The storm had passed, but the echoes of the vision still burned behind Ahri's eyes.
She sat beneath the temple's withering lantern tree, a breeze tugging gently at the golden thread on her wrist. Jin sat beside her in silence, their shoulders barely touching. It was a comforting quiet—the kind that only grew between people who had survived something strange together.
In the distance, the Elder knelt near the thread pool, his hands moving in deliberate, meditative motions. Weaving. Mending. Reading the faint traces left behind by the Severed's interference.
"You saw it too," Ahri finally said. Her voice was raw.
Jin nodded. "The Hollow. Or something like it. A place where the threads go to die."
"It didn't feel empty," Ahri whispered. "It felt… trapped. Like all the lost futures were screaming."
Jin turned, searching her face. "Do you think the fox spirit came from there?"
"I don't know," Ahri said. "But it's following me. Or guiding me. Maybe both."
The golden thread shimmered faintly in the fading sunlight, and Ahri traced its line with her finger, watching it pulse in time with her heartbeat. "There's more to this story than the Elder is telling us."
Jin looked toward the temple, where the Elder's silhouette flickered in the lantern light. "Maybe it's time we asked him."
They rose together.
Inside the meditation hall, the Elder didn't look surprised to see them. He didn't speak at first. He simply gestured for them to sit.
"You're not children anymore," he said at last, pouring tea into three small clay cups. "So I'll speak plainly."
The silence stretched like thread between them, waiting to snap.
"There are places," the Elder began, "where broken threads gather. Places where memory and fate collapse into each other. Long ago, the Spirit Weavers sealed them off. We called those realms the Hollowed."
Ahri's breath caught.
"You knew?" she asked.
"I suspected," he admitted. "But the signs have been growing stronger. Your visions, the Severed's movements, the trembling of the loom... It's all converging."
Jin leaned forward. "What are they planning?"
The Elder's voice dropped. "To open the rift between this world and the Hollowed. To unmake the weave itself."
Ahri felt the floor beneath her shift—not physically, but in a way her soul recognized. The foundation of her world, her understanding, was cracking.
"But why?" she asked.
"To erase their pain," the Elder said. "Or so they believe. The Severed think fate is a curse, that to be born into destiny is a prison."
"And the fox spirit?" Ahri asked. "What role does it play in this?"
The Elder hesitated for the first time.
"It's not just a spirit. It's a keeper of forgotten stories—tales that were never allowed to finish. It waits at the edge of memory, collecting endings that were stolen."
Ahri's heart pounded. "Like my mother?"
The Elder's eyes met hers, and in them, she saw the truth he had carried alone for too long.
"She was one of us," he said softly. "A Spirit Weaver who vanished during the last attempt to close the rift. I thought she was lost... but your thread bears her mark."
The room spun, and Ahri's vision swam with images—flashes of a fox mask, a burning temple, a woman's silhouette cradling a thread.
Then the wind howled through the temple gates.
A bell cracked in the courtyard.
And with it, the faint echo of laughter—not cruel, but mocking.
A dark thread slithered beneath the doorframe, thin and whispering like smoke.
Jin stood, talisman in hand, eyes narrowed.
"They've found us."
Ahri rose too, her pulse ringing in her ears. "We're not ready."
"No," the Elder said, stepping into the light. "But fate rarely waits for readiness. It demands we act."
The temple walls groaned.
Outside, the shadows deepened—and within them, the masked figure of Miran emerged, her threads unraveling behind her like wings of ash.
She smiled behind the cracked fox mask.
"I told you," she whispered. "All stories must end."