To save the tapestry, Lyra shows Elias the Shroud. She lets him touch the silver threads of other lives—a painter who became a clerk, a queen who ran away to be a poet. He sees that these "Echoes" aren't just remnants of failure; they are the weight that holds the world steady.
"If you bring her back," Lyra whispers, "you erase the person you became because you loved her. You become a hollow note in a song with no ending." Elias realizes that by trying to fix the past, he has stopped living in the present. The echo of his wife wasn't a call to return; it was a song to carry forward.