Kael stood alone in the place where threads begin.
It was not a birthplace.
It was a loom, but not made of wood or steel.
The threads here were alive. They moved like veins.
Some glowed.
Some bled.
Some screamed.
And in his hand - still cool, still humming, was the needle the figure had given him.
Slim. Silver. Deceptively small.
But it pulsed with the rhythm of something older than time.
The sky above shifted constantly, no sun, no stars, just a weave of color and memory.
Kael could see echoes bleeding through the air.
Rin screaming in the throne-less world.
Mace unthreading a battlefield with every step.
Juno standing in a library of forgotten selves.
Azerai remembering what should've stayed buried.
And him?
He was outside the story.
But the needle in his hand?
It wanted in.
He looked down at it.
"You can write one thing," the figure had said.
"One change. One truth. One lie. One name."
"What do I pay?"
"Everything."
Kael's mark burned, not with pain, but pressure.
Like something inside him was trying to break out.
He looked around the loom.
Every thread here led somewhere.
He could see the paths.
A thread that would lead him to kill the throne.
One where he becomes it.
Another where he saves Rin but loses himself.
One where the rebellion ends in ash.
One where none of them ever met.
And a single thread, thin, fragile, shaking, where they all survive.
He reached for it.
The needle in his hand screamed.
A voice rose around him.
Not the figure's.
The Loom itself.
"You were not meant to stand here."
Kael's eyes narrowed.
"Then you shouldn't have pulled me in."
The loom twisted violently. Threads snapped. Recoiled. Wrapped around his arms like restraints.
"The needle is not a gift."
"It is the Fang of the First Weaver."
"It does not write... it rewrites."
Suddenly Kael saw, the First Weaver, its face hidden behind a veil of endless thread, bleeding from the fingertips as it stitched the first reality.
The Fang, ripped from its ribs, dipped in memory, forged to defy pattern.
And the moment it was lost, because the throne had feared it.
Feared what it could undo.
Kael dropped to his knees, breath heaving.
"So you gave me the thing that could kill you?"
No answer.
Because the loom wasn't trying to teach him.
It was trying to consume him.
Threads lashed out, slamming into his mind, dragging him through visions:
A version of himself kneeling to the throne.
A version where he kills Rin to save the pattern.
A version where Azerai becomes the villain.
A version where he destroys the mark inside himself and forgets everything.
"Which truth will you carve?" the loom demanded.
"Which path will you stitch into reality?"
Kael looked at the needle.
Then at the trembling thread where they all survived.
"None of these," he whispered.
He stood.
Gripped the Fang.
And stabbed it into the loom itself.
The world exploded in light.
The loom convulsed.
Reality howled.
Kael screamed, not in pain, but in resistance.
"I'm not choosing your threads."
"I'm writing my own."
The Fang pulsed. Threads snapped, tangled, rewrote.
Marks across the universe flared.....
Rin's, Juno's, Mace's, Azerai's.
The sixth mark in the sky?
It shattered, and rewove itself into something else.
Something unseen.
Kael collapsed as the loom began to fold inward, unraveling.
The Fang remained in his hand.
But now, it glowed faintly, no longer just a needle.
But a weapon against inevitability.
As everything turned to white, Kael heard a voice, not the throne's, not the loom's.
His own.
"I choose rebellion," the voice said firmly.