The sun rose like a golden thread stitched lazily across the sky, unraveling the dark tapestry of night over the hills of Brihrest. Beneath its warmth, a solitary figure moved through the quiet farmland — a boy with tired eyes, a rusted sickle, and a name half-remembered by history.
Hiro Brihrest. The boy who lived. The boy who never died.
To the villagers, he was just Hiro — a quiet, stubborn farmer who never aged. His calloused hands tilled the same soil year after year, planting the same rice that bent dutifully in the wind. No one dared question the oddness of his eyes, which flickered like ancient candlelight, or why he never changed.
He didn't speak of the past. But the land remembered.
Two thousand years ago, Hiro had been just another nameless child from a nameless valley, until the day the Nightmare Devil crawled out from under the world. Cities vanished. Rivers boiled. Children woke screaming. And when every warrior fell, it was Hiro — barefoot, bleeding, and angry — who faced the beast with nothing but a wooden pitchfork and a prayer that sounded more like profanity.
And won.
Or so the legends said. Hiro remembered it differently.
The devil had no name, no eyes — just a great shadow that unwove everything it touched. Hiro didn't kill it; he ripped it open. Something inside snapped, and for a moment he saw it: threads. Invisible lines of fate and fear, of names and memories. He reached blindly and rewove them around the devil's soul.
It worked. It also cursed him.
The next morning, the villagers hailed him as "Hero." He tried to correct them, but the name stuck.
In the present, Hiro knelt beside a rice paddy, ignoring the whispers of the wind.
It spoke in threads now. Every time he touched the earth, he felt it tugging — like a memory refusing to be buried. He'd hoped the years would make him forget, but it only made the whispers clearer.
"Do you remember the beast? It wasn't alone."
The sky flickered. For just a breath, Hiro saw something impossible — a single strand of golden thread stretching from the sky to his chest. It pulsed.
He blinked. Gone.
Hiro exhaled sharply. "Not again…"
From across the fields, an old man waved at him. "You spacing out again, Hiro-boy?"
"Always," Hiro muttered.
He stood, stretching his aching spine. Immortality, as it turned out, didn't spare you from back pain.
His hut lay at the edge of the fields, where wildflowers grew untamed. He returned there, washed the dirt from his arms, and sat by the window with a cup of tea. It was quiet. Too quiet.
And then, a knock.
No one ever knocked.
He opened the door to find no one. Only a bundle of thread sat on his doorstep, tangled and humming faintly with golden light.
He didn't touch it. He closed the door.
That night, the dreams returned.
He stood in the void — no stars, no earth, just endless black… and the Severed Thread.
It dangled before him like a torn lifeline, twitching at the end. Something moved beyond it — a shape made of threads, unweaving as it crawled toward him. Hiro tried to scream, but his mouth unraveled.
Then a voice — soft, familiar, feminine — spoke from the dark:
"You stitched the end. Now weave the beginning."
He woke gasping, fingers tangled in the threads of his bedsheet.
Elsewhere, in a library hanging upside-down over a waterfall of starlight, Dee Megus scribbled furiously in his journal. His candle was three days old. His teacup was talking to him again.
He wrote:
"The thread is awakening. I felt a ripple in the west. Possibly Brihrest. Possibly him."
He paused, then added:
"I must find the Hero. Before the Severed Loom does."
He stood up, robes a patchwork of stitched constellations and ink stains. The room spun slightly — not from dizziness, but because the library itself rotated once every hour, a habit it had developed after Dee accidentally gave it a sense of rhythm.
He turned to a strange creature in the corner: a half-owl, half-spool of yarn.
"Pack the echo crystals, Hootspin. We're going west."
Hootspin hooted in disapproval.
"No, I am not bringing the singing socks. They creep me out."
The socks, hanging by the fireplace, whined in harmony.
Back in Brihrest, Hiro sat under the stars, watching the bundle of thread glow faintly from its place on the porch.
He finally picked it up.
It was warm. Too warm. As he held it, a single phrase pulsed into his mind:
"You are needed again."
He almost laughed.
"No," he said aloud. "I've done enough. Find someone else."
The thread pulsed again. Then disintegrated into gold dust.
From the woods came a soft sound. Footsteps.
He stood, reaching for his old pitchfork — the same one from the legend, worn and blunt but still intact. The footsteps grew louder.
Then, a voice.
"Excuse me," the traveler said. "Are you the farmer known as Hiro Brihrest?"
The man was tall, cloaked, and slightly singed. His beard was braided with quills. A floating lantern hovered beside him, whispering mathematical equations.
"I am," Hiro replied, grip tightening on his pitchfork.
The traveler smiled. "Good. My name is Dee Megus. We need to talk about the end of the world."
Hiro groaned. "Not again."