At first, it was just small things.
A forgotten name on the tip of her tongue. A flickering sense of déjà vu when she walked past the old sycamore near the garden gate. A scent—rosewater and ash—that stirred something behind her eyes, then slipped away before she could catch it.
Then came the dreams. Fragmented images. Her mother's silhouette outlined by moonlight. A lullaby with no melody. Hands—gentle, calloused—tying a red ribbon in her hair. But when Lyra woke, the images blurred like ink in water. The harder she tried to hold them, the faster they slipped through her fingers.
She sat at the loom longer now, weaving with a desperation she didn't recognize in herself. As if somewhere inside the threads, in the patternless patterns, lay the answer to a question she no longer knew how to ask.
"You've been here since before dawn," Thorne said, standing in the doorway of the weaving room, his shadow long across the floorboards. "You need to stop."
Lyra's fingers didn't pause. "I'm close to something."
"You're unraveling."
His voice was too soft. That scared her more than if he'd shouted.
"I have to keep going," she whispered.
"You don't even remember what you're looking for anymore."
She looked up sharply, a protest forming—but it withered before it left her mouth. Because he was right. There was a hole inside her, a growing absence she couldn't name. She knew it was there, but she didn't know what had been taken. Like trying to remember a book you'd never read.
Thorne stepped closer, his expression worn thin with worry. "Prolonged use without grounding yourself — it causes memory bleed. You know this, Lyra. You taught me this."
She flinched at the echo of her own forgotten lesson.
Memory bleed. The weaver's curse.
Every thread, every pull of the shuttle, asked something in return. Memories were the price. To unearth the past, you had to sacrifice the present. Piece by piece, you unraveled yourself.
And Lyra had been weaving too long.
⸻
That night, she couldn't sleep. Her dreams were a chaos of color and sound. A girl's laugh, distant and hollow. A name—her own—spoken like a question. Cold hands reaching, always reaching.
She woke in a cold sweat, heart pounding like war drums.
The loom called to her, a silent pull in the dark.
She lit no candles. She moved by memory—what little of it she still possessed. The floor creaked beneath her bare feet. The loom loomed out of the darkness like a sleeping beast, waiting.
Lyra knelt.
She didn't reach for the threads at first. Instead, she placed her hands on the base of the loom, feeling the grain of the wood, the ancient grooves worn smooth by generations of weavers.
Then, her fingers found something else.
A seam.
No wider than a fingernail. Almost imperceptible.
She traced it, heart thudding. Gently, she pressed.
The wood gave with a soft click, revealing a hidden compartment beneath the loom. Inside was a single spool. Black thread, darker than pitch, so dark it seemed to absorb light. Cold to the touch. Humming with a quiet, electric life.
This wasn't part of the loom's standard offerings. This had been hidden. Forgotten—or meant to be forgotten.
Her breath came shallow as she lifted it free.
She should've stopped. She knew she should have.
But her hands were already moving.
The thread glided through her fingers like water. As it touched the loom, the room seemed to tilt. The air thickened. Shadows stretched longer than they should. And then—
The weave opened.
Not slowly. Not gently.
It ripped itself into being.
She saw her mother.
Not in a memory she recognized, but one hidden beneath layers she had never dared touch.
The night was storm-torn. Lightning slashed across the sky. Lyra was small—five, maybe six—peeking from behind a curtain. Her mother stood in the garden, arms raised, as figures emerged from the woods. Hooded. Silent. The storm didn't touch them.
The Gatherers.
She knew the name, though she had never heard it spoken.
They were memory hunters. Ghosts in the world of weavers. Stories whispered behind locked doors. The Gatherers didn't kill. They erased. They came in silence and left nothing behind but questions.
In the vision, her mother stepped forward, defiant. She said something, her voice lost in the storm. One of the figures lifted a hand.
And then—
Light. Like a sun detonating.
Lyra screamed.
The vision vanished. The loom went still.
She collapsed to the floor, breath ragged. The black thread dangled from the shuttle like a noose.
⸻
She didn't leave her room for two days.
Thorne found her huddled in the corner, eyes vacant.
"You wove it, didn't you?" he asked, quietly.
She didn't answer.
He sighed, kneeling beside her. "The black thread—it's a fragment. A memory that was never meant to be reclaimed. That's why it's hidden."
"Why?" Her voice cracked like dry wood.
"Because some memories are protected for a reason. Some truths unravel more than just the weaver."
Lyra stared at her hands. "The Gatherers took her."
Thorne didn't respond. He didn't need to.
She could see it in his face.
She remembered now.
Her mother had been a master weaver. One of the few who could stitch into the collective memory—the pool that bound every living mind. She had taught Lyra the loom's first language: that the past was not gone, only misplaced.
But her mother had also known too much. And the Gatherers… they harvested those who reached too deep.
"I have to find her," Lyra said, the tremble in her voice giving way to steel.
"She's gone."
"Not gone. Taken."
Thorne looked at her for a long time, then said, "If you go after her, there's no coming back."
"Then I won't come back."
⸻
That night, Lyra sat at the loom again.
But this time, she didn't weave.
She opened the compartment and stared at the black thread, the hum beneath her skin like a storm waiting to break. She couldn't hear her mother's voice anymore. Couldn't remember her face unless she forced it.
But she remembered the way her mother stood—a quiet defiance, chin lifted, eyes lit from within. She remembered the feel of her arms around her, the rhythm of her heartbeat when Lyra fell asleep on her chest.
She anchored herself to those fragments.
Tied them like knots around her soul.
She began to weave.
Not backward. Not into the past.
Forward.
She wove a path into the forgotten.
The loom groaned beneath her hands. The room shuddered. The walls buckled, bent, fell away.
And Lyra fell with them—into the black.
Into memory's last stronghold.
⸻
She woke on the edge of a ruin.
It was a place that didn't exist. A city built from lost time. Forgotten laughter echoed in broken alleyways. Ghosts of moments drifted like mist. Doors opened onto scenes half-remembered—weddings, funerals, first kisses, last words.
This was where the Gatherers kept what they took.
The archive of the unremembered.
She moved like a shadow through the city, following the thread in her hand. The black filament stretched ahead of her, pulsing with quiet urgency.
She passed a child chasing a red balloon that never landed. An old man singing to a gravestone with no name. A woman reading letters that burned after the final line.
And then—
She saw her.
Her mother sat beneath a withered tree, weaving a tapestry from empty space. Her eyes were blank. Her hands moved without thought.
Lyra's breath caught.
"Mother."
The woman didn't look up.
Lyra stepped closer. "It's me. It's Lyra."
Still nothing.
She knelt, pressed her forehead to her mother's hands. They were cold.
"They took you," she whispered. "But I remembered. I remembered."
A spark flickered behind her mother's eyes.
"I followed the black thread. I gave up pieces of myself to find you."
Her mother blinked. Then again.
The thread in Lyra's hand pulsed.
Her mother exhaled—a sound like wind rustling through dry leaves.
"I knew you would," she whispered.
Lyra's tears came fast and hot. "I'm here now. I'll bring you back."
But her mother shook her head slowly.
"You can't bring what doesn't belong anymore."
"I don't care. I'll stay."
"You can't do that either."
A silence stretched between them.
Then her mother reached out, gently took Lyra's hand, and pressed something into her palm.
A thread.
Not black.
Not white.
Gold.
"You must finish the weave," her mother said. "Close the path before the Gatherers follow."
The city groaned. Far off, a bell rang.
"They're coming," her mother whispered.
" Then come with me".
"I'm already gone".
Lyra's