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Chapter 2 - Echoes of first thread

The winds shifted as Calyx stepped from the shattered mirror field and crossed into a valley of drowned bells.

The terrain was brittle, composed of ancient stone tiles laid in spiraling patterns, their designs worn nearly smooth by the weight of centuries. Once, it might have been a plaza of great significance. Now it stood half-swallowed by frost and fog, its beauty buried beneath the erosion of memory. Bells of every size hung from chains that trailed between broken arches, leaning statues, and shattered lampposts, yet not one of them stirred. Not a single chime echoed in the still air.

The Moon hung low here, fuller than before, casting longer shadows than Calyx remembered. He adjusted the sash at his waist, where the obsidian shard he claimed now rested, pulsing faintly with a soft silver glow. The thread coiled around his wrist had not unraveled. If anything, it had tightened subtly, as though aware of the path he now walked.

Each step forward dragged a soft ring from beneath his boots not from the bells, but from the stones. The spiral tilework sang faintly when disturbed, as though the ground itself remembered music.

"Walk where no footsteps echo," the Loomweaver had warned.

He stopped.

Calyx turned slowly, scanning the spiral plaza with sharpened eyes. The Moon's light made the world appear silver-washed and strange, but not everything followed its rules. Some statues cast shadows in the wrong direction. One arch shimmered faintly where none of the others did. And near the far edge of the plaza, where two large bells hung from a skeletal tower, he saw what looked like footprints in the dust but they vanished halfway along the path.

He moved toward them cautiously.

The bells did not ring. His own steps made no sound now, and even his breath fell into a hush.

The footprints ended at a jagged tear in the air, like a scar sliced into the world itself. It shimmered faintly, pulsing with light that wasn't light an inverse glow, cold and memoryless. Calyx felt it tug at his bones. His reflection in the tear wasn't his own. It was that of the older man he fought in the mirror field, the one wielding ash and sorrow.

He pressed his palm to the surface. It parted like water. No resistance. No warning. He passed through. For a moment, there was only cold and dark. Then the world returned sharper than before.

He stood atop a wide black dais in the center of a desolate temple. The structure rose like fangs from the earth, with shattered pillars arcing into the sky and moonlight seeping through slits in the ceiling. It felt wrong. Not empty but abandoned. As though the place had been forgotten intentionally.

Before him, etched into the stone of the floor, was a massive spiral glyph nearly identical to the one that had shimmered on the obsidian shard. Only now it was cracked through the center. At its edge stood a statue, twisted and malformed. It had once been a woman, robed and crowned. Now her face was eroded, her arms broken at the elbows, and her crown crumbling to dust. Still, something about the presence of the statue stirred a terrible familiarity.

Then came the voice.

"Another stray thread pulled into the spindle."

It did not echo. It spoke directly into his thoughts.

Calyx turned, slowly.

A figure emerged from the far end of the temple. At first glance, it seemed human but the illusion collapsed quickly. It had no clear face. Its form was wrapped in layers of ash-cloth and shadow, shifting constantly, never holding still. Its eyes were not eyes, but pits of starless dark. Around its neck hung dozens of charms some stone, some bone, some shaped from things Calyx could not name.

It was a Name-Eater.

"Do you know what they call this place, little weaver?" the entity asked, its voice like parchment tearing in reverse. "The Temple of the First Song. Where the first lie was bound to a name."

Calyx didn't speak. He felt the shard pulse at his waist.

"Your thread is young," the Name-Eater said. "Frayed already. But not without potential. You've tasted one echo, haven't you? Fought your reflection in the mirror shore."

Calyx narrowed his eyes. "What do you want?"

"I want what all broken things want," the entity replied. "To be whole again. But wholeness is a lie. Just like identity."

It stepped forward. Its robes trailed behind it like the unraveling of a story no longer told.

"Give me your shard," it said. "And I will give you truth."

Calyx's hand instinctively gripped the obsidian sliver through his sash. "Truth isn't given. That's what she told me. It's earned."

"Ah." The creature tilted its faceless head. "You spoke to the Weaver. Then you know nothing can be kept without cost. Even truth."

With a sudden flick of its hand, it tore one of the charms from its necklace and hurled it into the air.

The charm split open mid-flight. Light and shadow burst from it, coalescing into a form. It was Calyx. Or something that wore his face again.

But not like the reflection from before. This version was cracked and crumbling, its limbs bound in writhing thorn-chains. Its mouth was sewn shut with silver thread. Its eyes bled smoke.

"This is who you might have been," the Name-Eater whispered. "Had you forgotten one moment differently."

The bound version of Calyx moved with unnatural jerks, its chains dragging behind like wet roots. It raised a hand. From its palm erupted a memory not a weapon, but an entire place.

A burning tower. Screams echoing from its windows. A child falling. A promise shattered.

Calyx staggered back as the vision surged toward him. Pain twisted behind his eyes.

He shouted and drew the shard.

The moment it left his sash, it extended, forming a short blade veined with moonlight, humming with names he could almost remember.

The bound echo lunged. Steel met chain. Sparks scattered like dying stars.

The battle within the temple was not one of brute strength, but of remembrance. Each strike from his echo tried to inject memories into him false or real, he couldn't tell. A woman screaming his name. Fire eating through letters. A betrayal he couldn't stop. A home he never saw.

Calyx fought back with silence.

Every movement was guided by instinct, every parry an echo of training he did not recall having. The blade pulsed with rhythm. It did not sing it remembered. And its remembrance was violent.

Finally, with a single upward cut, he severed the last thorn-chain from his echo's arm.

The doppelganger screamed not with its mouth, but through the silver thread sealing it.

The scream became a name. His name. It struck him like thunder. Calyx dropped to his knees. But he remembered something. A single moment.

