, not a heavy thing, a companion, the kind of quiet squads earn and keep because it's the only way to put your insides back where they belong. The forge nook ticked as old heat found new cold, Rook's breath made a small, steady rhythm, somewhere beyond the door the forest said nothing at all, which in Thornveil meant more than a shout.
Elias rubbed at the bridge of his nose and found grit, blood, and the ghost of smoke there. He lowered his hand and looked around at the faces that had become his map, "We started something," he said, voice low enough that the stone drank it happily, "and there's no going back to pretending we're not in it."
"Did you want to pretend," Elvi asked, not unkind, mouth quirking, "because you don't strike me as a man with the patience for costumes."
"Hell no," Elias said, a bare ghost of a grin. "I just like acknowledging the cliff before we run off it."
"Forward is the only way," Thorek said, with the cheer of a man who has never feared fire, "backward is for cowards and funeral dirges."
Noll looked from one adult to the next, jaw set the way boys set their jaw when they've tried on dying and found it too big but not impossible. "Then forward," he said, like he was buying into a debt and happy to owe it.
Hale watched them, that small nod he gave sometimes when the ledger in his head balanced enough to move the next crate. "Then forward," he echoed, "but with our eyes open," he took a breath and let it out slow, "Sleep would be wise."
They didn't get to keep the plan.
The Loom's hum shifted, a tide change under stone, a slow gathering like breath taken in before a word that matters, not loud, not sharp. The kind of pressure you feel in the bones of your face when weather is about to break, Rook's head came up, ears flattening, he didn't growl, he listened the way the forest listens to itself, Elias felt the pressure slide across his ribs and settle behind his sternum, his Resonance Sense catching it like a drum skin catching a hand.
Lysera stopped mid step, the color went somewhere else in her, not fear, recognition, old recognition, the sort that makes the back of the neck heat. "She's calling," she said, almost to herself, eyes on the doorway and far beyond it.
"Who," Hale asked, voice steady, body already shifting into the posture of a man who expects to be needed.
"A watcher," Lysera said first, because names have weight. Then, after a breath that tasted like respect, "Aeloria."
Even those who didn't know the name felt the way it fit the air. Elvi straightened as if a string had been pulled, Thorek's brows crashed together and then lifted like an apprentice who just heard the master step into the room, Noll swallowed and tried not to look like a boy in a story, Hale's face didn't change much and somehow changed entirely, the set of it recognizing a thing bigger than command.
Elias got to his feet, joints complaining, spear rising because hands remember. "Is that… good," he asked, because plain speech makes big moments manageable.
Lysera's mouth tugged at one corner, humor too tired to be sharp. "It is what it is, and it is not a knife at our throat," she moved to the door, veil sliding back from the threshold with a touch, "We're being invited."
"Bring your manners and whatever passes for reverence," Elvi said, pushing off the wall, but she checked her knife's edge anyway, soldiers carry respect and steel in the same pocket.
"Do we bring a gift," Thorek asked, mock solemn, "some bread, some salt, a very polite grenade."
"Bring your mouth closed until spoken to," Hale said. Thorek grinned and pretended he didn't like being told what to do by this man he liked being told what to do by.
They stepped out into Thornveil and the fog felt different, not thicker, more intentional, as if hands had shaped it, as if the air had been combed into partings and paths. Threads glimmered faint for those who knew how to look, Elias saw them like hairline cracks of light where the forest had stitched itself, the hum tugged left, then deeper, not a yank, an insistence, Rook paced at Elias's knee with the grace of a creature who knows when he is in someone else's house.
They walked without chatter, boots whispering on wet leaves, the forest was not silent, it was purposeful, every creak a sentence, every breath of wind a page turned. Once a shadow moved at the line of vision and Elias's fingers tightened on the spear, Rook's tail flicked and the shadow resolved into the notion of antlers and was gone again, no threat, just a glance from a neighbor.
