The Boy in the Thread

The green thread curled in Rien's palm like a question waiting for its answer.

It was unlike the others—light as mist, pulsing with a gentler rhythm, like a heartbeat still deciding who it wanted to be. The Loom had not woven it. It had released it, as though exhaling something it had held in too long.

"This is a child's memory," Maerai said softly, examining the thread. "Earliest kind. Still fragile. If it fades, it's gone."

"Then we protect it," Rien answered, tying it to her wrist.

And the moment the knot touched her skin—

She was elsewhere.

The Memoryscape

She stood in a wide field of colorless grass, sky a dull gray slate overhead.

Memories here were half-formed.

Shapes without names.

Voices without mouths.

In the distance, she saw a child.

Barefoot. Thin. Wrapped in threadbare linen. His hair was ash-colored, and his eyes shimmered not with power—but with wanting.

He sat beside a small, broken loom. Not the great one from Caldrith, but a crude wooden frame with snapped strings.

"It won't work," he muttered to himself, trying to tie a thread. "It never works. Not when it matters."

Rien stepped closer, and the child looked up.

Startled.

"Who are you?" he asked, blinking. "Did the Loom send you?"

She knelt. "No. I came because I needed to see you."

"You shouldn't be here," he said, voice quiet. "The Seamwright will take you away."

She smiled gently. "You are the Seamwright."

The boy frowned, as if she had spoken a word in a forgotten tongue.

"No. My name's Tessen. I'm not a... Seam-anything. I just want people to stop hurting each other."

His voice broke at the end.

And Rien saw it then—

This was not a villain's beginning.

It was the birth of a broken dream.

A Memory Unfolds

The sky shifted.

The field darkened.

And the Loom appeared—not the real one, but a twisted, skeletal version of it. Tessen looked up at it with awe and terror.

"If I can fix the stories," he whispered, "maybe no one will be scared anymore."

The Loom responded to his thought.

Threads danced in the air.

One showed his village burning.

Another, his mother weeping with no name left.

A third showed his own future—older, colder, silver-eyed.

"No," Rien said, stepping between him and the vision. "That's not the only path."

Tessen looked at her.

"How do you know?"

"Because I saw what you buried. And I'm going to give it back."

She reached for his hand.

The moment their fingers touched, the memory fractured—

And reformed.

A Message Across Time

Rien opened her eyes back in the Loom chamber.

The thread on her wrist had changed.

No longer green.

Now deep cobalt blue.

A color of truths unearthed.

Kaelen stepped forward. "What did you see?"

"The boy," she whispered. "The real Tessen. Not the Seamwright. Not the Codex."

Elyra frowned. "He was a dreamer once."

"No," Rien corrected, standing. "He still is."

She turned to the Loom, then to the Flamebearers gathered at the chamber's edge.

"He didn't bind the world because he hated freedom. He did it because he was afraid. Because he lost too much."

"So how do we stop him?" Maerai asked.

Rien held up the blue thread.

"We don't fight the Seamwright. We remind the boy."