The café feels hollow after fate's "pause."
It's not quiet. Quiet is natural, familiar, peaceful.This is something colder — like someone unplugged the world and forgot to plug it back in.
Milo stands at the doorway, watching the street outside dissolve into a strange kind of stillness. Cars remain mid-turn. Leaves hang mid-fall. Every thread he once saw humming through people now lies slack, dim, and motionless.
The world isn't frozen.
It's waiting.
Liora steps beside him. "It's happening faster than I thought."
Milo swallows hard. "What is?"
She doesn't answer immediately. Instead, she opens her palm. A small thread — thin as hair, glowing faintly gold — lies across it. Milo recognizes it.
His thread.
Or… one of them.
"This fell out of you," Liora says softly. "That's not supposed to happen."
"What does it mean?" Milo asks, though dread already whispers the answer.
"It means your fate is no longer attached. You're outside the Loom."
Milo feels the floor tilt beneath him. "So… I don't have a future?"
"No." Her voice is gentle, but firm. "It means you have all of them. You're not following a path anymore. You're walking above it."
The air shifts — a deep vibration running through the café walls. Milo feels it in his teeth.
"They're coming," Liora says. "The Fatekeepers. The real ones. The ones you met before were just Envoys."
"So who's coming now?"
She looks at him, eyes dark with something like reverence and fear.
"The Weavers."
Milo's breath catches.
Weavers — the architects of fate. The ones who design possibilities before the Fatekeepers distribute them. They haven't walked the human plane in centuries.
The vibration grows stronger.The air thickens.The walls bend — not physically, but in perspective, as if reality is squinting.
Liora grabs his wrist. "Listen to me. When they arrive, they won't be here for negotiation. They will ask for one thing."
"What?"
"You."A beat."And the Eclipse Blend."
Milo's chest tightens. "Why?"
"Because you're the first anomaly in centuries." She squeezes his hand. "They don't want you to change the Loom. They want to erase the part that made you."
The café suddenly goes silent again.
Not paused.Not waiting.
Bracing.
Liora turns toward the back room. "Get ready."
"For what?"
"For the moment, the Loom wakes up angry."