[Location: The Blackstar Verge – Sky Above Elarith Peaks]
The sky had not shattered.
It had been sundered.
Across the highest reaches of Aurenya, above the silent monasteries of the Elarith Peaks, the sky bled fissures of lightless flame. Not lightning. Not cracks of magic.
Threads.
Torn and wild—rippling like the wind was trying to remember something it had forgotten.
Pilgrims fled the mountains below, some falling to their knees, others clawing at their own skin as voices not their own whispered names never spoken in this era.
And above them all…
She descended.
[New Eternal – Aelara of the Hollow Sky]
She was once the Keeper of the Unwoven Vow, a being tasked with silencing gods who had broken their fates.
Her form was impossible—half starlight, half eclipse. Veins of mirrored time flowed through her skin, and her eyes… her eyes reflected things that hadn't happened yet.
She hovered in the rift between threads, arms folded across a chest plated with fractured constellations.
And she wept.
"Sovryn has fallen."
Her voice caused the monks of Elarith to lose their tongues.
Not metaphorically.
She raised her hand. The fissures in the sky responded—stitching together into a tapestry of sorrow. The echoes of the Loom of Memory strained to return… but could not.
"A name unthreaded the past…"
"So now I must sing the future into silence."
[Elsewhere: Deep beneath Zenith's Reach]
Ma'urak the Graveweaver stilled in his endless digging, dozens of bone-hands clawing the air around him.
"One more has awakened…" he hissed, voice a fusion of hollow moans.
His countless skull-faces turned upward as if they could smell the unraveling sky.
"The Hollow Sky returns."
[Meanwhile: Kael Arclight – Base of the Scorched Spire]
Kael stood beneath the towering spire, his blade sheathed, his eyes still dark from the battle with Sovryn.
He felt her.
The new presence.
Not just an Eternal—but a weaver of aftermaths.
"Another thread bearer," he muttered.
Lyra stepped beside him, her light barely flickering in the ever-thickening ashfall.
"Kael…" she said, breath uneasy, "the stars aren't holding still anymore."
Kael looked up.
Through the crimson-streaked sky… he saw a pattern forming.
Not constellations—warnings.
Final Scene:
Aelara raises her palm.
Within it, a needle of solid shadow glows.
"He broke the pattern…"
"So now the world must forget he ever existed."
And with a single motion, she threads the sky into a blade—a memory unspoken—and hurls it toward the surface of Aurenya.
"I am the silence that follows legacy."
"And your name will not survive me."
[Scene Opens – Aurenya's Surface, Just South of the Sunspire Ruins]
The sky bled silence.
Not fire. Not thunder.
But pure forgetfulness—a void made solid.
From the heavens, Aelara's conjured blade spiraled downward.
Not even the wind dared resist it.
This was not an attack.
This was erasure.
The very concept of memory unraveled in its wake. Trees withered before remembering how to grow. Stones turned to dust as if they'd never stood. The air screamed in backward echoes—then stopped.
A relic battalion, still rebuilding in the wake of the Eternal War, caught sight of it.
"Aura shields, now!" barked the commander, her sigil crest flaring.
But it didn't matter.
The blade didn't hit them.
It rewrote them.
[Cut to: Kael Arclight – Sensing the Distortion]
Kael's steps halted mid-stride. His body reacted before his mind registered the presence.
"It's not just an aura strike…" he muttered, head slowly turning toward the ripple in the east, "It's a narrative cut."
Lyra stumbled beside him, eyes wide.
"Kael… I—what were we doing just now? Why are we even—"
"No. Not you too." Kael's voice sharpened.
He lunged forward, fingers pressing against her chest, feeding a pulse of Ashen aura through her core. Her eyes flickered—lost time reclaiming itself.
"Something fell," Kael said, standing.
"Something meant to erase."
[Flash Scene – The Blade Mid-Fall]
Within the blade of Aelara's making lived null-threads—tethered to the deepest voids of the Loom of Memory. It did not just cut.
It rewound.
The world stuttered. The birds in the trees forgot how to sing. Cities lost names. Tombstones faded.
And at the epicenter—
Kael appeared.
Ash bled from his heels as he blinked to intercept it.
He didn't draw Ashenflame.
He simply raised his hand.
The blade struck.
The world fractured.
[Inner Realm – Kael's Soul Arena]
Kael stood inside a crumbling domain—his internal soulscape cracking at the seams.
The blade hovered in front of him, still spinning, trying to find purchase in the threads of his identity.
It hissed:
"Who are you?"
"What were you?"
"What did you lose to become this?"
Kael breathed in.
The domain around him distorted.
Scars from battles past—Zareth's scream, Sovryn's fall, Drayke's betrayal—surged.
"You want to erase me?" he whispered.
His voice thundered like ash cracking stone.
"You'll have to remember me first."
He gripped the blade.
And the world blinked.
[Real World – Aelara's Perspective]
Far above, Aelara staggered.
"He held it…?"
A beat passed.
And the memory-thread she hurled shattered in her vision.
Down below, Kael looked up—eyes burning with silent heat.
He didn't say a word.
But the sky remembered his name.
"Haaah…"
"…what a strong aura."
[Scene Opens – The Ruptured Loomspace, Beyond Aurenya's Boundaries]
Time didn't flow here.
It fractured—like shattered glass caught mid-fall, refracting memories that didn't belong to any one soul.
