The world became light and screaming.
When Zayn's cuff shattered, his Domain surged out of its cage like a starving animal, colliding with the Thread‑Well's wild eruption. For an instant, he saw everything the pillar touched: Threads being ripped out, twisted, forced back into wrong shapes; people hollowed into puppets; the Loom itself stretching thin around a forced knot deep beneath the Temple.
Pain lanced through his skull. His knees hit stone.
"Zayn!" Renn's voice came from somewhere behind him, thin and distant.
The husks closed in, answering the mountain Seer's call like hunting dogs. Their void‑eyes blazed whiter, mouths opening in wordless hunger. Each step they took left blackened footprints on the wet cobbles, as if the world wanted to recoil from them and could not.
Zayn pushed himself upright.
Inside, his power roared.
For the first time since his rebirth, he dropped all restraint.
The nearest husk lunged, fingers spread to grab his face. Zayn reached—not for its body, not for its stolen Thread, but for the moment it had stepped out of the pillar. He found that instant in the Loom, that single frame where it crossed from below to above, and tore it out.
Reality hiccuped.
The husk vanished mid‑lunge.
Not fell. Not exploded. One heartbeat it existed, the next the street was simply empty where it had been. Rain fell through the gap as if nothing had occupied that space in years. The pillar's tether to that puppet snapped with an audible crack.
The other husks staggered.
Zayn's lips peeled back in a thin, fierce smile.
"So," he thought, tasting blood, "I don't have to erase minds. I can erase events."
Another husk charged. He deleted the instant its foot left the ground. Its body remained frozen in mid‑step, balanced on a heel that would never fall. Threadless, unsupported, it crumbled into dust, collapsing in slow, eerie silence.
The pillar screamed—an inhuman sound vibrating through bone and stone.
Below, the mountain Seer looked up sharply.
Zayn felt that gaze like a knife.
He kept moving.
He didn't try to erase the pillar itself; that was too large, too rooted in the Thread‑Well. But he could clip its claws. Each time a lash whipped toward him, he sheared off the moment of impact, forcing the Loom to jump from "threatening" to "already past." The lash still existed, but the harm it would have done simply… never happened.
His head pounded with the strain. Blood trickled from his nose.
"Every cut I make," he thought through the pain, "is a debt the Loom will one day try to collect. But that day is not today."
Husks shrieked as their stolen Threads lost purchase, stumbling like drunkards when the steps they thought they'd taken were pulled from under them.
Behind him, Renn stared, shaking. "What are you?" he whispered.
Zayn didn't answer.
He dove toward the edge of the rupture.
Heat licked his face; the glow seared his vision. Through the swirling light, he saw the Temple's lower levels laid bare—rooms where people writhed on tables, cuffs blazing, Threads being siphoned through sigil‑etched channels into the Well. Priests chanted. Wardens held people down as their souls were peeled.
And at the center, on a stone platform above the heart of the Well, stood the mountain Seer.
Up close, the man's features snapped into cruel clarity.
He was older than Elric had been, hair threaded with grey, face lined by sun and strain. A thin scar crossed his left brow. His eyes, though, were the same colour as Elric remembered from another life's council chambers: pale, intense, seeing Threads everywhere.
"Elric Veyne," the Seer called up, voice booming through the pillar.
For a heartbeat, Zayn's heart stuttered.
He had never given this world that name.
The Seer smiled.
"I wondered where you'd fallen," he said. "The Loom does not waste interesting mistakes."
Renn glanced wildly between them. "Elric—?"
Zayn's hand clamped on his shoulder without looking. "Say that name again," he said softly, "and I decide whether this moment exists."
Renn swallowed the word.
The Seer spread his arms.
"You burned your Thread and took another," he said. "You tore free of our Loom and forced your way into mine. Did you think that would go unnoticed?"
Zayn's lips curled. "You speak as if you own a world," he said. "That arrogance alone tells me the Loom does not choose its servants for their humility."
Below, on the platform, bodies convulsed as their Threads were drained into the Well, feeding the pillar, feeding the husks.
"This city is diseased," the Seer said. "Their Threads are corrupted—Frayed by greed, addiction, heresy. I am cutting rot away from the weave."
Zayn glanced at the street, at the broken, hollowed corpses.
"Interesting," he said. "Your surgery seems to involve tearing out organs and throwing them at bystanders."
"Collateral threads," the Seer said. "A necessary tangle. In my old court, you once argued that a king should feel every death he caused. Now you object when I make a city feel its own."
