"I stitched myself into the pattern.But now the pattern has begun to stitch back.And it's stitching without asking."
It began, not with a whisper or a flicker of thread, but with stillness.
A kind of stillness that didn't belong to the world he knew.
Darian sat motionless at the edge of his cot, gloved hand resting on his lap, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the pale ceiling above. But the stillness wasn't his.
It was in the seam.
The one inside him.
The one he'd sewn into his own being back in the chamber of threads—back when he made his first choice. Back when he thought he could control the stitching.
But something had changed.
The seam wasn't humming anymore.
It was tightening.
Pulling against itself.
As though something else was tugging on the same thread.
He stood.
Not quickly.
He had learned that sudden movements made the threads react.
They were sensitive, now more than ever. As if the weave around him had developed nerves of its own.
He moved across the room and toward the mirror. Not the broken one—the one beside the water basin, which was whole, still dusted with age.
He stared.
His reflection stared back.
But not perfectly.
There was a pause.
A glitch.
His hand lifted, and the reflection followed—but a heartbeat behind.
Then, for a moment so brief it might have been imagined, it blinked before he did.
Darian inhaled.
Stepped closer.
Watched as a single thread—thin, pale, nearly invisible—began to uncoil in the mirror, curling down from the edge of his reflected shoulder.
Only in the mirror.
Nowhere else.
He raised his real hand.
No thread.
But the reflection?
Still unraveling.
Still watching.
He backed away, out of the mirror's reach.
Out of the moment.
But he could feel it now—his stitch had bled into something else.
And wherever that something was, it was growing.
That afternoon, he left his assigned tasks behind.
No one stopped him.
They hadn't looked him in the eye in days.
It was as if the spiral inside his chest had begun to bend their sight, their thoughts, their sense of him.
He passed unnoticed down halls that once would have drawn reprimands for a servant of his rank.
But he wasn't just a servant anymore.
He wasn't even sure he was just Darian.
In the western wing—rarely used, left to dust and memory—he heard it.
Footsteps.
Not echoing.
Not steady.
But doubled.
Like someone was stepping just out of rhythm with themselves.
He rounded a column—and froze.
Ahead of him, at the end of the hall, stood a boy.
Small.
Barefoot.
Facing the opposite direction.
But around the boy's body curled a thread.
His thread.
It pulsed in time with Darian's breath.
Not the boy's.
The boy turned.
And Darian's chest locked.
The boy had his face.
Younger.
Eyes larger. Shadows deeper.
But it was him.
Not a twin.
Not a reflection.
A copy.
Unstitched.
Raw.
Darian took a step forward.
The boy took one back.
They both stopped.
And then the thread began to vibrate.
Between them.
Like a nerve between two minds.
The boy opened his mouth.
No sound.
Just movement.
And Darian heard it.
Inside.
Not in his ears.
In his seam.
"You pulled.And I answered."
Darian blinked.
The boy was gone.
Not ran.
Gone.
The thread snapped like light extinguished.
And in its place—
A mark burned faintly into the stone.
A new symbol.
Two spirals. Interlocked. Unfinished.
The mark left behind glowed faintly for seconds before fading completely.
Darian stood frozen, the image of the boy burned behind his eyes.
Younger. Lighter. Unfinished.
The echo of him.
He touched the center of his chest, where the seam still hummed beneath skin and bone.
The pulse was erratic now.
Not painful.
But confused.
As though the pattern itself no longer knew where he ended.
He turned from the symbol and walked.
Not aimlessly.
The halls bent toward his steps. A corridor once sealed opened at his approach. A curtain that should have fluttered in still air hung motionless as he passed. Light turned cooler in his wake.
He was not alone in the pattern anymore.
And the weave had started to reshape itself around that fact.
He entered the abandoned western drawing room—a place supposedly cleared of furniture years ago. Dust blanketed the floor like snowfall. No candles had been lit in weeks.
But on the far wall: threads.
Dozens of them.
Some hung like ivy, others coiled tightly in rings.
Each one marked.
With his spiral.
But altered.
Wider loops.
Broken centers.
Double needles.
Someone—or something—was experimenting.
With his design.
On the ground beneath the threads lay a page.
Single. Tattered. Folded in thirds.
He knelt, gloved fingers brushing away the dust.
Unfolded it.
It wasn't ink.
It was thread.
Sewn into the paper itself.
Reading it felt wrong, like threading words through skin.
