In the beginning, there was the Loom.A vastness without color, without form, where the Original Weavers danced between nothingness and possibility. Their fingers, deft and silent, stitched reality — thread by thread — until the tapestry of existence took shape: continents, thoughts, seasons, gods, and doubts.But now, the fingers had stilled. And the Loom... began to unravel.
Night in Etherya was a living shadow. Cutting winds descended from the peaks of Keloria, where the borders of the world whispered secrets no empire dared to translate. There, in the cold folds of a dead forest, the muffled sound of footsteps blended with the rustle of branches — like threads about to snap.
Kael moved in silence, a heavy cloak trailing behind him, blade sheathed at his side. His eyes were hollow, burned by visions that no longer belonged to the world of the living. He didn't belong. Not anymore.
The man ahead of him — a spy from Fimbria, carrying messages that could ignite a war — was running in a frantic zigzag, drenched in cold sweat. But Kael didn't run. He never needed to."Destiny is a steady step," said an old saying. He knew it well... before he tore it apart.
One strike. Simple. Without honor, without glory. The throat opened like old parchment. The spy collapsed without a scream, his eyes locked on a sky already forgetting him.
Kael exhaled. He didn't kill for pleasure, but because the strings demanded it. His task was to sever the inevitable — or at least delay it, with thread and steel.
But in that moment, he saw something new.
A thread.
Suspended above the corpse. It glowed like the dusty light of a forgotten sun. Delicate, yet... insistent. It had not broken with death. It drifted, hesitantly, toward the horizon. As if the man hadn't fully departed.
Kael frowned. Threads weren't meant to remain after death. The rule was clear: cut the destiny, and the memory dissolves. The soul fades. That's how the world worked. That's how it had always worked.
Driven by something even he didn't understand, he reached out. His fingers touched the black blade he carried — Verba, an ancient weapon marked with the sigil of the Cutters — and he sliced the glowing thread.
What happened next... wasn't fate. It was ruin.
The thread didn't fall. It snapped.A flare raced through the Loom — invisible to mortal eyes, but brutal in presence — and Kael felt the pull.A searing pain. As if his very body were being tugged in a thousand directions at once.The ground vanished.Sound collapsed.Everything spun, in absolute silence, until he saw:
His own thread.
A pale cord, scarred by choices and mistakes, trembling as if it knew it was about to be seen.
And then... it broke.
Not by another's hand. But his own.
Kael awoke in the same place. The body was gone. No blood remained. No footprints. The world felt... smaller. As if something had been erased — not killed, but forgotten.
He touched his chest. Still breathing. Yet there was an absence within. As if his name belonged to someone else's memory.
He had cut his own thread.And yet, he was still there.Not bound to the world.Not free from it.
Something held him — or perhaps, rejected him.
In the trees nearby, he heard the Loom whispering. Not in words, but tension. Like cords straining before the snap.The world felt him. He was no longer part of the tapestry.He was a loose thread. A wound.
And wounds... attract things worse than death.
Kael stood. In the distance, something vibrated.A thread — not his — but of someone about to be pulled into the abyss.He didn't know who. But he could feel it.Someone was starting to forget who they were... and why they still existed...