The Loom did not flare when Tessen touched it again.
It shivered.
A tremor ran through its ancient frame—not in fear, not in rejection, but in recognition. The man who had once twisted it into obedience had returned, not as Seamwright or Codex architect…
But as the boy who broke.
Tessen knelt, fingers brushing its lower threads—the oldest strands, heavy with soot and silence.
"These aren't memories," he whispered. "They're mistakes."
"No," Rien said beside him. "They're roots."
He closed his eyes.
And reached deeper.
The Threads Beneath the Codex
They found the foundation of the Codex buried in the sub-weave—thin silver-black strands laced in tightly bound grids. Unseen. Unquestioned.
Every rewritten story, every censored name, every reassigned memory—anchored here.
Tessen hovered a hand over one.
It pulsed cold.
"If I pull this wrong…"
"Then don't pull it alone," Rien said, wrapping her fingers around his.
The Loom responded to both.
And for the first time in decades, it consented to be unwoven.
The first Codex thread uncoiled.
The name it had hidden—Veren Kai, Firekeeper of Ahset—flashed across the world.
In Ahset, an old woman awoke gasping, tears on her face. "He remembered me."
The Cost of Unmaking
But memory is not a quiet thing.
As the first threads unraveled, cities faltered. Towers that relied on Codex algorithms began to flicker. Voice gates failed. Clean water access routes glitched, redirecting supplies to long-erased districts.
The Codex wasn't just history.
It was infrastructure.
Vel stormed into the chamber an hour later. "Refugees are pouring into Liraeth. The Codex fed entire provinces. You break it, you break them."
"We're not breaking it," Rien said. "We're liberating it."
"Then do it faster. Or do it smarter."
Tessen stood slowly.
"Then we weave a bridge. Not just a purge. A path from false memory to free one."
He looked at the Loom.
"Let the Codex remember—but let people choose which version they keep."
A Thread of Choice
They began crafting a new thread.
One born not of law or fear, but of option.
The Choice-Weave.
For every citizen, a mirror-thread would awaken—reflecting both the Codex record and the truth buried beneath it. People could walk into the light of their own story and say:
"This is mine. Or it is not."
But they would know.
The Loom, moved by such purpose, glowed gold for the first time since the Seamwright's fall.
And across the continents, one by one, lanterns of the Flamebearers flared anew—relinked not by rebellion, but by remembrance.
A Message to the World
At dusk, Rien stood atop Caldrith Spire, wind threading through her braids, the sky awash with firelight.
She held up a voice-thread woven with Tessen's and her own, bound together.
When she spoke, her voice reached every lantern, every Codex node, every hidden thread that still listened.
"We are not perfect. We are not seamless. But we are ourselves."
"You may keep the version you were given."
"Or take the one you forgot."
"But now, you get to choose."
Tessen took the thread from her hand and added, softly:
"And so do I."