Dust and broken light swirled across the valley floor as Kaelen and Aelira stood at the ridge's edge, peering down at the ruin below.
It had no name.
Not anymore.
Whatever it once was—city, temple, fortress—had been erased from records, swallowed by the collapse of time and memory. What remained were fragments: towers turned sideways, roads spiraling upward, and buildings whose windows led nowhere.
But Kaelen felt it.
Like a splinter lodged in the skin of reality.
"This is the place," he murmured.
Aelira frowned, lowering her hood. The wind caught her hair, casting strands across her sharp, angular face. "It feels... wrong. Like walking into someone else's dream."
Kaelen said nothing. The pull was stronger here than anywhere before. The whispers had grown clearer, more coherent, threading through the Weave itself. The city didn't merely exist—it remembered.
He took the first step.
The moment they crossed the threshold of the outer ruins, the sound changed.
No birds. No wind. No shifting dust.
Only silence—and something beneath it. Like breath held behind glass.
Buildings leaned at impossible angles. Walls folded into themselves. Stairs ran sideways into pillars and melted into floor tiles. It wasn't decay. It was a corruption of design. A blueprint rewritten by something that had never been sane.
"These structures..." Aelira ran her fingers along a warped archway. "They weren't made. They were dreamed into being."
Kaelen crouched by a mural half-buried in ash.
It depicted a figure with threads of light spilling from its fingers. It stood before a throne of screaming stars, faceless, with a crown shaped like a loom.
Kaelen narrowed his eyes.
"That's a First Weaver," he whispered. "Or... a memory of one."
Aelira stepped beside him. "The same crown from your vision."
He nodded slowly. The scent of ozone and ink lingered in the air. The Weave here had been overwritten—by something older than gods and more precise than mortals.
"These ruins aren't just relics," Kaelen murmured. "They're... echoes. Living ones."
They moved deeper into the city.
And the voices began again.
Unlike before, they didn't scream. They whispered.
Faint. Layered. Meaningless. Terrifying.
Kaelen tried to focus—tried to extract patterns from the murmur—but every time he drew close to understanding, it slipped, as if the thoughts themselves were greased.
He placed a hand on a broken wall.
The surface rippled.
For a second, Kaelen wasn't himself. He was someone else. Standing in this same city. Watching it burn.
He blinked—and the vision vanished.
Aelira caught his arm.
"You went still for ten seconds," she said. Her voice was taut. "Eyes blank."
Kaelen exhaled slowly. "This place... it's feeding us memories. But not our own."
"Is that safe?"
"Not even remotely."
They came to the heart of the ruin—a sunken courtyard filled with inverted statues. Figures with no eyes and too many mouths. Each whispered into the next.
Kaelen approached the center.
A vast circular platform lay cracked in half. Runes circled its edge—runes in a language not meant for tongues, but for threads. Only Weavers could read them. Or things like them.
He began to translate aloud.
"Here... the Pattern was cast. Here... the Loom unraveled. Here... the Shadow dreamed itself into light."
Aelira stepped back, her knives drawn. "Kaelen... the shadows are moving."
He turned.
She was right.
The statues had shifted. Their necks craned. Their mouths gaped. The whispers grew louder—and now, they were directed.
At him.
We know you.
You are not yet.
But you were always.
Kaelen clenched his fists. "Back."
Aelira didn't hesitate. They stepped away from the altar—
And the world bent.
Suddenly they stood somewhere else.
Same courtyard. Same statues. But different.
The sky above was now bleeding. A red aurora hung above, streaking across a warped sky. The buildings around them shimmered, phasing between ruin and glory. In this version, the city was alive.
Lights in the towers.
People moving in shadow.
And at the altar—
A figure.
A man.
Tall, draped in robes stitched with stars. No face. Just a mask of woven silver threads.
Kaelen stepped forward instinctively.
The figure raised a hand.
Time shattered.
Kaelen dropped to one knee, gasping. His mind split in three. He saw himself as a child—then as an old man—then as something not human.
"Who are you?" he snarled.
The figure didn't speak.
Instead, it extended a thread.
Kaelen hesitated. Reached.
And the thread unraveled—pouring visions into his mind.
A loom made of galaxies. A scream that unmade ten thousand timelines. A weaver who tried to change fate—and was cast into oblivion for it.
Kaelen screamed.
Then everything went dark.
He awoke in Aelira's arms.
They were back in the original courtyard. The sky was its normal bruised grey. The altar was cracked and dead.
He gasped, grabbing her arm.
"Did you see it?"
"No," she said. "But I felt it. Like the Weave itself blinked."
Kaelen stood, body trembling.
"He showed me something. Not a vision. A... seed. A truth."
"And?"
Kaelen looked at the cracked loom-circle.
"It wasn't a ruin. It was a warning."
They left before the whispers grew bold again.
Back through the city of half-buildings and angled madness, back through the shattered gates that once held memories of gods.
By nightfall, they camped in the shallow rise of a dry ridge.
Aelira tended the fire.
Kaelen sat alone, hands steepled before him.
His thoughts were chaos.
There was a pattern—he knew it now. These ruins weren't random. They were part of a larger Weave, scattered by design. And someone—something—was waiting at the end of the pattern.
"Are you sure about this path?" Aelira asked softly.
Kaelen didn't answer for a while.
Then:
"I was made for this path."
She tilted her head. "You don't even know who made you."
Kaelen turned to her, silver-purple eyes gleaming in the firelight.
"That's exactly why I need to find out."