The black thread waited for her.
It pulsed faintly beneath the others — darker than shadow, not absence but consequence. The loom did not tremble this time. It accepted her touch as if it had been waiting, not for Elira's desperation, but for Lyra's understanding.
She wove it not in fear, but in clarity.
And the world fell away.
What surrounded her now was not memory, exactly — not a place, not a dream. It was a moment unmoored, floating between thread and thought. A space only accessible through the loom's final stitch. Time pooled strangely here. Windless, weightless, still.
And in the center stood Elira.
Not the broken woman from her final days, not the mother fraying at the edges of herself — but whole. Real. Waiting.
"I hoped you'd come," she said.
Lyra tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat.
Elira stepped closer. "I left this part untouched. One moment, sealed away. For you."
"Why?" Lyra managed.
"Because I knew what it would cost you to find me," Elira said. "And what I couldn't bring myself to say in life."
She lifted her hands, showing Lyra a spindle wound with thread — hers. Lyra's childhood, her first lie, her first story. All intact. Elira hadn't tried to erase her daughter. She'd protected her from the loom's unraveling.
"I thought," Elira said softly, "that if I remembered him strongly enough, I could bring him back. But memory is not a door. It's a mirror. I was chasing a ghost and turned the loom into a weapon without meaning to."
Lyra's eyes stung.
"You always told me stories were magic," she said.
"They are," Elira replied. "But not because they change the world. Because they show us what it means to lose something, and still go on."
She stepped back.
"The loom does not create," she said. "It remembers what we dare not."
The memory-fragment began to dissolve. Time pulling taut again. This moment was ending.
"Wait," Lyra said, reaching for her. "I don't want to forget this."
"You won't," Elira said, fading. "Not if you tell it."
And then she was gone.
Back in the attic, Lyra sat before the loom. Threads loose. Spindle still. But something had shifted in her — not a loss, not entirely. A quieting.
She took the black thread one final time and sealed it into the weave, knotting it closed. The loom pulsed once, faintly. Then grew silent.
Memories had a cost. But so did clarity.
In the days that followed, Lyra began to forget certain things. A particular scent from childhood. The tune of a lullaby her mother once hummed. Some losses stung, others slipped past unnoticed.
But she wrote.
She wrote everything she could remember — and everything she couldn't — shaping it into stories. Not magic, not spellwork, just truth. She wrote about the loom, and the Gatherers, and the black thread. About grief and forgiveness, and the strange shape of love that lingers even after memory fails.
People listened. They always did, when a story rang true.
And through her stories, those lost pieces lived on.
The loom remained quiet after that. Covered now. Still.
But in the silence, Lyra finally heard what her mother had tried to tell her all along.
That remembering wasn't about holding on.
It was about letting go — gently.
And so, the loom grew quiet, but her stories did not.