Rain falling on stone. A child reaching for him. A lullaby sung in a forgotten tongue.

He looked up.

The echo collapsed, unraveling into strands of moonlight that coiled around his blade.

The Name-Eater watched, unmoving.

"You took it back," the entity whispered. "The first of many."

"I didn't choose to forget," Calyx said, his voice low.

"No. But you chose to remember. That's worse."

The Name-Eater turned and walked into the shadows, vanishing without sound or trace.

Calyx stood alone in the temple once more.

The blade in his hand faded into light and reformed as the shard, cool against his palm.

Above, the broken ceiling revealed the Moon again no longer full, but waning.

Its light fell across the statue of the broken queen.

For a moment, the cracks faded.

She almost looked familiar.

Then the fog rolled in, and everything vanished into silver.

The silver fog receded slowly, reluctant to let go of what it had seen.

Calyx emerged from the broken temple into a silence that didn't feel empty it felt watched. Every ruined archway and forgotten relic carried a weight, as though they remembered the confrontation he had just endured. Or worse shared it.

The obsidian shard now nestled quietly in his palm, but it radiated a quiet heat, like a living ember refusing to cool. He sheathed it beneath his sash once more and stepped away from the cracked glyph at the center of the dais. The spiral's once luminous lines had dimmed into ash-gray scars, as if memory had been bled from the stone itself.

He had reclaimed a name, though it was still incomplete—like a single chord plucked from a symphony he hadn't learned to conduct. But it was a beginning. A tether.

His own.

The voice of the Weaver returned to him, faint, like a dream spoken beneath breath.

"Every soul is a thread. Pulled long enough, it frays. Pulled right… it sings."

He descended the temple's steps slowly. The moon's light, once stark and unwavering, now flickered faintly like it, too, was watching him, waning in quiet judgment.

Below lay the Graveskein Path, a pale causeway carved through jagged lunar stone and frost-veiled thorns. It ran westward, toward the Edgewood Verge, and beyond that, to the outer ring of the Waneholds territory of the self-named lords, war-binders, and scarred tyrants who reforged identity with every conquest. He knew this from instinct alone. Or perhaps from something the shard had whispered when he held it too long.

He had no map. No companion. Only the thread at his wrist, the shard at his waist, and the name slowly piecing itself together inside him.

Calyx.

Once spoken, it had felt like lightning. Now it was an ember, flickering in wind. As he walked, the fog peeled back in rippling curtains, unveiling the world in fragments. Broken lamplight skeletons. Collapsed monoliths. Half-remembered constellations etched into the dirt. No birds. No breeze.

Only that sound beneath his boots the spiral-stone chime. Still faint. Still echoing.

The path narrowed near a fallen spire of black glass. Moss grew in pulsing veins across its base. As Calyx passed it, he noticed something burned into its surface a symbol of three interlocked moons, their edges jagged and tangled. Beneath it, words barely etched into the stone:

"Here sang the First Weaver. Here broke the thread."

He didn't stop. Some truths didn't want to be unearthed all at once. Let them rest a little longer. But then came the sound. Not of bells. Not of memory. Footsteps. Not his. He turned, slowly.

Across the pale mist strode a figure cloaked in patchwork armor stitched from bone and duskcloth. Its helm was angular and faceless, carved in the image of a crescent moon with its edges flaring outward. In one gauntlet, it carried a lantern that burned not with fire but with echoes. Inside the glass spun flickers of moments: a woman weeping over a corpse, a boy sharpening a blade by candlelight, an army drowning in blood.

Calyx knew the stories without hearing them.

A Wanehunter.

One of the forgers of the Waneholds. Not quite a soldier. Not a priest. Something else. A seeker of broken names.

It spoke without lifting its helm.

"You bear a shard."

Calyx remained still. "I don't want trouble."

"All who walk the Graveskein want something. The path itself demands it."

"I want to remember who I am."

The Wanehunter tilted its head. "Then you're not the worst kind of liar."

It stepped forward slowly. The lantern it carried swung gently at its side, casting long, twitching shadows across the stone path.

"What did you trade to hold that shard?" the hunter asked. "What memory did you burn?"

"I don't know yet," Calyx said. "Maybe I'll find out."

"That's the cruelest part," the Wanehunter murmured. "The price is always paid in advance. But never revealed."

It paused beside him, not raising a weapon. Just watching. The mist shifted.

"Walk west, Calyx," the Wanehunter finally said. "The Waneholds stir. The Namewrights are branding themselves anew. Someone has whispered of a boy with a moonshard and an echo that did not consume him. That whisper is becoming a song. And songs become wars."

The lantern pulsed. A flicker of Calyx's own face danced inside it for a moment then vanished.

"Do not let your name be sung before you understand its tune."

With that, the hunter turned and strode into the mist, leaving no trail behind.

Calyx exhaled.

The encounter left a heaviness in his lungs. Not fear. Not quite. A deeper weight. Like being named before he was ready.

He walked.

As dusk deepened though the moon still loomed, unwavering the terrain shifted. The spiral-stone gave way to uneven paths of thorned roots and ancient wards carved into petrified bark. The Edgewood Verge began here. A memory-blighted forest where trees murmured in forgotten tongues and the wind spoke in contradictions.

He felt it the moment he crossed the threshold.

His breath fogged differently. His heartbeat echoed in his ears with a rhythm that wasn't his. The trees bowed toward him.

A voice, high and many whispered from the canopy.

"Threadbound. Shardforged. Do you remember us?"

He looked up.

Something moved above the trees something long-limbed and silent, its eyes mirrors, its spine shaped like a crescent moon curled inward. It did not drop. It didn't need to.

Its presence was enough. He stepped forward, blade-shard in hand, knowing full well it would offer no safety here.

This was not a place of battle. This was a test. The first of many.

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