The glade found them rather than the other way around, a bowl of stones gripped by roots, the light in it wrong in a way that comforted, pale without a moon, soft without a sun. Lysera slowed first because her bones remembered something here, Hale slowed because he was Hale, Elvi because anything that felt like a chapel deserved the kind of quiet that cuts trouble down from men's tongues, Thorek slowed because even he knew forges built for gods burn hotter, Noll slowed because his heart did and he followed it, Elias slowed because Rook did, and because the hum in his chest changed key and made the hair on his arms lift.
She stood at the glade's heart as if she had been carved there and the carver had taken his time. Tall and spare, lines clean like a blade well made. Her hair fell long, the color of woven silver when the fire is almost out, fine as thread yet carrying the weight of centuries. Her ears swept back in the subtle, unmistakable curve of her kind, delicate and sharp all at once, marking her as Elf. Her eyes held a light that did not reflect the glade so much as command it to behave, pale, ageless, carrying the hush of old forests and storms. She did not shine. She did not parade power about like a festival. She simply existed, and the air drew itself up accordingly.
Lysera bowed her head, not low, but honest. "Aeloria," she said. The name felt like a bell rung once and perfectly.
Elias did not bow. He did not know what to do with his spine and chose to keep it where it was. He let the spear rest against his shoulder and kept his hands open. The hum pressed into his bones like the first time you touch a drum and it answers.
Aeloria's gaze fell on him like shade on a summer road. Not cold. Not warm. Necessary.
Rook lay down immediately, not obeying, acknowledging, head on paws, tail still, eyes bright. The wolf knew majesty that had nothing to do with noise or teeth, Lysera bowed her head, not low, not servile, a warrior's nod to a queen who had never asked to be one, Hale inclined just enough to make respect plain and self possession intact, Elvi let her hands go empty and open and her shoulders drop, Thorek straightened like a man before a master smith, turn of chin equal parts defiance and delight, Noll forgot what to do and did nothing, which, as it turned out, was the right choice.
Elias did not bow, not out of arrogance, because he didn't know the choreography and he did not fake reverence. He stood with the spear loose at his shoulder, hands open, eyes straight, the hum pressed behind his sternum in a way that asked, who are you, and answered itself, not mine, not theirs, something older, something watching.
When Aeloria spoke, her voice sounded like a harp string plucked with a fingertip callused by centuries, clear, low, and the space listened. "You've carried the fire farther than I expected," she said, head tilting the smallest degree, "and sooner."
Her eyes found Elias and settled there with the kind of attention that makes other attention seem like a child's game. He felt seen in a way that was not undressing, more like measurement, not to diminish, to fit, "Threadcutter," she said, and the word was not a crown, not a curse, simply the right noun placed in the right sentence.
Elias's throat worked, the spear felt heavier and lighter together. "That's what they've called me," he said, no defense in the tone, no surrender either.
Aeloria watched him for one more heartbeat, then let her attention widen to include the others like light spreading when a cloud moves. "You have made a noise the Church cannot cover with their music," she said, no heat, no spit of politics, just a statement the way a builder points at a wall and says true, "and you have set your feet on a road that has an end, but not the one they intend."
Thorek's mouth stayed closed because Hale's earlier order had stuck for once. Elvi's brows made a small question, Lysera said nothing, saving questions for when answers could be caught.
Hale stepped half a pace forward, no fear, no swagger. "You called us," he said, all the words that mattered packed into two, the rest implied, why, for what, what cost.
"I did," Aeloria said. "The Weaver's tide pulled, and I am its shore in this wood," she let her gaze tick toward Lysera for a splinter of time, the faintest nod to an old bloodline, then back to Elias, "You cut," she said, "and the forest felt it, and the debts this land keeps have long memories."
Noll swallowed, the sound oddly loud in the glade that made men whisper without telling them to. "Did you send the beasts," he asked, because boys ask questions men are too careful to voice.
Aeloria's eyes softened a hair, which in her face felt like a season changing. "I do not command Thornveil," she said, "I ask, and it answers when the balance permits," she looked to Elias again, "Tonight, it permitted."
Elias thought of the wolves flowing around him like a river that refused certain stones, he thought of little fingers curled in the edge of his cloak and a promise he had made with his mouth and his marrow. "They didn't touch us," he said, flat, bare honesty, "I don't know why."
