The ruins of the forgotten city still breathed smoke from a past incinerated. Collapsed structures—like the skeletons of a time that never was—rose around Kael as he walked. No memory echoed in that place—not his, not the world's. Only emptiness.
Yet something pulled him. An invisible thread that shouldn't be there, that shouldn't even exist. He felt it—a cold knot in his gut. The city, though extinct, still had a name. He had heard it whispered between the fractures of reality: Orasein.
Kael moved through the rubble, eyes sharp, senses high. The thick fog resisted the logic of wind. Every step felt like treading on silk paper, ready to tear. And then he saw it: an inscription carved into dark stone, veiled by fading runes — "Orasein endures where the thread was forgotten."
The phrase thundered silently in his mind. There was no way to remember. And yet, the name… somehow, it remained.
That's when the creature attacked.
It leapt from the shadows like a warped specter, its body made of loose threads fluttering like exposed tendons. It was stitched—an abomination sewn from the fragments of forgotten beings: eyes far too human, limbs wrongly placed, a mouth that opened sideways.
Kael rolled back on instinct. The blade in his hand was already moving before his mind could grasp what he saw. The monster struck with claws that didn't just slice flesh—they tore through logic itself, warping the air with every swing.
He dodged, led by the instinct that never left him. But then he saw: the enemy didn't move alone. Invisible threads—remnants of the Loom—flared with every strike, reweaving in unpredictable patterns. It wasn't a creature… it was a puzzle animated by its own will.
Kael twisted his blade and aimed for its exposed throat—but the sword met only air. The beast unraveled into a cloud of threads at the moment of impact, reappearing behind him. Its stitched tendons snapped tight, closing in a deadly embrace.
A deep gash on his shoulder. The pain was real—but not the blood. Kael bled something like dark smoke, not red. And in that instant, he understood: he no longer fully belonged to that reality.
"You shouldn't exist," the creature murmured with a voice of many echoes. "But neither should I."
Kael drove his blade into the ground and, in pure desperation, grabbed one of the floating threads around the beast. It was like touching fire and frost at once. A shock surged through him—and something happened.
The thread shimmered, pulsed… and obeyed.
Kael pulled—and the creature's limb unraveled into smoke. Without thinking, he grabbed another, spinning his body as if dancing with death, and yanked it with brutal strength. The creature screamed—a sound with no throat—and crashed into a wall, part of its stitching undone.
More threads swirled around Kael. Not by will—by reaction.
He didn't command them. He forced them to respond. Like a glitch in the Loom, he broke the rules simply by existing. The threads didn't know what he was. And that was his greatest weapon.
"You tore me from the world," Kael growled, lifting his sword like an extension of the thread he'd just pulled. "Now suffer the mistake."
He struck—not with technique, but with rage. The blade fused with the threads, slicing not flesh, but seams. The creature howled with every blow, unmaking itself. One arm vanished. Then the jaw. Its eyes dripped from its face and shattered like glass.
With a final motion, Kael drove the sword into the creature's core—a place that pulsed like a reverse heart. And there, for the first time, he saw a crimson thread—unbound. Untethered. Vibrating. Defiant.
He hesitated.
The blade trembled.
Then, with a roar, he severed it.
The creature screamed… and vanished.
Silence fell. The threads that once shivered around him dropped, still. Kael fell to his knees, breathing hard. He looked at his hands, stained not with blood—but with error. With the residue of a world trying to erase what it couldn't comprehend.
But he remained.
He raised his eyes to the sky, now clear. The name still echoed in his mind: Orasein.
On the horizon, a tower of ivory began to form. A place that didn't exist until that very moment. And above it, a bright point—like the eye of a needle about to descend.
While Kael reels from what he witnessed in Orasein, far away in Fimbria, a young woman receives a call that could elevate her station—or destroy it.The time has come for Lira to confront the lying heart of the Loom.