The girl's words clung to Aloysius like a shadow.Something dangerous.Something still alive within him.
He followed her through the glass-veined forest, listening to the muted crunch of their footsteps on the mossy ground. She moved like someone who knew every root and branch by heart, but her glances over her shoulder betrayed a sliver of unease.
They stopped at the edge of a river unlike any he had ever seen its water shimmered in shifting colors, reflecting not the sky, but unfamiliar landscapes: deserts of floating stone, oceans lit from beneath, cities carved into living mountains.
"This river doesn't just flow," she said quietly. "It… connects."
Aloysius crouched beside it, brushing his fingers against the surface. Ripples bloomed outward, distorting the strange visions until one image clung stubbornly in place an endless black plain, cracked and pulsing with red light.
He froze. That place wasn't new to him.It was one of the realms the Weaver had spun from the remnants of the Loom. A fragment of reality born after the gods' fall.And it was breaking apart.
The girl's voice dropped to a whisper."You see it too. The Fracture."
The air around them seemed to tighten, as if the river itself didn't like being watched. From the black plain, movement stirred something massive shifting beneath the cracked surface, its presence bleeding into the water like ink.
A sound rose from it not a roar, not a scream, but a deep, resonant hum that set Aloysius's bones vibrating. It was calling. Not to the girl. Not to anyone else.To him.
The girl stepped back, eyes wide. "It knows you."
He didn't look away from the vision."No," he said quietly, "it remembers me."
The hum deepened, and for the briefest moment, the surface of the black plain split open, revealing a single, glaring eye an iris of molten gold, ringed in burning silver.
Aloysius's jaw tightened.The Weaver's death had not been the end.
Something in the Fracture had survived. And now, it wanted out.