"You will," Aeloria said, not kindness, certainty. "And you will learn to cut with your spear like him, without laying your life thread on the altar each time," her eyes dipped to the spear, and there was a kind of far off grief in the look, and pride too, "but not by asking me how," she added, a slight shake of the head, "I do not know how he did it."
Elias's breath caught on the edge of a question he couldn't shape yet, the name for the he that lived behind every page of this story hung like a held chord. Aeloria did not play it, not yet, she let the silence hold the note until it meant to resolve.
"We will talk," she said, and the glade agreed, mist settling in a circle as if chairs had been brought. "But not of what the Church shouts, and not of the fear you already understand," her gaze turned and took them all in, "We will speak of the truth they buried, and of what you must build so that when the next tide rises you do not drown buying time for others."
Rook sighed as if he had chosen this, as if this was what he had been escorting them toward since the first night under a broken arch. Hale lowered his spear point a fraction, Elvi sat without realizing it, Lysera's shoulders eased into a posture that looked very much like relief and very much like a soldier finally allowed to hear the orders that make sense, Thorek grinned the grin of a man given a blueprint and told to make it sing, Noll blinked fast because this was the kind of moment you try not to blink during, Elias rolled the spear in his fingers until the etchings met his palm and bit small crescents into the skin, anchors, proof, pain he understood.
Aeloria's words came soft and without theater, which made them heavier.
"What they call him is not his name," she said. Each syllable placed like a stone in a foundation.
"And what they tell of him is not his truth."
She let the fog breathe once, let the threads hum like a string barely touched, then gave them the promise and the threshold together.
"Sit, and listen, and I will tell you what I can."
The circle closed without being drawn. They sat because it felt wrong to stand too long in her presence, wrong to treat this like a passing talk when the Loom itself seemed to lean in to listen. Stones and roots and fog made chairs of themselves. Aeloria stood, weightless in stillness, as if the ground lent her its patience.
Elias leaned on his spear with elbows loose. He did not feel like prey under her gaze, though there was enough in her to make any man swallow. It was not threat. It was depth. The kind of presence that makes you feel like a drop of water suddenly aware of the ocean it floats on.
"You already know what the Church will say of you," Aeloria began. Her voice steady, unadorned.
"Heretic. Pretender. Enemy of the Loom. They will not tire of the words. But the sharper knife lies elsewhere. In the names they keep and the names they bury."
Lysera's shoulders tightened. Elias glanced at her and saw the watchful brightness of someone who has carried a suspicion for years and is finally close to seeing its face. Aeloria's gaze slid across them, steady, calm, cutting deeper than sight.
"The man you know as Saint Caelus," she said, each word set like a stone, "was not born here. He was not born of this Loom. His name was Lucius Crassus. He called himself a Roman. And his blood was not of this soil."
The name struck like a hammer in a chapel. Sharp, ringing, undeniable.
Lysera drew breath. Elvi frowned. Thorek muttered something low in his beard. Noll blinked hard as if trying to catch the syllables before they fled.
Elias froze. The word Roman burned in his ears. Not just Earth, his Earth. History classes. Old names etched into stone and blood. Legion standards carried through dust and fire. He saw shields, pila, men in iron, sandals on stone roads. He had studied it. He had admired and cursed it. And now one of those soldiers, a Roman, had been here.
"Roman?" he whispered. His throat scraped.
"He was a Roman soldier?"
"Yes." Aeloria's voice was quiet, final. Her eyes held Elias without crushing him.
"He was from your world, Elias Edge. Torn across the veil in an age men call the Mythical, when the Loom had not yet settled its patterns, when threads ran wild and raw, when even the stars seemed nearer to the ground. I met him then. A soldier clothed in iron. Hands scarred by battles that were not ours. His eyes carried smoke from cities I have never seen but that lived behind every word he spoke."
Her voice dipped, a current pulling them inward.
"We did not fall to worship or awe. We fell to recognition. Two threads running side by side until the weave itself bound them. We loved, not as stories gild, but as people do when tomorrow is never promised. Quietly. Fiercely. In the space between battles, and in the heat of them too."
