There is no beginning.
Only residue.
Ash from choices not made.
Echoes of lies not told.
And silence—thick, suffocating—left behind by a truth that hasn't finished echoing.
Kael opened his eyes.
He expected fire. Or oblivion. Or something holy and terrifying.
But all he saw… was fog.
Infinite. Weightless. White.
His body didn't ache. His thoughts didn't race.
There was no time here.
Just after.
He looked at his hands—unmarked now. No sigils, no pain. Just… hands. Flesh. Skin.
"Kael."
The voice wasn't from around him.
It was in him.
A soft murmur curled from his ribs to his skull, like a memory that never happened.
He turned—
And saw no one.
But the world rippled, like the threads of reality were still figuring out what came next.
Meanwhile…
Rin stumbled through fields of golden grass that hummed like lullabies. The sky above her pulsed—breathing like a living organism, dotted with stars that moved like eyes.
There were no maps here. No rulers. No chains.
Only freedom.
And it terrified her.
She screamed once. Loud, raw, defiant.
The world didn't echo it.
It absorbed it.
As if it had been waiting for someone like her to break first.
Mace was drowning in war.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Endless battlefield. Corpses of titans. Machines of fate walking on shattered crowns. The throne's emblem was etched into every sky, burned into every flag, whispered in every dying soldier's prayer.
He fought for no one.
He fought because that's all this version of him had ever done.
He didn't remember how to be anything else.
But deep beneath the blood and fire, a thought was growing.
"What if I just… stopped?"
Juno flipped through a book.
Then another.
Then another.
Each one was a ghost. A possibility. A life he almost lived.
In one, he was a tyrant. In another, a healer. In another still, he died at birth and was never named.
All of them ended the same.
A blank page.
He began writing his own story.
Not because he wanted to be free.
But because he was done being read.
Azerai stared into a mirror.
Her reflection stared back. But it wasn't her.
Each mirror showed a version of herself—warrior, queen, monster, void.
One asked, "Who do you serve?"
Another asked, "Who do you fear?"
But the final mirror—
the one cracked, bleeding light—
asked only one thing:
"Do you want to know who wrote you?"
Kael stood before the loom.
The needle pulsed in his hand. Not with magic, but with choice.
He hadn't used it.
Not yet.
The stitched-eyed figure sat beside him now, cross-legged like a child watching a story unfold.
"You haven't chosen."
"I don't know what to write," Kael murmured.
"You already have," it said. "The moment you took the needle, you chose to unmake certainty."
Kael frowned. "What does that mean?"
The figure leaned close.
"It means the weave is bleeding."
Across every realm, every thread, every echo of reality—things began to unravel.
Not violently.
Organically.
Like the system itself was trying to forget how to control.
New stars appeared where none were mapped.
People began dreaming dreams not authorized by fate.
The throne—whatever it had been—was silent.
And in the spaces between spaces, where reality thins and thought becomes substance—
The sixth mark shimmered like a wound that refused to close.
It wasn't dormant.
It was watching.
Waiting.
Because what Kael had done wasn't end the story.
He had handed it back to the players.
To Mace, fighting in a war that could be refused.
To Rin, walking a world that dared her to define it.
To Juno, writing new laws in ink that bled.
To Azerai, facing mirrors that no longer lied.
To himself, standing before a loom with a needle that could weave anything—
Even love.
Even death.
Even peace.
Even—
Something that had never been allowed.
Freedom.
> Somewhere, in a reality not yet born, a child looked up at a sky full of threads— And smiled.