The name Mireon rippled like poison through the weave.
Wherever his voice echoed, threads twisted—not broken, not burned, but bent. Like children taught to walk backward, like rivers pulled into the air. He was not flame, nor thread, nor shadow.
He was belief, sharpened into obedience.
And belief, once twisted, could not be unspun so easily.
The First Fracture
In the border-village of Noriel, a weaver screamed mid-song.
Her lantern burst into crimson light, her memory-thread reversing in her hand. The villagers watched in horror as her past shifted before their eyes—her dead brother alive again, her mother vanished from all names.
"This isn't mine!" she cried.
But the Codex shard now pulsing in her chest insisted otherwise.
The village elder called for Rien.
But it was already too late.
Mireon had rewritten her truth.
The Gathering in Ashlight Vale
At the meeting stones in Ashlight Vale, beneath the firewillows, the Flamebearers, the Unnamed, and the Threadkind came together—three peoples once divided by memory, now united by the same threat.
Rien stood in the center, cloak burned from travel, her voice hoarse but clear.
"We gave the world freedom," she said. "Now something older wants it bound again."
Kaelen stepped forward, sword at his back, silence at his side. "We need a wall."
"No," Tessen murmured. "Not a wall. A knot."
Maerai blinked. "Explain."
Tessen pointed to the map of living threads splayed before them.
"Mireon doesn't attack with blades. He threads loyalty into confusion. If we try to shut him out, we become like the Codex again."
"Then what do you suggest?" Elyra asked.
"We knot our stories—Flamebearer, Unnamed, Threadkind—into a single weave. If one is altered, the others hold it."
The Unnamed elder, Voshe, nodded gravely.
"A shared cord. Each story tethered to three voices. It will be painful."
"Truth usually is," Rien whispered.
The Triad Thread
The first triad thread was woven at dusk.
One weaver from each people stepped forward:
—A Flamebearer child named Niren, barely twelve.
—An Unnamed singer, old and blind, humming a song of her forgotten river.
—And a Threadkind orphan who never knew his mother's name.
Together, their truths were braided—not rewritten, not softened. Only shared.
When Mireon's influence struck the child's memory, it hit resistance—not from inside, but from outside.
Three lives.
Three perspectives.
One story.
"It held," whispered Maerai.
Tessen wept silently.
The Loom glowed.
And for the first time, it sang.
Rien's Decision
But victory has never been so easily stitched.
News came from the western coast—cities where no one remembered being rewritten, but where everyone now believed Mireon had always ruled.
Rien paced the lantern hall that night, flame casting her long shadow in strange directions.
"We can't outmatch him in memory," she said. "He doesn't rewrite. He inserts. Like a parasite in truth."
Kaelen watched her closely. "Then what do we do?"
She turned to the Loom and placed her hand against its core.
"We give it one story he can't corrupt."
"Which is?"
"The truth we haven't told yet."
The Unspoken Thread
Beneath Caldrith Spire, hidden deep in the Loom's first foundations, there was one thread no one had ever dared touch.
Rien descended the spiral alone.
Only Tessen followed.
"You said we wouldn't command the Loom anymore," he warned.
"I won't," she said. "I'll ask."
She reached the thread.
It was small.
Unmarked.
Coiled like a sleeping child.
The first thread.
The memory of what the Loom was before it was shaped, before the Flamebearers, before even Tessen's Codex.
"This is memory before story," Tessen whispered.
"And it might be the only place Mireon hasn't infected."
Rien touched it.
And the Loom flared gold-white.
Then darkness swallowed the chamber.
And a voice, ancient and soft, said:
"You seek the truth untouched. Then come. But bring nothing written."