The Hall of Threads was never supposed to bleed.
Yet here it was—its white-gold walls weeping streaks of liquid shadow, like ink leaking from a story trying to erase itself. Each rivulet shimmered with fragments of memory—flashes of people no one remembered, children never born, cities never built.
Kael stepped forward cautiously, boots scraping against the obsidian veins that now ran like cracks through the polished floor. The hum of the timeline had always sounded like a choir—harmonious, layered, alive. But now, a low static buzz had replaced it, like a record caught in an endless loop.
Aeris followed behind him, her fingers brushing the edge of a ruptured wall. The moment her skin made contact, the air screamed.
Not aloud.Not with sound.But with memory.
She saw herself—older, crueler, eyes like splinters of void—raising a hand and unmaking a city with a thought. She flinched back, trembling, her breath caught between worlds.
Kael noticed instantly.
"What did you see?"
"Not me," Aeris whispered. Her eyes flicked toward him, too bright, too wide. "But close enough to wear my face."
Kael's jaw clenched. "Another variant?"
Dray's voice echoed down the hall, calm and brittle like a cracked mirror. "No. Not a variant. A reflection."
The mage stood in the doorway, runes dim and hesitant. Around his neck hung a shard of glass wrapped in copper wire—a Fragment, capable of showing glimpses of when-things-shouldn't-be. It pulsed now, faint blue light skipping like a heartbeat in distress.
"I checked the Anchor Chamber," he continued, stepping into the bleeding hall. "It's untouched physically. But temporally? It's…fraying."
"Fraying how?" Kael asked, hand instinctively tightening around the hilt of the blade on his back—a weapon forged from the ashes of unmade tomorrows.
Dray's expression darkened. "The timelines are starting to fold inward. Like paper creased too many times. Soon, they'll collapse."
Aeris moved toward the center of the room, where the Ecliptic Dial hung suspended—an ancient device that once spun to track the pulse of time. It now hung still, its rings bent out of alignment, frozen mid-turn.
"They're not collapsing on their own," she said softly. "Something's pressing from the outside."
Kael looked up. The great domed ceiling above them was painted with constellations from every known timeline. Except now… there was a hole.
A literal absence—a blank wound where stars had once been. Around it, the mural warped, brushstrokes twitching like they were alive.
"Gods…" Kael breathed. "It's not just echoes. It's leaking."
Dray dropped the Fragment. It hissed on contact with the floor.
"It's not leaking," he said. "It's answering."
Aeris turned, her voice barely audible. "Answering what?"
And then—everything stopped.
Not the world. Not time.The silence.
A single sound rang through the hall.
A footstep.
But not from any of them.
Kael's sword was halfway drawn before the sound repeated—measured, slow, confident. From the far corridor. A silhouette approached, bathed in a flickering light that pulsed unnaturally.
They emerged from the veil of bleeding walls—a woman with Aeris's face… but eyes black as unlit stars, and a smile carved like it had forgotten how to feel.
"Hello," she said sweetly. "I came to return what was never yours."
Her voice fractured at the edges, like multiple versions of her were speaking at once.
Kael stepped in front of Aeris instinctively. "Who are you?"
The woman tilted her head.
"I'm the scream your fate forgot," she whispered.
And with a flick of her wrist, the entire hall shattered like glass—walls collapsing inward, light bending, gravity convulsing—as if the Hall of Threads was only a memory and someone had just chosen to forget it.