Chapter Fifty-Five – The Thread That Remembers

Sleep came fitfully. Not in full dreams, but in half-glimpses and whispers from a time before names.

The fire had died to embers, but the air was thick with tension—Kael's protective spells hummed faintly around the camp, and Riven had taken the first watch, though I could feel his unease with every breath.

But it wasn't the present that kept me awake.

It was before.

A thread pulsed in my mind—a golden one, unlike the chaotic threads I usually sensed. It called to me like a heartbeat, low and constant.

I closed my eyes and let it take me.

And suddenly I was somewhere else.

A chamber of mirrors, vast and suspended in nothing. Each mirror showed a different version of me—child, warrior, weaver, queen, monster. The reflections whispered, not in words, but in emotion.

Loss.

Longing.

Power.

And then I saw her.

My mother.

Not as I remembered her in flesh, but as a weaver of threads, her fingers moving delicately through fate itself. She stood before one loom among many—hers golden, pulsing, humming with the same rhythm now echoing inside my bones.

"Sera," she whispered without looking at me. "You were never just mine."

I stepped forward, throat dry. "What do you mean?"

"I carried you, yes. I loved you more than the stars. But you were given to me. Offered… by the Loom itself."

My breath caught.

"You were born of two desires," she continued. "One, human. One, beyond. That's why you hear it. Why you feel it. Why the being in the void smiled."

I shook my head. "No. That thing isn't… me."

"It's part of what made you."

The golden loom behind her pulsed again—then unraveled.

I screamed.

But the scene collapsed before I could move.

I jolted awake, heart pounding, breath ragged.

Kael was beside me in an instant. "Sera?"

I stared into the darkness, hands trembling. "I think I know why the Loom shattered."

"Why?"

"Because it was never meant to hold someone like me."

---