Here stood Vaelithar, the Weaver-That-Forgets, one of the Forbidden Eternals.
She hovered in a sphere of impossible silence, her six hands threading broken fate-lines through a bone-spindle etched with runes only the dead could pronounce. Her eyes were blindfolded by veils of stardust, yet her presence saw everything.
"Something… resisted the Blade of Erasure," she whispered, hands pausing mid-spin.
One of the threads in her loom twitched violently—Kael Arclight's name.
"A name that should not echo."
With a gesture, she pulled that thread taut. It bled black ash and ember light.
She hissed.
"A thread… that rethreads itself."
[Cut to: Sunspire Plains, Just Moments After Kael's Deflection]
Kael stood in the smoking crater left by the null-blade's descent. His hand still hummed from the memory clash.
Ashenflame pulsed faintly at his back.
Lyra, breathing hard, reached him, eyes full of awe and fear.
"Kael… you didn't destroy it… you redirected it."
He nodded.
"It wanted to unravel the world. I showed it something the world forgot it had."
She frowned. "And what's that?"
He looked up.
"Will."
[Flash Cut – Zera in the Temple of Echoes]
Far across Aurenya, Zera Vaelith's Wraith Bell chimed violently.
The sound—it wasn't a warning.
It was a summoning.
She stood in the twilight cathedral of forgotten knowledge, eyes narrowed. The Echoes screamed louder than they ever had.
"Another Weaver awakens. But this one… even the Eternals feared her."
From her sleeves, she unfurled a faded tapestry.
The name stitched across it read:
Vaelithar.
"The Weaver who snipped even fate."
[Scene Shift – North of Noctheron, Within the Spiral of Breath]
Another ancient Eternal stirred in his slumber. His form was incomplete—half bones, half constellations. His eyes opened like twin eclipses.
He murmured:
"She moves again? The Loom-Stalker returns?"
"Kael Arclight… your thread must survive her. Or all this collapses."
He raised a hand and sent a ripple through the ley-lines, awakening hidden sentinels.
[Back to Kael and Lyra – Storm Building]
The skies churned with lines of stitched clouds, pulling into patterns too deliberate to be natural.
Kael clenched his jaw.
"She's weaving above us."
Lyra's voice trembled. "Who?"
Kael turned slowly, ash rising in coils from his steps.
"The one who forgets you before she kills you."
[Final Panel – The Loom of Vaelithar]
She whispered as she pulled Kael's name closer.
"Let's snip."
A single silver scissor, older than time, slid into her hand.
She reached for the thread.
But it burned her palm.
She recoiled—gasping, for the first time in eons.
"No…"
"This thread bites back."
"I'll show you, Weaver…"
"…that not all threads obey the loom."
[Opening – The Ashfield Expanse, Duskfall Skies]
Lightning writhed across the heavens—but it didn't strike.
It looped.
Over and over, like a spell caught in repetition, an echo of a memory trying to reassert itself.
Below, Kael Arclight stood still, surrounded by fragments of his own presence—slivers of ember-glow caught in the gravitational pull of his soul. His breath misted out like the cold before a storm. Lyra kept her distance. Even the light around Kael seemed unsure if it should approach.
"She tried to erase you," Lyra murmured. "And the world flinched when it failed."
Kael's voice was low, eyes half-lidded.
"She wanted my name forgotten."
"But you remember it?" she asked.
Kael's eyes flicked to hers—burning silver in black voids.
"Haaah... what a strong aura…"
[Cut to: Vaelithar's Loomspace, Distorted]
The Loom itself—an infinite weave of lives, destinies, decisions—shuddered.
The thread bearing Kael's name was now wrapped in something she had never seen before: resistance.
Not protection.
Defiance.
Vaelithar sat in silence. Her six hands stopped spinning. Her blindfold shimmered. A voice not her own echoed across the threads:
"This one cannot be unraveled."
And then—the loom itself rejected her hand.
Glyphs turned. Symbols shifted.
Kael's thread suddenly split—not as damage, but as evolution.
Two destinies.
Three.
Endless.
"This thread... is becoming a loom."
She hissed.
"Impossible."
[Meanwhile – Noctheron, Forgotten Citadel of Threads]
Zera stood with Drayke Norr, the two watching pillars of broken time spiral around them.
"She will come," Zera said. "And when she does, she won't need to fight us directly."
Drayke cracked his knuckles.
"Good."
"Means she'll never see the punch coming."
[Scene – Return to Kael & Lyra]
A strange fog rolled in. Not mist. Not smoke.
Memory.
The surroundings bent, whispering voices of alternate pasts. In one version, Kael had died. In another, he had betrayed Lyra. In another still, he never awakened at all.
Lyra gasped. "What is this?!"
Kael stepped forward. His aura shattered the illusions on contact.
"She's trying to bury us in versions of ourselves."
He raised his hand—Ashenflame ignited along his back, humming like a cursed prayer.
"But I only need one version to kill her."
[Final Scene – Loomspace Cracks]
The tapestry surrounding Vaelithar began to burn—edges curling with ash, not from Kael's flame, but from something more dangerous:
Choice.
Every soul Kael had touched rippled through the threads. Their memories. Their will.
A storm was forming within her loom.
And in its center: Kael's name, refusing to be forgotten.
"Come out, Vaelithar."
"Let's see if your scissors can cut through a soul that chose its own fate."