The loom had never hummed like this before.
Lyra sat before it, her fingers ghosting over the shuttle as threads shimmered and snapped into patterns. It no longer resisted her. It responded. With each pass, memory wove itself into form — not her own, but those belonging to others, tangled and half-faded, pulled from the skeins that ran deeper than time.
She wasn't weaving stories. She was unweaving lies.
The Gatherers appeared again — but not as looming shadows or whispering threats. Not this time. She saw them as they truly were: not malevolent, not monsters, but custodians. Frayed at the edges, spectral, solemn. They didn't devour memories; they collected the ones that had grown too unstable to bear, the ones left half-formed by broken hearts and unfinished truths. Their purpose had never been destruction.
They were the loom's safeguard.
My mother didn't fear them, Lyra realized. She defied them.
And then the threads twisted, darker now, and the loom drew her deeper — to Elira.
Her mother's face flickered into being across the tapestry. Not young, not old, just worn. Behind her eyes: guilt. The memory-thread stretched thinner now, the loom strained to show what remained. Lyra clutched the shuttle harder and held the weave steady.
She saw a man.
He was laughing in one memory, tucking a lock of Elira's hair behind her ear in another. Then: a hospital bed. Then: silence.
He was someone Lyra had never known — and someone Elira had tried to bring back.
But you cannot pull the dead from memory. Not without tearing the rest apart.
Her mother had tried. In secret. Not with spell or science, but with the loom — with the deepest part of its pattern, the black thread. That was the costliest weave, the one that blurred the line between remembering and remaking. Elira had tried to reverse time, not to change the world, but to hold one person a little longer.
And in doing so, she'd ripped holes in the memory-fabric of others.
Lyra stepped back from the loom, reeling. A child's laughter cut off mid-note in the thread. A lover's name spoken but never remembered again. Elira hadn't meant to cause harm — but the Gatherers had intervened all the same, sealing the loom, scattering memory fragments, waiting for someone who could untangle the damage without trying to rewrite the past.
That someone was Lyra.
But now the loom whispered a choice.
She could stop. Seal the loom again. Live a quiet life. Forget all this — forget them, even her mother. She could wake up tomorrow and remember nothing stranger than dreams.
Or she could keep weaving, follow the black thread to its end, and see — truly see — what her mother had done… and why.
The loom would not offer both.
She looked down at her hands, ink-stained from her notes, calloused now from weaving. So much had been taken already. But she'd also found something: a map of memory, a trace of truth through grief.
And even if the story hurt — it was hers to finish.
"I'm not done," she whispered, setting the shuttle once more between the threads. "Not yet."