Elric's memories shivered at the words.
For a moment, Zayn saw himself in an old council hall, voice raised, insisting that rulers should drown in the truth of their actions.
"Hypocrite," a distant part of him whispered.
He strangled it.
"I object," Zayn said calmly, "when your methods interfere with mine."
The Seer laughed once, harsh. "Of course," he said. "You always did care more for your own design than the Loom's."
His gaze sharpened.
"Come down," he said. "Walk into the clinic voluntarily. I will examine the knot you have become. Together, we can repair what you broke."
Zayn's Domain writhed at the thought. He felt the pillar's pull strengthen, trying to draw him closer, to wrap him in raw Thread and rip him apart.
"Walk willingly into the jaws," he thought. "Only the naive call that redemption."
Aloud, he said, "No."
He reached inward, deeper than before.
Until now, he had erased specific instants, small knots. The pillar, the Seer, the clinics below—these were whole tapestries. Too big to cut cleanly.
But there was something else he could target.
Not the event.
The rule.
Threads obeyed law: cause and effect, distance and strain, Tension and Fray. His Domain sat outside that law—a parasite, a loophole. If he could erase one tiny law here, even briefly…
He found it: the pattern that bound the pillar's hunger to those husks, the "command" that told them to bring him down. The Loom's enforcement of that instruction, woven hastily by the Seer.
Zayn gripped that instruction and tore.
The effect was immediate.
Every husk froze mid‑step.
Their void eyes flickered, confused. The tether pulling them toward him snapped; for a heartbeat, they stood unmoored, Threads flailing.
Then the pillar panicked.
Raw power surged, uncontrolled, lashing at anything and everything. Husks exploded in bursts of light and gore. One burst so close that a wave of hot blood washed over Zayn, splattering his face and coat with steaming crimson and glowing motes of half‑digested Threads.
The rupture widened—then contracted violently, like a wound trying to close too fast.
The street buckled again. Stones heaved upward, tossing people into the air like dolls. Buildings groaned; a balcony tore free and crashed down, crushing a priest who had rushed out to "help".
From the platform, the Seer staggered, hand to his head.
"What have you done?" he snarled.
"I removed your leash," Zayn said. "Now your dogs are eating your hand."
The pillar's light began to collapse inward, dragging loose debris, corpses, and screaming half‑alive victims back into the chasm. The husks were pulled too, flailing and tearing, some ripped in half at the waist as the Well chose which parts to reclaim.
One tore free long enough to latch onto a fleeing child. Zayn erased the fraction of a second where its hand would have touched, leaving it grasping air. The child escaped, not knowing his life had been edited by a monster.
The strain hit Zayn like a hammer.
His nose streamed blood. His vision tunneled. Somewhere behind him, Renn yelled his name—Zayn, not Elric—and grabbed his arm before he stumbled into the collapsing zone.
The pillar imploded.
With a deafening roar, the column of light sucked itself downward, like water draining from a basin. The chasm's edges cracked and fell inward. For a heartbeat, the world was nothing but blinding white and the sound of Threads screaming.
Then it was gone.
The rupture sealed in an instant, stone knitting over like scar tissue. The street was left broken, scorched, littered with pieces of what had been people. Blood soaked the seams. A hand twitched once and stilled.
The only remaining sign of the Well's fury was a faint, ugly shimmer in the air and a ringing in Zayn's bones.
He dropped to one knee, gasping.
Around them, silence fell—a shocked, trembling hush.
Then the survivors began to sob, pray, or crawl away.
Zayn tasted bile. His Domain coiled weakly, drained.
"Costly," he thought. "I tore at a law, and the Loom screamed. Do that often enough and it will notice the pattern that is me."
Renn knelt beside him. "Can you stand?" he demanded.
"Unfortunately," Zayn said hoarsely.
He pushed up.
Below, the chasm was gone. So was the platform.
The Seer, though, was not.
He stood on the sealed street where the rupture had been, robes smoking, blood trickling from one ear. He was breathing hard, but his eyes burned brighter than ever.
He looked up at Zayn and smiled.
"For a moment," he called, "I lost you."
Zayn met his gaze.
"For a moment," he replied, "I considered letting you keep this world."
The Seer's smile widened.
"This isn't about worlds," he said. "It's about patterns. You are an error in the weave, Elric Veyne. And I am very good at correcting errors."
He lifted a hand.
Zayn felt something twist behind his eyes—sharp and intimate. Not an attack on his body, not on his Thread.
On his name.
