The stars had changed.
They no longer shimmered with distant indifference.
Now, they watched.
From above the Cradle, the sky opened—not with thunder, but with silence deep enough to swallow prayers. A chasm of nothing tore across the firmament, and from it descended the Hollow Prince.
No announcement.No blinding arrival.Only a whisper:
"So… you touched the Loom."
The Hollow Prince Appears
He wore a crown of threads, burning softly with each word spoken in rebellion.
His skin was porcelain.His eyes voids.And around him floated twelve relics—shards of gods he'd silenced.
Vyn froze beside Cael.
"Run," she whispered.
"No," Cael said. "He came for me."
The Hollow Prince stepped onto the Plateau as if it bowed to him.
"Cael," he said, voice like dust in the lungs."You have committed the most sacred heresy."
Cael's grip tightened around the hilt of his broken threadblade. The Loom's essence still pulsed through him, but erratically now—as if the very pattern inside him was resisting.
"Good," he said. "That means I'm doing something right."
⚔ The Battle of Threads
There were no formalities.
The Hollow Prince moved first.
A flicker—and reality folded.
Cael was flung backward, crashing through memory-stone pillars. Vyn leapt forward, singing the Thread Hymn once more, wrapping Cael in protective verse.
But the Hollow Prince was a being of pure dominion. His thread control surpassed everything. Even the Loom had once feared him.
"You think you're the first," he said, twisting the air around Cael into a cage of regrets."Every generation has one fool who believes they can rewrite the pattern. I bury them all."
Cael roared, the cage shattering.
"I'm not here to rewrite it," he growled. "I'm here to burn it down."
The sky turned white.
Final Stand
Cael threw everything at the Prince.
Raw threadlight.Echoes of gods.Fragments of his own memory, weaponized.
Still not enough.
The Hollow Prince impaled him with a spear made from his mother's voice—"You are not enough"—driven straight through his chest.
Cael dropped.
Vyn screamed.
But just before his thread unraveled...
He remembered the first moment he ever rebelled.
In the Pit.When he refused to die.
He whispered to the Loom inside him:
"If I must fall... then let me fall as myself."
And the Loom responded.
Not with light.
But with reversal.
Birth of the Threadless
Cael's body surged with reversed fate.
Where the Prince sought control, Cael embraced chaos.
Where the Loom wanted obedience, Cael gave it choice.
His body burst into iridescent strands—half-mortal, half-myth, neither god nor echo.
"I am not yours," he said, rising. "I am the first Threadless."
And he struck.
The Hollow Prince staggered.
For the first time in millennia, he bled.
Ending: A New Pattern Begins
The Prince vanished, whispering:
"We'll meet again, Patternbreaker."
And the Cradle, now cracked and empty, collapsed into itself.
Cael and Vyn stood alone on the ruins.
Silence.
Then a single thread descended from the sky—soft, golden, pulsing with warmth.
Not from a god.
Not from the Loom.
But from the world itself.
A new pattern.
Woven not from prophecy.
But from choice.
Cael reached out and caught it.