The wind had changed.
It no longer howled through the broken trees or screamed through the Riftscars. Now it whispered, low and constant, like voices trapped in breath. It slid across Kaelen's skin like fingers brushing a page. Each gust seemed to speak his name—not in sound, but in memory.
Aelira felt it too.
They had traveled south for three days since the battlefield. Through black sands and dried rivers, through lands where nothing grew but bones and silence. The land was older here. And the shadows deeper.
Kaelen didn't ask where they were going.
The Loom was guiding him.
And he had learned to listen.
On the fourth morning, they reached the edge of the city.
It wasn't on any map. It didn't even appear real at first—just outlines through a shimmering veil of heat and air. Only when they stepped forward did it solidify.
Aelira stopped.
"It's... wrong," she said, eyes narrowed. "The angles. The buildings. They're not symmetrical. They curve away from your eye when you try to look at them."
She was right.
The city bent space—not violently, but gently, like a dream held too long. Walls seemed to fade into themselves. Streets looped in impossible patterns. Structures had windows that opened into rooms that couldn't exist.
And still, the whispers came.
Kaelen stepped forward.
Each footfall triggered flickers of memory—not his own, but someone's. A woman crying in a tower. A child holding a book of blank pages. A voice calling out to someone who no longer had a name.
They weren't illusions.
They were leftovers.
"This was a sanctuary," Kaelen said softly.
"For what?" Aelira asked.
He didn't answer.
Because even he didn't know yet.
The city had no name. No sign. But its center was clear—a cathedral of shattered glass and bone-white stone, half-collapsed but still radiating weight.
Kaelen felt it before they even reached it.
Something beneath the structure was awake.
Or waking.
Inside, the light changed.
Not dimmer—but older. It passed through the colored remnants of the glass, painting patterns across the ground. Symbols Kaelen recognized but couldn't read. Not yet.
He touched the nearest wall.
It pulsed beneath his fingers.
The Loom stirred.
And something answered.
A voice—not heard, but felt—slid into his mind.
"You returned late, Weaver."
Kaelen flinched.
Aelira reached for her blade, but he raised a hand. "It's not hostile."
The voice continued.
"Too much has unraveled. We were echoes waiting for you. Now only ash remains."
Kaelen stepped deeper.
And then the hallucination began.
The cathedral changed around him.
The air thickened.
Light bent.
And suddenly, he was no longer walking in ruin.
But in memory.
The walls were whole. The glass untouched. Candles floated through the air on invisible strands. Figures moved without feet, voices chanting in an unspoken language.
At the center of the hall stood a woman.
Tall. Pale. Veiled in white that shimmered like threads in moonlight.
She looked at him.
No, through him.
"You are the needle," she said. "But the pattern frays."
Kaelen tried to speak, but no sound came.
The woman stepped forward and placed a hand against his chest.
The pain was instant.
Every vein lit up.
Every thought became tangled.
And then—
She smiled.
"You carry the Eye. Then the Heart must still be whole. Go to the Spire of Threadless Dawn. There, you'll find what was left of your first pattern."
The world shattered.
Kaelen gasped and staggered backward.
He was back in the ruined cathedral.
Alone.
Aelira stood at the door, expression grim. "You disappeared. For almost an hour."
Kaelen looked at his hands.
They were bleeding.
Threads of silver leaking from his skin.
The Eye was active.
And something inside the Loom had changed.
They left the city by dusk.
Kaelen didn't speak for hours.
Not until they camped near a broken aqueduct far from the ruin's edge.
Then, without preamble, he said:
"That place was part of the First Weave."
Aelira raised an eyebrow.
"You mean the First World?"
"No. Older. The architecture... the voices... they weren't of the world we know. They were of something before reality as we understand it. The city wasn't built in space. It was built with it."
He looked at the fire.
"I didn't remember it. But it remembered me."
Aelira hesitated.
"What did she show you?"
Kaelen stared into the flames. "Not what. Where. A spire. One untouched by Rift or time. And something... something I must reclaim. A heart. Of what, I don't know. But she called it my first pattern."
Aelira nodded.
"Then we go."
Kaelen glanced at her. "You believe me?"
She met his eyes.
"You've never lied. Just... said too little."
He almost smiled.
Almost.
That night, Kaelen dreamed.
He stood at the base of a tower that reached beyond stars, built from uncountable voices whispering at once. The sky cracked above him. The ground bled color beneath his feet. And far above, something moved—
A shape.
A design.
The Loom, alive and weeping.
And at its center—
Him.
But not him.
A version with eyes of flame, draped in threads of dying gods, laughing as worlds unraveled beneath his will.
He woke with a start.
Aelira was already awake, sword unsheathed.
He looked at her.
"You saw it too."
She nodded once.
"You're not the only one the Loom speaks to."
Kaelen closed his eyes.
This wasn't just about power anymore.
It never was.
The Weave wasn't asking to be repaired.
It was asking to be rewritten.
And somehow, he was both the hand to do it…
And the reason it broke in the first place.