ScarlettThe air feels like it’s holding its breath.Outside, the city begins to wake. Market stalls creaking open, carts rolling over stone, birds calling in broken, hesitant bursts, but it all feels distant and muffled.Like I’m underwater. Like the world is waiting for something.Signe lays the scroll out on the table like she’s peeling back a wound. The parchment is ancient.It looks too old for ink to still cling to it, but somehow it does. I can smell the magic on it. Burnt copper and dust.Aunt Cerelia stands beside me and her expression is unreadable.“This is it?” I ask. “The prophecy in full?”“No,” Aunt Cerelia says softly. “It’s what came before the prophecy. The framework the Weavers built around it.”“The original spellwork,” Signe murmurs, tracing the edges of the runes. “What we didn’t realize is that prophecy isn’t seeing the future. It’s binding it.”I feel my stomach twist.“Binding it how?”“Limiting choice,” Aunt Cerelia says. “Creating a funnel of possibilities t
CereliaScarlett sits on the edge of the roof like she belongs there.Legs folded beneath her, hands splayed behind her to catch the breeze, curls lifting in the early morning air.The sun hasn't quite risen yet, but the world is already holding its breath.She doesn’t turn when I join her, but I know she knows I’m here.I settle beside her and we don’t speak for a while.The rooftops of Raventon spread out below us. Stone and tile and soft chimney smoke, like the world is still sleeping through what’s coming.“She said something,” Scarlett says eventually.I glance at her questioningly.“The Ashkeeper. I saw and heard her earlier. I don’t think it was a vision this time.”“What did she say?”“That Victoria isn’t the storm anymore. She’s the vessel.”I nod once. “I know.”Scarlett turns to me and her eyes are still firelit. Not from rage, but pressure. With heat too long contained.“She was Erik’s friend,” she says. “Which means she couldn’t have been a bad person. A bit vain, but nev
SigneThe Weave is thinning. Not unraveling yet, but there are fissures in it now. Fractures in the ancient bones of magic that whisper when they used to sing.I feel it in my hands. In the trembling edge of every spell I cast.And in the silence between the threads. Where the Ashkeeper waits.She is close. I can feel her watching. Not as an enemy. But not as a friend either.She is the end of roads. The needle when the thread frays. She doesn’t destroy. She undoes.And if she’s near, it means the Loom is closer to breaking than we realized.I sit at the far edge of the inn’s attic, runes carved into the floorboards in salt and ash, my palm bleeding into the center sigil.Erik and Scarlett are asleep downstairs. Cerelia is meditating. Arlo and Hilda are sharpening steel. But I am doing the thing none of them can.I am listening.The Weave is no longer still. It trembles constantly now. And beneath the trembling, I feel her.Not the Loom. The Ashkeeper.She’s not a myth. She never was.
ScarlettI wake up gasping. Not from a nightmare, or from pain, but from something pulling at me.Like something underneath the floorboards has reached up and yanked me halfway through time.The room is quiet. Erik still sleeps beside me, his hand curved loosely around mine, our tether steady and warm where it pulses against my wrist. The fire’s gone out and the window is still dark.But the world feels louder than it should.Like it’s breathing down my neck.I untangle myself gently and move to the center of the room, where I press my hand to the wooden floor.And I feel it. Not just heat, but threads. They may not be visible, or tangible, but they’re real.So real I close my eyes and I see.There’s a flash and I find myself standing alone in a field of snow, hands blackened with ash, magic blazing wild and untethered.Then I see me, standing in front of Victoria, but it’s not now. My hair is longer. My expression… colder. She kneels in front of me bleeding and silent.I see Erik, on
HildaThe world smells wrong. Not like rot or blood, just off.Like a bone set wrong after it broke. Like something beneath the surface has shifted, but no one’s bothered to comment on it.I press my palm against the map laid out on the table. The paper curls at the edges and I feel shaky from the weight of choices.We're past hope now. Past caution. We're in the kill zone."You're obsessing again," Arlo murmurs from behind me.I grunt. "I learned from the best."He walks over, still drying his hands on a dish towel like he hasn't been pacing the kitchen like a caged beast all morning.“If I brood, it’s called being ‘dangerous.’ If you brood, everyone asks if they should run.”“Only if they’re smart.”He leans over the table. His arm brushes mine. Just enough to say he’s here. Just enough that I breathe deeper.Because the truth is, he’s the only one I don’t have to be strong for.The others? They look to me like I’ve got the answers carved into my ribs.Chris hasn’t said much since S
VictoriaThey strip the mirror from the wall. Silently. Like I’m not even here.Two robed members of the Circle, faceless under gauze, nameless by design, disassemble the frame with bare hands, no spellcraft. No respect.Just quiet, methodical removal. As if it were their mirror. As if I don’t live in this room. As if I have no say.I sit on the edge of the bed, watching them. Not speaking.There’s blood on my palm. My own. Dried and flaking. A burn mark rings the center. Scarlett’s magic, residual from where she shattered the spell in my hand. It hurts when I flex it.I do it anyway, because pain is better than this silence.Silence, I can’t fill. Silence is full of all the things I failed to become.When they finish removing the mirror, one of them turns to face me. I still can’t see their features beneath the white veil, but I don’t need to. I know the shape of rejection. Of judgment.“The thread has passed beyond your influence,” they say.“My influence?” I repeat, tone flat.“You