The Hollow Tree wasn't a tree.
It had once been alive—some kind of godwood that drank from ley-lines and bloomed with memory-fruit. Now it was petrified, fossilized, and hollowed out from the inside. Witches like Marell used it for rites too dangerous to perform near settlements.
Kale sat cross-legged inside it, surrounded by fungus candles and bones.
The air was thick with spores and incense. Each breath tasted like mold and old blood.
Marell sat across from him, unmoving. Her seeing-shroud twitched gently, glowing with threads only she could read. She whispered words not meant for the living, and the roots of the Hollow Tree answered—creaking, twitching, listening.
Kale hated this place.
"She is calling to the Loom," Azrael murmured. "She seeks confirmation. Proof that you have broken the weave."
"You're not helping," Kale muttered under his breath.
"I am never helping. That is not my purpose."
He clenched his fists. His fate thread—it was still visible in his mind now. A glowing line of light stretching into the future, shimmering like a taut wire.
But something was wrong with it. It was… frayed. Like someone had taken a blade to it and only halfway finished the job.
"Marell," he said, voice low, "what do you see?"
She said nothing for a long time. Then:
"You don't have a thread anymore."
Kale's heart skipped.
"That's not possible," he said.
"Not anymore," Azrael whispered.
Marell stood. Slowly. Carefully.
"You're not bound to fate," she said, voice filled with quiet awe. "You're untethered. Free." She touched her fungal blindfold. "But the world doesn't like things that are free."
A shiver ran through Kale.
Then the Hollow Tree shook.
Not from wind. Not from storm. From something inside.
A low hum built in the roots. Then a voice, layered and distorted, echoed from the walls like a thousand whispers stacked on top of each other.
"ANOMALY DETECTED."
Marell's eyes widened behind her blindfold. "No—damn it, it's found you already."
"EXISTENCE ERROR. THREADMASS CORRUPTED. HOST: UNBOUND."
The floor of the Hollow Tree split open.
A hand emerged. Metallic. Bone-white. Clutching something that shimmered like thread and blood.
Then came the rest of it.
A being half-machine, half-divine, dragging itself up from beneath the tree's roots like a spider shedding skin. Its face was a smooth plate of ivory, no eyes, just a symbol etched in the center: a spinning wheel of threads, fraying and twisting as it moved.
A Loomstalker.
"INITIATING DELETION."
It raised a hand.
Threads unraveled from its palm—burning red threads of pure fate, sharp as wire.
Kale didn't think.
He moved.
One of the threads shot toward him. He dove, the thread slicing a deep gash across his coat. Blood sprayed. Pain followed.
"Let me in," Azrael said, calm.
"No."
"Then you die."
Another thread came. Kale rolled behind a twisted root, heart pounding. Marell was chanting something in the old tongue, holding the Loomstalker back with a wall of glowing fungus.
But it was fading.
"I said no," Kale hissed.
"And I said: you are already mine."
Suddenly, his vision shifted.
The Loomstalker's body was still moving, still mechanical—but now Kale saw threads radiating from it. Hundreds of them. Lines of cause and effect. Lines of fate. And one of them—
—was brittle.
Kale reached for it.
His fingers brushed the glowing thread.
He tugged.
And the Loomstalker screamed.
It spasmed. Light erupted from its chest as one of its internal threads snapped like a violin string. The entire being glitched—shifting between realities, stuttering and freezing mid-movement.
Marell gasped. "What did you do?!"
Kale didn't answer. His body felt like it was being pulled in every direction at once. His thoughts swam in static. But he saw the Loomstalker fall, collapsing into a heap of tangled threads and broken metal.
The tree fell silent.
"Well done," Azrael purred.
Kale dropped to his knees, coughing blood.
"What... was that thing?"
"The first of many janitors."
End of Chapter 3