It rained that morning.
Not the soft kind.
The old kind—wind-laced, sharp, like the sky had opened veins instead of clouds.
In the high tower of Caldrith Spire, Rien stood before the Loom, her cloak soaked, her boots leaving threads of water across the stone floor.
Outside, the world stirred.
Lanterns were being moved underground.
Threadbearers whispered code into their fires.
Children were being taught how to speak without words—the old signs, older than memory, for when language became dangerous again.
It was happening.
Not a war of swords or soldiers.
But a war of truths.
The Loom's Dilemma
The Loom was alive, but it had never been free.
Built to record, shaped to obey.
Even in this new age of remembrance, it waited—silent, pulsing, unsure.
Tessen knelt beside it now, hands resting gently on the ancient core.
"We asked it to hold history," he said quietly. "But we never asked if it wanted to."
Rien approached slowly, her voice a whisper. "Can it want?"
Tessen looked up. "It remembers. That's close enough."
Then he placed a single gold thread into the Loom.
Not a command.
A question.
Do you wish to remain passive? Or do you wish to choose?
The Loom pulsed once.
Then again.
And then—a faint hum filled the tower. A low vibration, like a thousand names whispering at once.
It had begun to respond.
Divided Flamebearers
At the edge of the Ashen Coast, the Flamebearers gathered.
Not all agreed.
Vel paced the tide-slick rocks. "We aren't meant to hold swords. That was the Seamwright's way. Not ours."
Elyra, wind snapping her braids, stood unshaken. "This isn't conquest. It's defense. Memory is bleeding—we cauterize it."
"And how many truths do we burn in the process?" Vel snapped.
Kaelen, watching both, finally spoke.
"We've been given fire. If we don't decide how it's used... someone else will."
A vote was cast.
Seven cities pledged their Flamebearers to protection only.
Four prepared for armed resistance.
One chose silence.
And Rien?
She wrote no decree.
She packed a threadknife and her mother's old flamecord, and whispered, "We stand where we must."
A Flicker in the Loom
That night, the Loom shuddered.
A pulse of light shot across the ashfields.
One of the Codex towers—long dormant—awoke.
Not by Singular hands.
By the Loom itself.
Tessen watched in horror.
"It's moving. The Loom... it's testing choice."
"Or preparing," Rien murmured.
"For what?"
She didn't answer right away.
Instead, she touched the blue thread tied around her wrist—the one that had led her into Tessen's memory.
Then she looked out at the storm-washed land, and said:
"For the moment when it stops being a mirror… and becomes a voice."
Severa's Silence
In a chamber of cracked glass and humming circuits, Severa watched the Loom's pulse on a map of threads.
It glowed like wildfire across the continent.
She did not shout.
She did not curse.
She simply turned to her white-cloaked followers and spoke in a tone made of ice.
"She woke it."
A pause.
"Burn her name from every node."
"What of the others?"
"Let them keep their memories."
"And if they fight?"
Severa's eyes narrowed.
"Then we erase the ones who remember them."
The Flame Before the Fall
As the rain faded and wind stilled, Rien stood in the Spire's highest tower, watching the distant horizon flicker with Codex light.
She held a new lantern.
This one was not lit.
Not yet.
"This isn't the end," Kaelen said behind her.
"No," she whispered.
"It's the memory before it."
And she struck the spark.