In the Loom, some far‑distant knot labelled "Elric Veyne" flickered.
The Seer was reaching backward, fingers sliding along the tapestry toward the moment on the mountain, toward the point where Elric had let go.
"I can erase you too," the Seer whispered—not aloud, but inside Zayn's skull. "Not just here, but there. I can make it so you never jumped. So you never burned. So you never became this."
Images slammed into Zayn: the mountain rim, Marek's scar, Lena's hand, Gesh's rust. The seconds before the fall.
"If I let him," Zayn realised, "he'll rewrite my first death. He'll smother Zayn under a version of Elric that never broke."
The thought was more terrifying than the pillar.
Renn saw none of this. He only saw Zayn's face go white.
"What is he doing?" Renn demanded.
Zayn's jaw clenched.
Inside, under the Seer's invasive touch, something else moved—a coal buried in ash.
The Loom had records. But it also had gaps—places where Zayn's Domain had already eaten.
He grabbed one of those gaps, dragged it over the mountain memory, and snarled into the Seer's presence:
"You can't rewrite what I already devoured."
The Seer hissed.
The pressure vanished.
Both men staggered—one atop the ruined street, one on the fractured steps.
They stared at each other across the distance, breathing hard.
"Very well," the Seer said softly. "Keep your corruption. It will only make your final unthreading more enlightening."
He lifted two fingers to his temple in a mocking salute.
"Until the next inspection, Elric."
Wardens rushed in around him, forming a protective knot. Temple bells began to toll in a pattern Zayn didn't recognize—an alarm for internal disaster.
The Seer turned away, disappearing into the swirl of robes and steel.
Renn grabbed Zayn's arm. "We have to go," he insisted. "Before they lock this whole district and start dragging people to clinics."
Zayn let himself be pulled, steps automatic.
His mind was elsewhere.
"He tried to kill my past," Zayn thought, stomach cold. "I thought my greatest weapon was erasing other people. I forgot the obvious: someone else might learn to erase me."
They slipped through alleys, avoiding the forming cordons, until the Temple square was a distant bruise behind them.
Only when they were safe in South Weir's cramped streets did Renn stop, panting.
"What happened back there?" he demanded. "Those… things. The pillar. And you. The way you made them just—stop."
Zayn wiped dried blood from his upper lip.
"A demonstration," he said quietly. "Of why this world should be very afraid of what its priests are doing under the Temple."
"And of you," Renn said.
Zayn smiled, eyes flat.
"Especially of me."
Renn stared at him for a long moment.
"I need to know one thing," he said finally. "If that Seer finds a way to unmake you… does everything you erased come back?"
Zayn considered it.
"Possibly," he said. "Or it might stay gone, leaving a hole where I used to be. Either way, the Loom will scream."
Renn swallowed. "So if you die, the world either remembers every crime you hid… or it breaks worse."
"Welcome," Zayn said, "to the value of my continued existence."
He started walking.
Renn caught his sleeve. "Where are you going now?"
Zayn didn't look back.
"Home," he said. "To talk to Mera. I need to know every rumour she's ever heard about Seers who can reach into other worlds."
He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought:
"And after that, I'm going to find Sera."
Renn frowned. "Why? You erased her memory. She's safe."
"She was," Zayn said. "Until today."
His eyes were very cold.
"If the Temple is ripping Threads out of 'corrupted' souls," he said, "they'll need names. Lists. Anyone who ever bent their rules, even once."
He thought of Sera selling door rotations to save her brother, of her blank confusion when she'd walked past him this morning.
"I erased her memory," he said. "I didn't erase her guilt. On paper, she's still perfect for their experiments."
Renn went pale. "You think they'll take her?"
"I think," Zayn said, "that somewhere in a clinic ledger, her name is already underlined."
He looked up at the Weir's distant pulse.
"And if I want to keep my tools," he added, "I can't let someone else hollow them out first."
He smiled—a thin, merciless curve.
"Time," he thought, "to see just how far I'm willing to go to protect something I claim to only use."
He turned down a side street toward the Temple district again.
Behind him, Renn hesitated—then followed.
High above, on an unseen balcony, the mountain Seer watched two tiny figures moving against the city's weave and whispered to the Loom:
"Show me every Thread they touch."
In answer, a new pattern began to glow in the tapestry—one that traced not just Zayn's path, but every mind he had ever erased.
And at the end of that glowing trail, far beyond Zayn's knowledge, a familiar name flickered back to life on a rust‑stained stone:
Elric Veyne.