But he did.
And it said:
"We did not ask to be stitched.We only learned to listen to the ones who pulled."
Beneath that: a diagram.
His spiral.
Split into four.
Each directed toward a different sigil.
One was the original.
The second had a hole through its center.
The third bled out into dozens of tiny fractures.
The fourth was blank—but beneath it: a mark.
"Awaiting recipient."
He folded the page again and tucked it into his coat.
As he rose, the room shifted.
The threads on the wall snapped taut.
One pulled downward.
Fast.
And from behind the tapestry emerged a figure—
Shrouded.
Head wrapped in cloth.
Body half-threaded into the weave itself.
It didn't walk.
It slid.
Carried by its own anchoring stitch.
It stopped two meters from Darian.
Raised its hand.
And for the first time in weeks, he heard a voice not his own speak in the thread:
"You shouldn't have stitched yourself.You weren't meant to be the needle."
He didn't respond.
Didn't move.
He could feel the seam in his chest warming—tightening.
"But now that it's done," the voice continued, "you'll need to be… realigned."
The figure raised its other hand.
A black thread coiled between its fingers.
It flicked toward him—
And Darian dodged.
The thread struck the floor, carving a perfect spiral into the stone.
It sizzled.
Reality itself groaned slightly.
He ran.
He didn't know how far he fled.
He didn't know when the threads behind him stopped moving.
He only knew that when he reached his cot again, the glove had bled slightly from the seam.
Thread. Not blood.
But something internal had frayed.
He unwrapped the parchment from his coat and held it to the candlelight.
The fourth design—the blank one—was no longer empty.
A new spiral had begun to form.
Incomplete.
But familiar.
It was his.
But different.
He whispered:
"Who stitched this?"
And for the first time, the seam inside him answered back.
Not with voice.
With heat.
With movement.
With direction.
He turned toward the mirror across the room—
—and saw it:
Not his reflection.
Not another version.
But someone else.
Wearing his thread.
Standing inside the mirror.
Watching.
And smiling.
The boy in the mirror didn't move like Darian.
He stood straighter.
His eyes were wider, but dimmer, like candlelight through smoke.
The spiral sewn into his chest glowed faintly, but it was not the same spiral Darian bore—it rotated in reverse.
Darian stepped forward.
The boy mirrored him—but the reflection lagged, like watching a performance of himself a second too late.
He raised his hand.
The boy raised the opposite.
Their palms aligned against the glass.
And in that instant, Darian felt a pulse rush through the thread in his chest—not from him, but into him.
A signal.
A message.
Not words, but understanding.
The first stitch that wasn't his was this:A pattern echoing back into flesh, trying to anchor itself where it didn't belong.
He pulled his hand away.
The mirror rippled once.
Then shattered.
Not into shards.
Into thread.
Hundreds of fine, silver threads unraveled into the air, fading like breath in cold.
The boy was gone.
But the pattern had already entered him.
That night, Darian sat at his desk.
The glove lay beside him.
Unworn.
The spiral on his palm no longer glowed.
But it had changed again—now containing a second spiral embedded within the loop, like a parasite feeding off the design.
He lit a second candle.
Drew the spiral on parchment.
Studied the way it bent.
And he began to understand:
The spiral was a receiver.And now it had received something that wasn't his.
He whispered:
"What are you?"
And the thread curled above the parchment, writing its answer into the air:
"Mirror.Mimic.Mouth."
He didn't sleep.
The air had changed.
The silence in the manor had shifted.
There were others now—others who bore spirals that pulsed like his.
But not because of him.
Because of what had watched him.
He found one of them the next day.
In the kitchen corridor.
A noble girl in a gray shawl. Young, distant, staring at nothing.
A thread hovered above her shoulder.
It turned when he turned.
Moved when he moved.
He stepped beside her and said nothing.
But her lips parted.
And in his own voice, she whispered:
"You should not have let the stitch listen back."
He left.
Returned to his chamber.
Closed the door.
Breathed slowly.
And whispered again into the air:
"Then who is doing the stitching now?"
A pause.
The thread emerged.
Thin. Pale.
Shaking slightly.
And it wrote:
"The ones who sew from the outside."
That night, Darian wrote a note and placed it beneath the floorboard.
He didn't sign it.
He only stitched the words by hand:
"I am not the original thread anymore.But I am still the needle.And I choose where to pierce next."