To turn a city of obsidian and iron into a ghost, Alicia didn't look to the forge; she looked to the Grave-Sea. She knew that the only thing the Hollow-Skippers couldn't track was something that technically didn't exist in the present.
"We need to desynchronize," Alicia commanded, her voice amplified by the High Spire's resonance. "We aren't going to hide. We're going to fall between the beats of time."
She plunged the raven-bone pen into the Red Loom-Eye's cradle. Instead of ink, she drew out a thread of pure crimson light and began to weave it into the indigo shadow-thread. This was the "Temporal Hem"—a stitch that would allow the Citadel-Beast to vibrate at a frequency just slightly out of phase with the Loom-Currents.
The effect was harrowing. The Citadel's walls began to transparentize, turning into a shimmering, violet-red mist. The survivors in the plaza looked like echoes of themselves, their voices sounding like they were coming from the bottom of a deep well.
"It's working!" Nelluru's voice was a ghostly whisper, her lime-green aura now a faint, emerald haze. "The Skippers... they're losing the scent!"
Outside, the translucent dragonfly-beasts began to dart erratically. They could no longer feel the wake of the city; to their senses, the Citadel had become a hole in the universe. They shrieked in confusion before peeling away, their glass wings shattering as they fell out of the high-speed current.
But as the city turned into a ghost, the "Between" changed. Without the anchor of solid reality, the Citadel began to drift toward the deeper, unmapped edges of the currents. Shapes began to form in the crimson fog—colossal, silent silhouettes of "Old-World Leviathans" that had been trapped in the margins since the first Spindle broke.
"Alicia, we're moving too far out!" the Architect warned, his translucent hands trembling. "If we go any deeper, we won't be ghosts. We'll be memories. And memories don't have a way back."
Suddenly, a massive, skeletal fin—made of solidified starlight and frozen screams—sliced through the current just meters from the High Spire.