The thing in my voice did not budge.
It stood between the statues, motionless, as though it was waiting for something to catch up with it...like time itself had forgotten to animate it. Its head cocked to one side, slow, unnatural. And then it spoke once more.
But this time… it uttered something that chilled the marrow in my spine.
"You die in Loop Eleven. Again."
Luro pushed me behind him.
"That's not a Threadborn."
"No," I breathed. "It's something worse. It's a reminder."
That's what they were in pieces I'd read in the Sixth Loop—beings that seep in when a world has become too aware of itself. They form only after sufficient numbers have lost recollection of the truth.
This one resembled me.
Because I had lost something important.
Luro grasped my shoulder and drew me back. "Into the vault. Now."
The entrance was half buried in thoughtglass debris. As we pushed it open, the Reminder did not follow—but I sensed its presence scratching at the fringes of my memory like a rusty blade.
We slid in, closing the stone behind.
Darkness enveloped the air.
We went down in the dark.
---
The Vault was older than the city above.
Constructed in the Third Loop, when memory still conformed to physics. The walls were constructed of a material I did not know—neither stone nor glass, but something in between, such as frozen remorse sculpted into shape.
I pressed my hand against the surface. It throbbed softly beneath my fingertips. Not light. Not heat. Something else.
> "This place is alive," I said.
Luro inclined his head. "It remembers. All of it."
We walked past murals carved into the walls—spun images of a world falling apart over and over. A collapsing spiral. A boy holding the string of reality. A body bleeding from the eyes, arms outstretched across stars.
And then we came to the last door.
The seal bore twelve interlaced glyphs.
Twelve Loops.
One of them was broken.
Luro drew out a knife and cut his palm. Blood fell into the seal. I began to talk, but he stared at me with empty eyes.
"It takes sacrifice to open."
I hesitated.
Then I did the same.
Our blood blended between the glyphs, and the seal hissed and dissolved into light.
---
The room within was not anything I had anticipated.
No relics. No machines. No treasure.
Just a strand of thread floating in the air. It changed color as we gazed at it—sometimes silver, sometimes black, sometimes something with no color at all.
The air around it was not moving.
Luro bowed his head.
"That's it. The original. The first thread."
I moved in closer.
And it pulsed.
And suddenly I saw
"..."
A vision of Kaelis, laughing in a world that had never been broken.
A younger me, deciding not to flee.
A copy of Luro who sacrificed themselves to save me.
A universe where the Break never occurred.
The thread allowed me to see every possibility simultaneously.
But only one could be selected.
" Select".
The word wasn't said out loud.
It was typed into my mind.
And for an instant—I extended my hand to grasp it.
Then Luro pushed me aside.
"No."
He held up his sword toward the thread.
"We don't get to fix this. If we do, we unmake everything. Everyone who suffered. Everyone who died."
I moved in front of him.
"If we don't fix it, the thing under the Loom will."
The thread glowed brighter.
And the Vault began to tremble.
---
Something was breaking in.
Not from the top.
From below.
A crack ran across the far wall as a black arm, long and jointless, stretched through.
Then I heard it again.
That voice.
My voice.
"I never should have lived at all."
The Reminder had discovered us.
But now it had shape.
And it was no longer biding its time.
It was coming to erase me.
---