The world remembers only what it's told to.
That was the first lesson Caelen Veyre learned in the Scriptorium.
He had been twelve the first time he saw a page bleed — not ink, but memory — weeping from its seams like the ghost of something almost true. He'd whispered the forbidden glyph beneath his breath then, and the page had burned away. The Scribes had whipped him for it.
Now, at twenty-two, Caelen had grown wiser. Or perhaps simply more careful.
Tonight, he moved like shadow through the Grand Archive of Lirmathra, fingers gliding along shelves that hadn't been dusted in a hundred years — because, according to the Loom's sanctioned history, they didn't exist.
Erase the page, you erase the man.
Unweave the thread, you unmake the war.
The Loom keeps peace by deleting what hurts.
So the Proclamants taught. But Caelen had long stopped believing in peace that required blindness.
He stopped at the edge of the Spiral Stair — a descending helix carved from stone older than the city around it. It whispered to him, the same way it always did when he neared its banished door:
"You remember too much. That's dangerous."
He smiled. "Good."
The torches refused to burn here. No light but the pale shimmer of Threadlight — soft particles drifting in the dark like snowflakes made of memory.
He pulled the forbidden lens from his coat — shaped like a monocle, carved from obsidian and bone — and placed it against his eye. The world refracted. Symbols unseen began to glow.
There it was.
A looped spiral of eight broken strands, hovering just beneath the arch.
The Eighth Thread — the one the Loom never acknowledged.
He had seen it in half-burned rhymes, outlawed murals, and dreamscapes he had no memory of entering.
"The Eighth Thread is the thread of no thread —
The memory that remembers being forgotten."
He pressed his hand to the glyph. It pulsed once — and then unraveled.
The door opened. Air spilled out, ancient and cold. Not musty, but empty.
Like a room that had never been breathed in.
And in the center of it stood a chair. A single, elegant wooden chair.
Occupied.
A man — or something like one — sat perfectly still.
He wore robes stitched from starlight and dusk, and his face was shrouded in a hood deeper than shadow. Not hidden — erased.
Time bent slightly around him. The dust in the air refused to touch his skin. Even sound dared not exist too close.
Caelen blinked. The lens in his eye cracked.
The figure spoke.
"You took longer than I hoped."
"You were never meant to find me."
"But I remember you, Caelen Veyre."
Caelen's heart paused.
"Who… who are you?"
The figure slowly lifted his head, though his face did not resolve. He gestured gently to the eight-threaded glyph in the air.
"A failed rebellion," he said.
"A forgotten name."
"Your first and final mistake."
He stood — and reality groaned beneath his motion.
The threads of the world bent, briefly, toward him.
"Call me Velkareth."
And then — without motion — he vanished.
Leaving only a torn page on the chair.
Caelen stepped forward, trembling. He picked up the parchment.
It read:
"Truth has no thread. It only frays."
End of Chapter One