The walls moved inward with a hiss of parchment folding, Kael pressed his back against the only space that hadn’t yet collapsed, arms up, blood dripping from where letters had carved across his skin.They weren’t just letters anymore. They were commands, Sentences etched with intention, not ink. Kael forgot, Kael kneeled, Kael broke.Each one forced him deeper into submission, each line burning itself into the air and then into his body, He wasn’t bleeding red anymore, His blood was black.He tried to summon Liolai’s face. The shape of her eyes. The curve of her smile, Nothing came. He tried to remember the child’s voice, Stillness, Only the pull of the threads, gold and white and the thorn-wrapped black.They writhed now. Feeding, Not off his body, but off his story, And as they did, Kael felt his thoughts being redacted. Whole parts of himself were being struck from the script. The strategist, The lover, The father.All crumbling under the steady, deliberate revision of the realm. T
Kael's scream tore through the illusion like lightning splits a storm, But the people in the village didn’t react. They smiled, Waved. Went about their business like actors in a forgotten scene.He stumbled backward from the broken mirror, chest heaving, hands shaking, The threads inside him, one gold, one white, twisted through his ribs, coiled around his spine, digging deeper.Each pulled in a different direction. Each alive, He gripped a nearby post, blood running down his arms. He could hear them now, The voices attached to each thread.“She forgave you.”“She was your mate. Your Queen. Your home.”“You were hers.”Liolai’s voice. Calm. Warm. Familiar, It tried to still him. Wrap around his grief. Anchor him to a memory of love.“You never named me.”“But I knew your name.”“Even as I was erased, I remembered you.”This voice, softer. Younger. But colder, Sharper, And filled with something no child should have to carry: abandonment. Kael fell to his knees.The threads burned benea
Kael’s body faded first, His handsonce strong, once stained with blood and love, flickered into smoke.The erasure began not with pain, but with absence, The kind that crept in soft, silent, final.“You don’t remember my name,” said the girl on the throne. “So the realm has decided you were never worthy of knowing it.”Kael struggled to rise, His knees buckled against the weight of her voice.“Wait,” he rasped, barely audible. “Please.”But the realm did not wait, The floor beneath him cracked, lines of gold and white light bleeding outward like veins of regret.“You were given the gift of choice,” she said, descending the steps of the throne, “and you bartered it for illusion.”He coughed, fingers clawing at the disintegrating fabric of reality beneath him.“I loved her,” he whispered. “I loved you both.”Her eyes, one gold, one white, glimmered with fury and something worse: pity.“No,” she replied. “You loved the idea of being right.”Behind her, two tapestries unfurled along the t
Kael stared at the thread, White, Unbroken. And burning like frost against fire in the girl’s translucent palm. She shouldn’t exist. He’d watched her vanish. But here she was. Eyes like empty moons.Skin humming with erased potential, She wasn’t crying, She wasn’t angry. She was waiting. Kael stood frozen, his breath frosting in the unnatural cold that now bled from her presence.“Why?” he whispered. “I thought you were gone. I felt it.”Her reply didn’t come from her mouth, It pulsed through the thread tied between them. You didn’t choose. You tried to cheat the realm. And now it wants something back.Kael stumbled back, clutching his chest, The thread pulled taut between them, humming with pain and memory. Visions clawed through his mind:Liolai smiling at him beneath a broken sky, The child reaching for his hand as the void swallowed her, The moment he plunged both hands between the threads and screamed no. He’d refused to choose.And the realm, in its cold balance, had chosen for
Darkness didn’t lift. It peeled away. Like burned parchment, Kael awoke on cold stone, the golden thread wrapped tight around his fingers. Only one thread. Only gold.He sat up slowly, the weight of silence pressing into his chest. The forest was gone. The rift sealed. The sky a blank sheet of gray. And she, The child. Gone.He clutched the thread harder until his knuckles turned white.“You chose,” whispered the wind.“Or were chosen.”Kael stumbled to his feet, numb, His body ached, not from battle, but from absence, The kind of ache that couldn’t be healed, He staggered through the empty world, There were no trees.No stars.Just ruins of memory carved in half-formed shapes, half a cradle, half a crown, half a home, In the distance, a shimmer of gold drew him onward, He didn’t know why he walked. Only that he had to, Each step was a betrayal.Each breath carried the name he could no longer speak, Her name was never written, She had never existed.At the heart of the emptiness stood
The moment the shadow spoke, time contracted, Kael froze, his breath torn from his lungs, He faced himself, or something that looked like him. Same eyes. Same voice. Same pain carved into the creases of his face.But where Kael stood bruised and bleeding with hope, the thing before him dripped with ruin, Its cloak was made of broken threads, Its crown forged from every failed choice Kael had ever made. It stepped forward, Slow. Certain.“I am what you would have become,” the shadow said, “if you had never tried to save her.”Kael backed up, one foot catching on a root. He nearly stumbled into the threads glowing at his feet—one gold, one white. The choice.“You’re not me,” he spat.The shadow smiled. “No. I’m what you buried.”Kael’s eyes darted to the gash in the world, still bleeding whispers from the voice of the woman he loved. Her plea echoing in every breath. “Choose.”The shadow didn’t blink. “And yet, here you stand. Again. Afraid to do what’s needed.”“I made sacrifices,” Kae