There were no stars that night.Only the Loom, trembling.
The first to arrive said nothing. She walked barefoot across the ash-blown field, her cloak stitched of silence. Where her fingers brushed the soil, the ground wept. Around her ankles, sorrow curled like smoke.
"He was the thread we never meant to lose."
Others followed. One by one. None by name.
A child with ribboned limbs skipped to the empty place, laughter catching in the wind like paper left out in rain. She dropped a strand of woven joy into the hollow, and for a moment—just a moment—the air forgot to grieve.
A stag of gold flared his nostrils once. His antlers shimmered with stories not yet told.He said nothing. But where he stood, the sky burned red.
A great turtle lanterned in mourning-light placed a glowing shell fragment at the cairn, humming a song no voice could carry.
"Let the roots remember him," a woman whispered, cradling a blackened thread in both palms. "Let the soil never forget."
In the distance, a pale knight knelt. His face had no features. Only grief.
Beneath a shattered mirror, a seer scattered silver sands. A page of unwritten law was left beside a rhythm-beaten drum. A sword forged of sorrow was planted upright, blade to the heavens. No one touched it.
The mourners formed a ring—not around a grave, but around an absence.An echo.
Some placed relics: a breath sealed in glass, a tear fossilized in amber, a thread coiled around a cracked memory.
A boy stood at the edge. He was older now. Older than when the thread first broke.
"He never asked to be remembered," he said. "Only not to be erased."
They all looked skyward. The Loom overhead flickered. Names moved within it like forgotten constellations.
And then, two figures stepped forth.
A woman, cloaked in moon thread, her hands trembling with every heartbeat.A man, silent and unshaken, carrying nothing but a tiny, pulsing ember.
The woman knelt.
"He was ours. Long before he was the world's."The man planted the ember. It pulsed once, then faded.
No prayers were said. No titles given.
Only silence.
And in the silence, the world remembered—what it had lost.What it had loved.What had once been woven from sorrow and thread.