Five years later, a young curator at the British Museum, cataloguing a bequest of minor antiquities, opens a dusty box. Inside, among Roman coins and Egyptian shabtis, is a single, unremarkable potsherd. She turns it over. On the reverse is a tiny, incised labyrinth, and at its centre, a question mark.
Puzzled, she checks the accession notes. Donated anonymously, decades ago. No provenance. She almost discards it as a modern fake, a child's scratch. But something makes her pause. She takes a photograph and emails it to a colleague who works on Cypriot pottery.
The colleague writes back: "Interesting! The fabric is local, but the symbol… not sure. Could be a tourist souvenir. Put it in the 'Study Collection'?
The young curator labels it: "OSTRACON, CLAY. UNKNOWN PROVENANCE. POSS. MODERN." She assigns it a number and places it in a tray with other fragments, where it will sit, unseen, for years.
In a quiet atelier across the city, an older woman closes a journal, her work for the day done. She feels a familiar, faint tremor in the world's weave—not a pull, just the gentle acknowledgement of a pattern continuing. She smiles, a small, private thing, and turns out the light.
The thread, once pulled, never truly disappears. It simply becomes part of the cloth.