The chamber burned with light.
Not warmth—but force. Precision. Memory.
Threads returned, lashing from the walls like golden whips—each one drawn not by spell or fury, but by a will buried deep in time.
Casamir ducked low, twisting past one strike, then another. One thread scraped his shoulder—just enough to bleed. Another hissed past his ear, cracking stone behind him.
They weren't meant to kill.
They were meant to test.
The Hermit had taught him that Threads were the breath of the world—woven through bark, blood, and memory. You don't command them, he had said. You listen. You move with them.
But these Threads didn't whisper.
They roared.
This wasn't nature.
This was judgment.
Casamir pressed forward, heart pounding. Pain flared in his ribs. His coat was scorched. But he didn't stop.
He had to know.
Something in the tomb was calling—not with voice or name, but with recognition. Not of the body, but the soul.
He wasn't sure why. He wasn't sure how.
But he'd felt this before—
in the moments before Karnox fell.
In the silence before the Spiral Gate tore.
That breathless sense of something ancient remembering your name… before you've learned it yourself.
He thought of that last Karnoxian morning—the sky split open, and every machine turned to ash before it burned. The hum in his chest back then wasn't fear. It was something older. Something like home.
Another thread struck low.
This time, he didn't dodge.
He stepped into it.
And in stepping forward, he crossed something he couldn't name.
It was no longer just a tomb.
It was a threshold.
Pain split across his thigh, but he kept going.
Not because he was brave. Not because he was foolish.
But because he had to see.
This wasn't defiance.
This was curiosity sharpened to instinct.
He raised his arms—not to shield, but to open.
And they struck.
A dozen in total—Thread-lances of gold, slicing air, memory, bone.
He screamed—but not aloud.
The sound caught behind his teeth, blooming like fire through his veins.
But it wasn't fire alone.
Each Thread that struck him didn't merely tear.
It entered—and where it entered, it asked.
Not questions of flesh. Not questions of thought.
Questions of memory.
Of legacy.
Of will.
He felt his bones tremble as if remembering shapes they had never worn.
He saw a battlefield of stone that had never been mapped. He tasted salt on a wind that had never touched this realm. He heard a name shouted across a field—and knew it was his, even though it wasn't.
The Hermit's teachings shattered beneath the weight of this force.
But Casamir held.
He didn't retreat.
He didn't resist.
He invited the strike.
He let the Thread in.
It didn't just enter him.
It read him.
Not his thoughts. Not his flesh. But his origin. His contradiction. His fracture.
It peeled back memory like silk.
Searching.
Weighing.
Measuring what had been lost.
Pain lanced through his ribs—but deeper still was the sensation of being seen. Not as a boy. Not as a Threadweaver.
As something that should not yet be.
And for a heartbeat—he saw things he shouldn't have.
Not visions.
Not prophecy.
Just one memory that wasn't his.
A city of ash.
A crown of glass.
A name buried beneath ten thousand songs.
Flames leapt backward. Stars turned red. The sky opened—not up, but inward.
And beneath it all—
A face.
Not his.
But somehow… his.
It looked at him with familiarity and weight, as if it had once worn his skin.
And it smiled.
He stumbled, hands blazing with Threadlight, and fell forward—palms landing on the edge of the sarcophagus.
A rune half-drawn awakened.
The tomb accepted.
The Threads dropped.
Not broken.
Not beaten.
Obeying.
⸻
Silence.
The golden glow faded. The glyphs on the walls dimmed to soft silver. The tomb did not stir—but the sword atop it shimmered faintly beneath his hands, as though warming in recognition.
Casamir's breath shook.
He felt the Threads bend—not in submission, but in reverence.
And he, unknowing, bore it like a crown.
They coiled loosely around him—no longer blades, but memory-threads, unwinding like old silk.
Their movement was gentle. Not because he commanded them.
Because they remembered.
⸻
Footsteps.
The Hermit.
He stumbled into the chamber, breathless. His walking stick clattered behind him, forgotten.
He didn't speak.
Didn't scold.
Didn't even move toward Casamir.
He froze.
As if seeing a ghost.
Or a mistake long buried.
He took a single step forward, then staggered—his hand catching a pillar as if the weight of a memory pulled through him like a blade.
For the briefest instant, his eyes clouded—not with age, but with recognition.
He had seen this before.
Not in waking. Not in dream.
In prophecy once broken.
Then—
He dropped to his knees.
And bowed.
Casamir turned, startled. "I—"
The Hermit's voice trembled. "Do not move."
Casamir froze.
The Hermit raised his eyes to the tomb. His hands shook.
"No one… no one was meant to find this," he whispered. "Not anymore. Not again."
Casamir's gaze flicked down.
The seal beneath his palm glowed faintly—like breath caught between syllables.
"What is it?" he asked.
But the Hermit wasn't looking at him.
He was looking at the sarcophagus.
At the spiraled glyph, slowly shifting.
His lips moved. Just once.
"By the Threads of the First Womb…"
He didn't finish.
Because—
The lid shifted.
⸻
Not with sound.
Not with motion.
With intention.
The glyphs flared—briefly, like a pulse.
And somewhere, impossibly deep beneath the chamber—beneath soil, beneath memory, beneath Thread—
A bell stirred.
Not a toll.
A listening.
It moved through root and stone, through oath and marrow.
It did not echo.
It resonated.
And across the scattered reaches of the realm, that resonance stirred things not spoken since the beginning.
⸻
In a ruin long buried beneath the Runebroken mountains, a sealed altar cracked—not loudly, but with a sound only Threads could hear.
A blue flame whispered upward in a circle of broken glyphs, then blinked out.
⸻
In a frozen chamber far north, where no road remained and time bent like snow-laden trees, a woman's breath caught.
She had not dreamed in centuries.
But now—her Threads wept.
⸻
In a forgotten crypt drowned in black salt, where bones bore names no one dared recall, a single sigil flared—
Not red. Not gold.
Indigo.
It pulsed once.
Then slept again.
⸻
The Hermit gasped.
His hand rose to his chest.
"It's waking," he breathed.
Casamir didn't hear him.
He felt the a toll.
It spiraled through his body—twining around his ribs like song given shape. His Threads flickered, humming in time with a rhythm he didn't know… but had once carried.
And in that breathless stillness, as the Hermit wept at the threshold—
Casamir understood:
He had not awakened her.
She had remembered him.
And somewhere, impossibly far away—
The world had remembered itself.