I. Still Waters, Fractured Reflection
The Academy of Primoria stood serene, untouched—or so it appeared.
Sunbeams filtered through stained-glass murals, splashing fractured rainbows onto polished obsidian floors. Each mural depicted gods whose names were now little more than footnotes in forgotten scripts. Their gazes, once triumphant, seemed hollow. Tired. As though they too had witnessed the slow unraveling of the world and chosen silence.
Students drifted through marble halls, their laughter soft, practiced. They walked with the grace of those convinced they were safe.
But beneath this curated peace, the bones of the world groaned.
Ashardio—Ash, to the few who dared to bridge the distance his magic built—stood alone in the Hall of Echoes. His reflection shimmered beneath him, yet it rebelled against his movements. The surface of the obsidian rippled, distorting his silhouette. Every gesture fractured into a mosaic of delayed echoes, as though reality itself struggled to remember where he ended and space began.
His fingers twitched. Pale light flickered to life, threading between his knuckles. Controlled. Barely.
"Reality isn't holding as tightly anymore."
He felt it—subtle but insistent—the dissonance between what should be and what was quietly becoming.
The Loom was fraying. And the Academy's bones felt it before the minds did.
II. The Breath Beneath Stone
The Academy breathed.
Not in metaphor. Not in poetry. But in pulse and pressure.
Each wall, each archway, expanded and contracted in slow rhythm, as if the stone itself inhaled the air of a dying world. The ancient silver filigree that laced the architecture throbbed with soft, metallic light—its glow paling with every breath, as though struggling against an unseen weight.
Ash's tether of light—alive, restless—spooled from his palm, mapping those pulses, tracing the heartbeat beneath the cold elegance.
That was when he saw them.
Hairline fractures. Spiderwebbing beneath the tiles, behind the murals, too fine for the untrained eye. But to Ash's magic, they gleamed like fault lines.
Tiny. Insignificant.
But spreading.
Each pulse widened them. Each breath of the Academy deepened the wound.
He whispered, not expecting an answer.
"No one else sees this?"
His voice was devoured by the hush. Of course, they didn't.
Ignorance was louder than truth here.
III. Lilim's Arrival — The Poison in the Thread
When Lilim emerged, it was as if the shadows birthed her.
A warden of the hidden, her presence was a ripple in the weave of space—subtle, invasive. Her smile was thin as a knife's edge, a thing of habit, not warmth.
"You feel it too."
No pretense of greeting. Just shared certainty.
She joined him, her fingers moving with surgical precision, weaving sigils from threads of green-gold light. Once, her magic had the softness of dappled sunlight through ancient forests. But now, it vibrated with a discordant hum—like a hymn played backward, the melody corrupted but no less beautiful.
"This quiet," she said, almost wistful, "is the sheath before the blade. The Wound didn't heal. It retreated."
Ash only nodded. Words were pointless beneath this weight.
They were two minds witnessing the same crack in the world's mask, and words were a poor balm for truth.
IV. The Library that Breathes
Their path, unspoken, led them into the Deep Archives.
Here, the architecture seemed to rebel. Books whispered in dialects older than time, their pages fluttering in sync with the Academy's breaths. Candles craned their waxy necks, bending their flames toward the intruders like curious serpents.
The air was heavier here. Dense with dust, magic, and things that had learned to listen.
Ash's fingers halted on a single tome: The Codex of Threads. Bound in something that pulsed beneath his touch, the cover seemed to breathe back.
His light brushed it.
The Codex reacted.
Ink, alive and eager, uncoiled tendrils around his wrist. They sank into his skin—not painfully, but possessively. Visions erupted behind his eyes: • The Maw, no longer a beast of brute force, but a creeping rot, clever and insidious. • Elissara, standing amid a sea of glass, her sacrifice etched into the marrow of the world. • The Loom itself, infinite and trembling, as a masked figure—a mirror of Ash, yet twisted—plucked at golden threads with deliberate malice.
A voice, older than language, whispered into his bones:
"Unmake to remake. Bleed to mend."
Ash wrenched his hand back, breath ragged. The Codex, satisfied, snapped shut.
The silence that followed was not relief. It was anticipation.
V. The Fracture Grows
Outside, Primoria's curated calm was splintering.
Students whispered of lost time—entire hours dissolving into nothingness. Names blurred. Faces once familiar became strangers. One scholar, revered for his memory, was found beneath the Evervault Arch, singing the Academy's anthem backward, silver tears leaking from empty eyes.
The Elders called it stress. Overexertion.
They refused to speak the word "Unraveling."
But Ash knew.
The Maw had evolved. No longer a visible wound upon the world, it had become the infection beneath the skin.
"We're standing on threads that can no longer hold our weight," Ash murmured.
Lilim's response was as sharp as it was inevitable:
"Then we teach ourselves how to weave, Ashardio. Or we fall into the Loom's teeth."
There was no alternative.
VI. Ash's Dilemma — The Weight of Light
That night, in the solitude of his chambers, Ash stared at his hands.
Light magic. Beautiful, volatile. It had never obeyed him the way it was supposed to.
The Professors had tried to box it, to mold it into predictable patterns. Glyphs. Circles. Constraints.
He had let them think they succeeded.
But his light was different. It wasn't a conduit for safe spellcraft. It was a catalyst. A force that demanded change. That devoured old forms to birth new ones.
He thought of the Codex's whispers. Of the fractures beneath Primoria. Of Eloen—her name still a blade against his ribs.
"What if the only way to mend the Loom is to burn it first?"
To unmake the threads and rewrite them anew. Reckless. Heretical. Necessary.
But with that thought came the fear.
What if he wasn't just a Weaver-to-be?What if he was becoming something else entirely?
A rupture.A Maw, reborn in light.
"Eloen," he whispered again.
This time, it felt like an invocation. A promise.
Enough waiting. Enough playing within safe boundaries.
If the world demanded a Weaver… he would give them one.
And this time, the pattern would be his.