Kaelith ran.
But the ground beneath her was not the same ground twice.
She leapt across the edge of a crumbling terrace—only to land in a hallway of mirrored obsidian, where her reflection was not her own. She stumbled forward again—into a moonlit forest where the stars wept in reverse, and the trees whispered secrets she had never heard, yet somehow remembered forgetting.
"This isn't real."
But reality no longer cared.
It had begun the moment Sol'Rhen returned.
The Third Thread, in its unraveling presence, was not pursuing her physically — no. It hunted her through narrative distortion, twisting her own history into a cage. Her memories tangled. Moments bled together. Names reversed their meanings.
Each time she blinked, she stood somewhere different: • A battlefield where Ashardio never rebelled. • A quiet garden where she and Tirameon were lovers, not traitors. • A throne room where she wore the mantle of Architect, and her hands were stained with the rebellion's blood.
Each was a lie.
And each felt more real than the last.
⸻
She clutched her head as a scream tore from her lips — not hers, but one of her "other selves," locked in a timeline she never lived. Around her, shadows moved — versions of herself distorted by paths not taken. One bore the Celestial Sigil across her throat, severed. Another knelt in robes of a prophet, speaking in the lost tongue of Sol'Rhen. A third wept over Ashardio's corpse, wearing his blade as a crown.
Kaelith backed away from them all — but the timelines didn't part.
They collapsed.
Like waves of glass shattering inward.
⸻
"You run through your own illusions," came a voice.
Sol'Rhen's voice — or rather, its echo woven into possibility.
"Every choice you made carved a thread. Every fear you buried… gave birth to another."
Kaelith screamed back, "I choose who I am!"
"Do you?"
"Then why are there so many of you?"
⸻
Reality twisted.
She found herself in the Temple of Cradle Ash, where her younger self trained under Celestial guidance. But her mentors had no faces — only bleeding symbols. One turned to her, lifted her chin, and whispered:
"You knew about Tirameon."
"You helped him."
Kaelith fell to her knees, shivering. "No. No, I didn't."
But the floor beneath her became a memory, and she sank through it—
—into another world.
⸻
Now she stood before a sacrificial altar.
On it lay Tirameon, bleeding from a wound she remembered giving him — except she hadn't.
Not in her timeline.
Not in this life.
Her hands were soaked in golden ichor. Her blade pulsed. And in this distorted world, Tirameon looked up at her with love and betrayal in his shattered eyes.
"Why did you kill me… Kaelith?"
"You promised we would burn fate… together."
⸻
She screamed and tore herself from the memory.
The false world rippled, then crumbled like ash in wind.
And for the briefest moment — she stood again in true space.
Alone.
Breathing.
Her own.
⸻
But something had changed.
A mark now burned on her wrist — a spiral of woven thread in impossible geometry. Sol'Rhen's mark.
Not ownership.
Recognition.
Sol'Rhen wasn't merely hunting her. It had tested her through broken selves, shattered timelines, possible sins — and in surviving, she had become something more.
A beacon. A catalyst.
⸻
Behind her, the skies trembled.
In the distance, the real Ashardio carved his way toward her, the world warping around him. He had seen her scream through the unraveling. He had felt her will survive.
And for the first time… he feared what Kaelith might become.
Because Sol'Rhen had chosen her for something.
Not death.
But inheritance.