Chapter Nine: The Stitch Between Worlds

Yren pulled the thread.

The moment his fingers closed around it, the world lurched.

The unraveling stopped.

For the briefest moment, everything—Seams, the fractured sky, the floating isles trembling on the edge of collapse—held still. Not because the Loom had begun spinning again, not because balance had been restored.

But because something else had taken hold.

The Weaveless One tilted its head, its shifting form flickering between light and shadow. "You've done it."

Mareth's breath caught. "Yren, stop—"

But it was too late.

The thread was no longer just a sensation at the edge of his mind. It was real. He could feel it winding through his body, threading through his very being. And the moment he had pulled it, something deep in Seams had shifted.

The Loom had not restarted.

It had rewoven.

Not with the old golden threads. Not with the pattern that had held Seams together for centuries.

With him.

Yren gasped as the power surged through him, burning, twisting, creating. He saw threads where there had been none before—lines of possibility stretching in every direction, connecting him to the floating isles, to the sky, to the unraveling itself.

And beyond them, something more.

A second Loom. A second Seams.

No—not just one.

Many.

Countless variations of Seams, layered atop one another like endless fabric, all stitched together by unseen hands. Some whole, some broken, some unwoven entirely.

Yren had not just pulled a thread.

He had touched the Loom beyond the Loom.

And the Loom had seen him.

A voice—not the Weaveless One's—whispered through his mind, vast and ancient and waiting.

"A stitch that was never made. A thread that was never woven. And yet, here you are."

Yren's vision blurred. The power inside him was too much. Too vast. Too wrong.

He wasn't meant to hold this.

He wasn't meant to be this.

But now, there was no turning back.

The Weaveless One stepped forward, watching him with something almost like reverence.

"You are not bound to the Loom," it murmured. "You are outside it. A thread of your own making."

Yren barely heard it. The weight of the unseen Looms crushed against his mind, infinite, endless—

And then, in the distance, beyond the veils of reality, something moved.

Something that had noticed him.

Something that had been waiting for a thread like his.

The moment stretched, fragile, hanging by a single stitch.

And then—

The Loom began to spin again.