The desert wasn't a desert anymore.
It was unraveling.
The Weaver's first step shattered the dune beneath it, but instead of sand scattering, the grains froze mid-air, suspended like glass shards. The stars above twisted into spirals, constellations bleeding across the sky. Even the survivors' shadows split and rejoined, moving out of sync with their bodies.
The creature's hollow chest pulsed with fractured timers, each one screaming its own broken rhythm.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Each sound tore through bone and memory.
---
Mira's knees buckled as her vision doubled. One moment she stood in the desert, weapon raised. The next, she was twelve again, in the ashes of her hometown, staring at her mother's burning body.
"No—no, not again!" She screamed, thrusting her spear at shadows that weren't there. Her digits glitched violently, flickering between [00:00:59] and [12 Years : 3 Months].
Elara rushed to her, grabbing her shoulders. "Mira, listen to me! It's not real!"
But her own glow was faltering. The Weaver's aura clawed at her timer, rewriting it with each pulse. She saw herself dying—burned, drowned, torn apart by creatures that never existed. Each vision felt real. Each vision left scars that lingered when they faded.
---
Kael wasn't so lucky.
He lay on the ground, timer spasming between negatives and infinities. His eyes rolled back as his body convulsed. "Too many… too many deaths…" he whispered. His voice wasn't his—it was a chorus of himself, dying a thousand different ways at once.
Lysa gritted her teeth, dragging him away from the epicenter. Her own digits burned against her skin, but she forced her focus into survival. "Move, damn it!"
But the Weaver's gaze followed, its fractured face tilting. Its presence stretched reality. Every step it took echoed twice, once in the present and once in a timeline that no longer existed.
---
And Aelric…
The corruption in his arm surged like wildfire. His digits flashed—[0:00:00], [∞], blank, then back again. For an instant, he saw himself as bones in the sand, as a corpse rotting in chains, as a child who never survived his first timer.
He shook his head violently, gripping his sword until his knuckles cracked. The whispers in his veins screamed, demanding surrender, demanding he let go.
But he laughed instead. A low, ragged, defiant laugh.
"You think you're the first monster to tell me I shouldn't exist?" he snarled, raising the sword. "I've been a mistake since the day I was born. Doesn't mean I'm done yet."
The Weaver's hollow chest pulsed. The tick stuttered, like a clock hesitating.
Then it lunged.
---
The world tore.
The Weaver's arm, stitched from bone and rusted steel, swung with the weight of collapsing timelines. Aelric barely managed to block, his corrupted arm screaming as the impact sent cracks into the ground. The collision shattered the air itself, creating a shockwave that knocked the survivors sprawling.
Sand exploded upward, then froze mid-air, each grain suspended like shattered glass.
Elara threw up a barrier of light, shielding Mira and Kael. It flickered violently, like it too was being rewritten by the Weaver's presence.
"Aelric!" she shouted. "You can't fight it head-on!"
"Too late!" he roared back, pushing against the Weaver's arm. His sword crackled with warped energy, a mix of his own essence and the corruption that clawed through his veins.
The Weaver's fractured clock-face loomed inches from his.
"Unravel."
Reality buckled.
---
Suddenly, Aelric was standing alone in a void.
No desert. No survivors. Just him, the Weaver, and the endless ticking.
On his wrist, his digits spun like a broken wheel—forward, backward, blank. His breath came ragged as he staggered. "What… is this?"
The Weaver's voice was the breaking of countless clocks.
"You are a fracture. A thread that should have been cut. I am the loom. I am here to mend what is broken."
"Yeah?" Aelric spat blood, tightening his grip on the sword. "Then try me."
The Weaver lifted its hollow chest. Inside, the timers flared, overlapping, screaming. One by one, the digits warped into faces—faces of the dead, the fallen, those Aelric had lost.
Elara's face. Mira's. Kael's. Even Lysa's, eyes already dim.
"You are their undoing," the Weaver intoned. "Your thread frays all others."
For the first time, Aelric's grin faltered. His hand trembled on the hilt.
But then he heard it—faint, almost drowned out by the ticking.
Elara's voice.
Aelric, fight.
His head snapped up. The void rippled. For an instant, he saw her—Elara, standing with the others, still fighting, still alive.
And his grin returned, sharper than ever.
"Guess I'm not unraveling today."
---
The void shattered.
Aelric burst back into reality, sword blazing with dark fire. The Weaver staggered as his blade carved through its stitched arm, sending shards of bone and rust raining into the frozen sand.
The survivors gasped, some regaining clarity. Mira blinked hard, the illusion of her dead mother fading. Kael stopped convulsing, though he still trembled. Elara's barrier flared stronger, her eyes locked on Aelric.
He stood in front of them, corrupted arm blazing like molten black steel, sword humming with unstable power. His digits still flickered wildly—but for now, they hadn't gone blank.
"Alright, clock-face," Aelric growled. "Let's dance."
---
The Weaver roared. Not with sound—with time. The noise wasn't heard but felt, a tearing in their bones, a scream in every digit of their timers.
It raised both arms, threads of fractured light spilling from its hollow chest. The threads lashed toward the survivors, each one aimed to bind, to rewrite, to erase.
Elara threw herself forward, glowing hands slashing through some of the threads, though each cut left her gasping. Mira stabbed her spear into the ground, anchoring herself against the pull. Lysa darted like a shadow, slicing threads before they could catch Kael.
And Aelric—Aelric surged forward, blade raised high, his grin mad and unyielding.
Every step cracked the desert. Every swing of his sword clashed against the Weaver's time-born threads. His corrupted arm burned hotter with each strike, whispering louder, demanding he give in.
But he didn't.
Not yet.
---
For hours—or seconds, time no longer mattered—the battle raged. The Weaver bent reality with every move, dragging them into false deaths, alternate lives, fractured memories. The survivors bled, broke, screamed.
And still, they stood.
Because Aelric refused to fall.
And as long as he stood, they would not unravel.
---
To be continued…