INTERLUDE - THE THREAD THAT REMEMBERS.(Selena’s Point of View)

They say memory is a thread. But mine is a tapestry of fire, ash, and names I no longer dare speak aloud. I stand now where the world bends—a place between what I was and what I might still become—and all I can do is look back. Not to mourn it. But to remember what I bled to carry forward.

I was not born to destiny. I was born to absence. To the silence my mother left behind, to the curse in my blood no one understood, and to the whisper that kept me awake long before I knew it was the Gate. My name was just a sound once. Now it is a storm. A reckoning. A key.

I remember the Academy walls, the brittle stone of a place that never felt like home. I remember pretending strength, while the darkness inside me folded itself into silence. I remember him—Calem—watching with eyes that didn’t demand, only understood. And yet even he didn’t see what slept beneath my skin.

There were others. Wounds with faces. Those who called me sister, student, soldier, traitor. I buried one with my own hands. I watched another bleed because I couldn’t choose fast enough. Every decision carved its name into me like a blade through soft bark. And still I walked forward, as if forward was safer than standing still.

Then came the fire. Not the kind that burns forests. The kind that burns truths. The Heartstone. The Spiral. The twin born from the part of me I refused to love. She was everything I hated and everything I hid. And yet, in her reflection, I saw what I had been trying not to become.

I stood before gods disguised as doors. I shattered seals that were meant to remain closed. I listened to voices that belonged to no one, and yet called me theirs. The world kept changing around me, but the heaviest change happened inside: when I stopped believing I had to be a savior and began wondering if I was only a survivor pretending.

Calem stayed. Through every unraveling, every fracture. Even when I screamed. Even when I ran. Even when I wasn’t sure if I could love without breaking what I loved. He held my hand not like someone afraid to lose me—but like someone who already had, and chose me anyway.

My twin tried to warn me. Not with threats, but with truths too heavy to hold. She showed me what it meant to be fractured—how every version of me had suffered for my silence. Still, I didn’t run from her. I walked beside her into the Spiral Gate, into the Mirror’s War, into the Temple buried beneath stars that never rose.

And then came the Lock.

The Gate is not just a thing. It is a being. It remembers. It tempts. It waits. I thought I would seal it. I thought that was the end. But it never wanted sealing. It wanted to be chosen. And now I know… it was never about closing it. It was about deciding what survives it.

The threads rose—each a possible future, a possible me. Some filled with sorrow. Others with thrones or graves or lovers who were never Calem. And one, the darkest of all, told me I was never the needle, only the cut it left behind. I nearly believed it.

But Calem’s voice called me back. My twin reminded me: even if I didn’t choose those paths, I was the reason they existed. I wept for them—all my other selves, trapped in echoes I could not save. I reached for the silver thread—not because it promised peace, but because it let me remain myself.

And now the Gate asks again. Am I ready to lose the version of myself that wanted this?

No.

But I am ready to face her. 

To carry her. 

To remember her without becoming her.

I am Selena.

I am not the seal.

I am the choice.

And the Gate is no longer the only one watching.