"He was no saint." Silver hair shifted like threads of moonlight as she shook her head. "He was stubborn, proud, too quick to anger, too quick to laugh. But he carried a will like tempered steel. And he learned our threads as if always meant to. Not with the grace of the native born, but with the hunger of a man who has lost enough to know he cannot afford to fail."
"With him the Loomguard were gathered," Aeloria went on. "Not a court. Not a choir. A covenant of crafts. A dwarf whose hammer taught mountains to yield. A fae whose sight ran ahead of time's step. A siren of the deeps who could make the tide kneel. A wanderer who bound dying wishes into law. Healers, warders, smiths and singers whose songs could carry bridges across gorges men feared. Each bearing a fragment of what the Loom needed. Lucius stood at the heart, not as master, as anchor. And together we built what later singers named the Age of Harmony."
She lifted her chin as if years had been painted on the fog.
"It was not an age without grief. Nothing good has ever been spared it. But grief was carried. Shared. Turned into roads of stone and markets where tongues traded without drawing blades. Forges that sang beside rivers instead of drowning them. Fields tended with more hands than chains. The races long divided walked beside each other and called it good. Harmony did not mean silence. It meant dissonance resolved, conflict turned to craft. And it held because we held it together."
Her gaze sharpened. Not cruel. Like frost tracing a blade.
"And as we learned, as we grew, we rose. Not with crowns, with consequence. Threadlords not by decree but by doing. Men and women who could cut and weave on scales others only whispered. Domains blossomed like spring storms and learned our names. A Gravity field laid over a mountain pass so caravans climbed as if the slope had become a flat hymn. A Tide field braided through a delta so flood and famine took turns and never the same year. A Heat field tempered by song so a thousand forges burned hot without smoke choking the valley. And when our hands withdrew those fields gentled and did not tear. We had found the way to ask the Loom for law without breaking its bones."
She let the wind move the leaves once, a soft punctuation.
"Our lifespans stretched with the Loom's favor. Centuries rolled like seasons. Still we endured. Not unscarred, only unbroken. The Loomguard became legend as we lived. Children learned to read under archways carved with our errors as well as our victories, because we swore to leave our flaws where young eyes could see them. Men cannot walk truth if they are only ever taught to kneel."
The fog brightened without light. Rook's head rose and settled again. Elias's hand found one ear without thought. Aeloria's voice held steady.
"We carried peace like a beam on our shoulders. We did not set it down. We made mistakes. We mended them. We argued like storms. We forgave like rains. And when the loom of the world sang out of tune, we listened until we found its burrs and smoothed them with patient hands."
Her eyes sharpened again. "Lucius learned to cut threads with his spear, without laying his life on the altar. He learned to nick a cruel binding without tearing the cloth it held. He learned to sever a crooked vow so the heart beneath it could breathe again. His spear answered him like a tuning fork answers a note. He would stand quiet, weight forward, and the metal in his hand would begin to hum. Not loud, but true, then the cut would happen, clean as first light over still water. And whatever had been wrong would part with minimal harm. I watched a thousand times and could not steal his secret. It was something between his hands and the truth. Something the Loom gave him and would not give me."
Thorek leaned in, forgetting himself, eyes bright as coals. Elvi's fingers tapped once on the flat of her dagger then went still. Lysera had not blinked in a long time. Noll sat rigid and unaware of it. Hale stood as if carved from the same slow patience as the stones.
Aeloria's mouth softened. "Love did not make him gentle. Grief did. He listened to widows more than to kings. He asked orphans what they needed before he asked generals what they planned. He walked harvests with farmers and came back talking about soil rather than speeches. When he had to be hard he was stone. When he could be soft he was water. He wore no crown, and yet in the end even kings sought his counsel because their people did."
She glanced toward Elias and did not look away.
"He told me once that in his first home he had built with numbers and arches. Bridges that bore weight without crushing those who passed beneath. He said a bridge must honor the river and the foot, the span and the stone. And that a world is only a bridge made of years. That was how he thought. Not of empires, but of spanning distances so others could cross."
