In Lunether, time didn't move forward. It spiraled.
Some called it a city. Others, a wound. But for Kaien Veyron, it was a tether — the last knot anchoring him to a life long unraveled.
He stood on the rooftop of a decaying spire, chain weapon wrapped loosely around his forearm like a serpent at rest. The wind cut through his hair — black and wild — and whispered in voices he refused to remember.
Beneath him, the Memory Bazaar buzzed: stalls flickering in and out of phase, selling moments for coin. Lovers re-lived first kisses in glass spheres. A child cried because her father forgot her birthday — again — not from cruelty, but because memory cost too much this week.
Kaien watched. Silent. Detached.
He'd learned long ago: to remember was to suffer.
Somewhere deeper in the city, a bell tolled.
Not one made of metal — but thread. Its sound rippled through the Archive above and the world below.
Kaien's eyes narrowed.
"The Loom Bell…" he muttered.
It hadn't rung in centuries.
Elsewhere — far beneath Lunether.
A child stood alone in a forgotten corridor. Stone walls cracked with age and symbols only the dead remembered. The air pulsed as if the place itself was holding its breath.
The boy reached out, touching a door of pure memory-thread — woven from lives that never were.
A voice whispered behind him.
"Do you understand what you're opening?"
The boy turned. His eyes were blank — but smiling.
"Not yet. But he will."
When he pushed the door open, no light spilled through.
Only absence.
Back on the spire...
Kaien fell to one knee.
The chain around his arm tightened on its own — reacting.
"No… this pull… It's not from the Archive," he breathed.
Something — someone — was reaching through the threads, not to erase a memory, but to rewrite it.
That was impossible. Even Azrael couldn't do that.
Unless...
He turned to the west. Far beyond Lunether's collapsing skyline stood the Hollow Range — a graveyard of minds too twisted to bury in memory.
Kaien's chain hissed. It was remembering something he had forgotten.
"She's waking up," he whispered.
But the "she" he meant wasn't Runa.
And he didn't sound afraid. He sounded guilty.
A Whisper in the Archive
That night, while the Bazaar slept beneath fractured stars, a forgotten record awoke inside the Archive.
It was old. Misfiled. Hidden. A black-thread entry with no name.
"Designation: Veyron, Kaien.
Incident: The Silent Axis.
Status: Memory locked.
Classification: Threadborne — Forbidden."
The file did not glow. It absorbed light.
And far above, where even time dared not tread, something ancient laughed without lungs.
"You should have cut him when you had the chance, Kaien."