When he woke, the thread was still there.
Not glowing. Not pulsing.Just warm.
It rested in the dirt beside him, frayed on both ends like something ancient that had only just remembered it existed.
He touched it carefully.
It didn't hum. It didn't resist.But it felt like a whisper that hadn't yet found its voice.
The boy from the cradle didn't know how long he sat curled in the hollow of the earth, arms around his knees.
The sky had begun to change above him.Threads stretched, shimmered, faded.Names spoken in distant places fluttered past unseen.
He didn't have one.Not yet.
But something had shifted inside him since the dream.
He felt less like a silence.More like the space where a question used to be.
That was when he saw him.
Another boy—smaller, slighter, older somehow—walking between the trees with the hush of someone who didn't want to be followed.
He carried a satchel at his side, and from it he drew petals, fragments of bone, and other small things the Loom had long since forgotten.
The boy from the cradle didn't move.
He watched the other boy make his way to the edge of the old offering mound—half buried in moss—and kneel.
Carefully. Reverently.
He placed a petal down and murmured:
"This one's for her smile."
Another petal.
"This one's for the songs she never finished."
A bone bead.
"And this one…"
He paused. His hand trembled.
"This one's for the name I buried."
He stayed crouched for a long while, staring at the things he'd left, like they might answer back.
Then he stood, slow and stiff, and turned—only to freeze when he saw the boy from the cradle watching him.
Their eyes met.
The boy with the offerings had expected fear. Or revulsion. Or emptiness.
But the watcher's eyes weren't empty. They were hollow.Not like something missing—but like something too big had been carved out and never filled.
And for the briefest moment, he felt it too—that weightless ache behind the ribs.That silence where memory should live.
That boy had lost something too.
The boy with the offerings looked away first.
He shifted, pretending to adjust the satchel at his side, but his hands wouldn't stop fidgeting.
"You're still just… sitting there."
Silence.
He glanced at the waterskin by his feet. Picked it up. Hesitated.
"You thirsty or not?"
The boy didn't move.
He set it down with a shrug.
"Fine. Don't drink it. Just… don't pass out, okay?"
A moment passed. Then another.
The boy with the offerings sighed and sat cross-legged a few feet away.
"I hate when people just stare and don't say anything."
Still nothing.
He picked at a thread on his sleeve and mumbled:
"My grandmother used to say it after nightfall…"
'If a child comes with no drumbeat,No birthline, no breath-name,Don't answer when they look at you.Don't speak when they smile.They are not meant to be.'
A pause. Smaller now.
"They say those are echo-children. Not born. Not dead. Just… left behind."
He risked another glance.
"But you're not like that. You're… real. Just quiet."
They sat in silence.
Then, quietly, a voice answered.
Not a sound. Not a call.
A name.
"Jareth."
It slipped into the air like it had been waiting for permission.
The boy with the offerings blinked.
"Wait—why did I say that?""That name—I've never heard it before."
He stared at the watcher's face. No reaction.No correction either.
"Is that your name? Did I… hear it from you?""No one told me. So why do I know it?"
The boy didn't speak.
But the air between them shifted. Threads high above them rippled softly, like a curtain catching wind.
"I'm sorry," the boy muttered, rubbing the back of his neck."That was dumb. I didn't mean to say it like that."
He stood quickly and brushed off his knees, not meeting the boy's eyes.
"I was gonna go there anyway. It's better than sitting around here."
He turned away, then hesitated.
"You can come. Whatever."
They walked side by side down a dirt path flanked by crooked trees.
The boy with the offerings led them to a field of worn stones.
Cairns. Petal piles. Shards of forgotten names.
"This is the Threadmound," he said, not quite looking at him."It's where we leave stuff the Loom won't take."
No reply.
"Names. Promises. Songs people forgot how to sing."
The boy from the cradle didn't speak.But something in the field made his chest tighten.
Not memory. Not recognition.Something waiting.
They didn't stay long.
Villagers lingered in the brush beyond the stones.Eyes followed them back.
Later, when the boy with the offerings was gone, the watcher sat alone outside the grief-hut.
The wind picked up.
Something stirred in him that didn't belong.
And then—softly—a bird landed on the roof.
Its wings shimmered like fractured glass, gold light pulsing through the cracks.
It didn't cry. It didn't chirp.
It opened its beak and spoke:
"We remember you."
Miles away, a woman dropped her tea.
The thread she wore around her wrist—tied in mourning—tightened, then unraveled.
And a man on a distant cliff exhaled as a pale thread lit across the sunset.
"He's alive," he whispered.
Back in the village, the elders gathered.
"The soil didn't birth him.""The Wailtree must decide what he is.""No child of flesh weaves grief."
Another voice, sharper:
"Only the broken. Only echoes."
Beneath the hut's floorboards, the boy with the offerings hid—still shaking.
He didn't understand the threads. Not fully.
But he knew one thing:
He wasn't a curse.He was a question the Loom had no answer for.