Aeloria's voice shifted, the timbre colder, edged by memory.
"But Harmony was not eternal. Nothing is. At its end the sky split. A seam torn wide by pressure from beyond. It was not storm or quake. It was invasion."
Her eyes burned silver as she spoke.
"Demons poured through. Not beasts. Not mindless chaos. Hunger that learned shape. Patience that wore flesh. They studied us. Learned our weaves and bent them cruel. Turned prayers into traps. Turned songs into chains. They did not come as tide or swarm alone. They came with intent. They came to unmake, to claim, to hollow this world until it rang like a shell and nothing more."
The glade seemed to contract around her words. Every squad member leaned forward without knowing they had moved.
"We fought," Aeloria said, steady. "Gods, how we fought. City by city. Valley by valley. Maps burned until the land itself became memory. Friends became names whispered over graves. The Loomguard bled. Some fell. Even Lucius staggered. Yet he refused to yield. His spear cut through their designs when ours faltered. His presence turned despair into defiance. When men saw him stand, they remembered their legs."
Elias's grip tightened on his spear. His chest felt hollow and hot at once. Roman. Soldier. Outsider. Now savior.
"At the last siege," Aeloria's voice lowered, heavy with grief so old it had become part of her marrow, "the world thread itself buckled under their weight. The demons sought to pry the pattern apart at its root. If they had succeeded, there would have been no weaving strong enough to save us. Lucius did what none of us could. He cut it. Clean. But the Loom gaped. Torn wide. If it had unraveled then, all would have been lost."
Her hands lifted, fingers spread like she could still feel the rent in the fabric of creation.
"So he wove his own life thread into the wound. A sacrifice no one could match. He became the knot that sealed the breach. Not dead in the way graves know. Not alive in the way arms remember. Gone. Yet the world endured. The demons were sealed beyond. Their tide broken by a single thread laid willingly across the gap."
She let the silence rest. The squad felt it like a funeral bell tolling through centuries.
Elvi swore softly under her breath. Thorek lowered his head and touched knuckles to the stone. Lysera closed her eyes as if she had seen this ending coming and dreaded the hearing of it. Noll's mouth trembled. Hale stood unflinching, though his hands flexed once behind his back.
Elias swallowed hard. He imagined it. A Roman soldier. His soldier. A man dragged from his Earth and forged into myth. And then choosing to die not as saint but as soldier. To lay himself across the breach so others could live. His throat ached with the weight of it.
Aeloria's voice carried them past the silence.
"After he was gone, the vacuum filled. Men of frightened hearts built the Church upon his absence. They did not begin in malice. They meant to preserve what he died for. They meant safety. Order. But fear is a mortar that builds walls too rigid. They took his name and twisted it into Caelus. Sky. A figure untouchable. Ordained. They erased his Earth. His blood. His flaws. They turned him from soldier into saint, because a saint is easier to wield than a man who proved any outsider might rise to cut threads."
Her lips pressed thin, contempt and sorrow mingling.
"They told the people he was born chosen. That the Loom anointed him alone. That no other could match him. They wrote his humanity out of their hymn because it terrified them. A saint cannot be argued with. A saint cannot be doubted. But a soldier, a man who stumbled, who bled, who loved, who swore, who learned, a man like that shows anyone might stand where he stood. And that was what they feared most."
Lysera's jaw set sharp.
"If they twisted his truth, they will twist Elias's," she said, no tremor in her voice. "They will write him into a monster if they cannot chain him."
Aeloria inclined her head, silver strands spilling like threads of light.
"They will. Because you cannot be bent into their hymn. They will paint you heretic, traitor, doom bearer, and worse. And the louder their lies, the truer your deeds must ring."
Elvi exhaled sharp, dagger still balanced on her knees.
"Then we don't give them the chance to tell the story first. We tell it. With arrows and fire if we must. With truth if we can."
Thorek grinned, feral and bright.
"Now that's a sermon I can believe in. Let them sing their lies. We'll drown them out with thunder."
Noll's voice came small but steady. "But how? We're just one squad."
