The light that greeted me wasn't sunlight.
It was memorylight—a shimmer of familiar warmth layered with echoes.
I stepped through the Gate, and the world inhaled.
Wind touched my skin like a mother recognizing her child after too long.
The ground beneath my feet did not feel like Earth—it felt like a page half-erased, waiting to be rewritten.
But it was real. It was the world I left.
And yet…
It wasn't.
---
Mountains in the distance now glowed faintly under the veil of dusk—lines of glyphs danced in their snowcaps. The rivers shimmered strangely, as though reflecting not the sky, but moments.
A child's laughter echoed somewhere, though no one was near.
And in the sky—threads.
Visible. Twisting. Some thin and fraying. Others thick with history.
"You feel it?" said a voice beside me.
I turned sharply.
A man stood there. Hooded. Simple robes. Eyes like cracked glass reflecting stars.
"I didn't call you," I said. "Who are you?"
He smiled.
"One who watched you leave." "And followed the thread back."
---
He knelt and touched the soil. A faint glyph emerged—an anchor mark.
"The Gate changed more than you." "It changed the world."
He pointed behind me.
I turned—and for a moment, gasped.
The Witness Gate, once hidden between reality and dream, now pulsed in the air behind me like a living scar across space.
Others had started appearing across the world. Some stable. Some broken.
"You're not the only one," he said.
He handed me a small stone. A sigil carved into it: Recognition.
"Some remember who they were."
"Others remember who they could have been."
"But you… you're the First Weaver."
I clenched the stone. And the glyph in my palm responded.
A single thread drifted from my hand.
It hovered. Then pointed—toward the east.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's your first call," he said.
"Someone remembered you before they were even born."
I stared at the horizon. Where threads twisted into stormlight.
And I understood: The world had changed its rules.
Memories were now places. Truths had weight.
And the forgotten were waking up.
---
"Welcome back, Lyan," he said.
"The Outside is no longer real.
But it remembers."
And with that, the journey began again.
---