The path to the Threadgrave wasn't marked on any map.
It didn't need to be.
Elian could feel it — a current beneath reality, tugging at the stitches that still barely held the world together.
Every step he took westward pulled more threadlines loose.
Every breath he took whispered deeper cracks into the surface of the system.
The girl followed behind, too afraid to speak.
The rotborne woman shadowed his flank, claws half-out, head lowered.
They could feel it too.
Elian wasn't walking toward danger.
He was dragging it to him.
Hours passed under the cracked sky.
The ground twisted.
Rotborne creatures stumbled through the wastes, confused, their bodies mutating mid-movement as the rules of flesh betrayed them.
None dared approach Elian.
Even the infected recognized a predator greater than their sickness.
When the Threadgrave finally appeared, it wasn't a city.
It was a corpse.
Towers made of petrified bone.
Ruins stitched together with dead glyphs.
Monoliths cracked open to reveal endless spirals of names, most of them half-erased by time or will.
The sky above the grave was wrong — a whirlpool of black rotlight circling a single hollow point where no star had ever existed.
Elian stood at the rim.
He looked down into the broken heart of what the Architects had left behind.
And he smiled.
The girl broke the silence first, voice thin:
"We shouldn't be here."
Elian didn't even glance at her.
"We shouldn't exist," he said coldly. "Yet here we are."
[Zone Detected: Threadgrave Core]
[Warning: System Control—Lost]
[Warning: Memory-Driven Entities Active]
[Warning: Sovereign Influence Possible]
A faint chuckle escaped him.
"Finally," he whispered. "A place without a master."
He took the first step down.
The Threadgrave spoke without sound.
Memories bled from the walls — flashes of old wars, betrayals, collapses.
The rot was heavier here, thicker, but it didn't choke him.
It welcomed him.
Whispers curled against his ears as he passed:
— "We failed…"
— "We broke ourselves…"
— "Save us…"
Elian listened without mercy.
He whispered back under his breath:
"I am not your savior."
"I am the reason no savior comes."
Farther into the ruins, shapes began to stir.
Half-formed echoes.
Remnants of those who tried to rule the system by force, by faith, by fear — and were consumed.
Their threadmarks were twisted beyond recognition, leaking rot with every shuddering breath.
Elian didn't slow.
He didn't draw a weapon.
He simply walked.
And where he passed, the echoes shrank back into the shadows.
The girl tried to keep up, but every step forward seemed to weigh her down more.
Finally, near the center of the grave, she collapsed to her knees, gasping:
"Elian—what is this place?"
He paused.
Turned his head slowly, the cracked glyphlight glinting across his face.
His voice was low, almost tender:
"This is where gods are buried by their own mistakes."
"And I am what crawled out of the cracks they left behind."
A new ripple passed through the Threadgrave.
The ruins trembled.
Dust cascaded down broken spires.
A shriek — not sound, but meaning — tore through the threadspace.
Entities woke.
Not alive.
Not dead.
Not even angry.
Just hungry.
And they smelled him.
The anomaly.
The fracture.
The threadbreaker.
Elian spread his arms slightly.
Inviting them.
"Come, then," he said softly, smiling like a blade unsheathed.
"Come see what kind of grave you've dug for yourselves."
[Warning: Multiple Hostile Entities Converging]
[Estimated Threat: Catastrophic]
[Threadmaker Status: Marked]
The girl screamed as the first creature emerged from the smoke — a rotting mass of stitched flesh and broken sigils, dragging seven fractured arms behind it.
Elian moved forward, unarmed.
Unflinching.
And as the creature lunged—
He whispered:
"The living cling to laws."
"The dead cling to gods."
"I cling to nothing."
"And that is why I endure."
The fight began.
Not a clash.
Not a battle.
A lesson written in blood.