Hale answered without pause. His voice calm as the beat of war drums. "Then we stop thinking of ourselves as just one squad. We've already shown them more than they can cover up. We bloodied their nose. Freed children from their cages. Made them fear the woods they thought theirs. This is no longer survival. It's a beginning."
The words hung. Heavy. Electric. Undeniable.
Elias looked around him. These faces, more than companions, more than soldiers. His map in this strange world. The truth sat heavy in his chest.
"If it's a beginning, then we need to make it more than chance," he said. Slow. Deliberate. "We need to bind it. Not just for now. For what comes after."
Lysera's eyes sharpened, searching his face. "An oath," she said. The word snapped like a bowstring. "To bind us in more than name."
Elvi's smile was dangerous and proud. "Ash and blood and promise," she murmured. "The kind of oath that doesn't break."
Thorek slammed his hammer down. Sparks almost leapt. "Aye, lad. Give it a name and I'll carve it into the forge itself."
Noll swallowed hard. His eyes wide. "Then what do we call ourselves?"
The answer slipped from Elias's lips almost without thought. Quiet. Casual. But it carried weight.
"Ashborn," he said, voice steady. "Because we crawled out of the fire. And we'll burn what they build if we have to."
The glade shivered. Fog curled tighter. Even Aeloria's eyes gleamed faint approval.
Hale nodded once. The nod of a captain accepting inevitability.
"Then let's speak it," he said.
They stood. Bodies weary, spines straightening. Fire kindling behind tired eyes. Weapons lifted not in battle, but in vow.
Elias raised his spear. Not high. Just enough for the runnels of blood and smoke still staining it to catch the strange light of the glade.
"From ash we rise," he said, voice carrying. "From ruin we bind. From oath we endure."
The others echoed. Voices weaving together. Different tones. Different timbres. One promise.
Thorek's deep rumble. Elvi's sharp bite. Lysera's clear steel. Hale's steady drum. Noll's unsteady but unbroken voice. All threading into Elias's words until the air itself seemed to hum with it.
Aeloria watched, her eyes silver fire. When the last syllable fell, she spoke. Soft but carrying like a bell.
"Then it is done. The Ashborn are named."
The Loom thrummed. Low. Vast. The forest answered with a breath that lifted fog and bent branches. The oath carved itself into the night like fire burned into wood.
Silence followed. Not empty. Full. Holy in its own way. Elias felt it sink into his marrow, into his Resonance Sense, into the threads themselves. An oath that would not be forgotten.
Aeloria stepped closer. Presence both terrible and gentle.
"Remember this," she said, gaze locked on Elias but words for all of them. "You are no one's saints. No one's slaves. You are Ashborn. And you will burn lies into light if you endure."
Her hand lifted. Threads shimmered faint around her fingers. Not weaving. Not binding. Just a gesture. The fog swirled. Dimmed. Reshaped the glade into something vast and intimate.
"This is the truth I can give you tonight," she said, voice dropping. "Lucius Crassus was no saint. He was a man. He found a way to cut without dying for it. I do not know how. But I know this, he was not alone. He had those who bound themselves to him, as you have bound yourselves now. And it was enough to change the world once."
Her eyes locked on Elias, sharp as spearpoints.
"The rest is for you to find."
Then the fog thickened. Threads hummed like a harp plucked too soft to hear. When it thinned, Aeloria was gone.
The squad stood in silence. Oath burning in their bones. Breaths misting in cold Thornveil air. Each of them knowing without words that nothing would be the same again.
Elias lowered his spear. His body aching. His heart heavier and sharper. He looked at the faces around him, firelight in their eyes. He thought of Ava. The children they had saved. The lies they had cut.
And for the first time since his arrival, he did not feel like a man stranded. He felt like a man with a road.
"We're Ashborn now," he said. Half to himself. Half to them. "Let's make it mean something."
The Loom hummed back. Deep. Endless. As if the world itself had heard the promise.
--- End of Volume 1---
One battle is finished, but the war waits. The Ashborn walk forward into shadows deeper than Thornveil's fog, and the threads of destiny tighten around them.