The Threadlands were not a place.
They were a condition.
A knot in the fabric of the world, where time bent like heat-hazed glass and reality wore thin. The sky here had too many suns—but none shone. Trees grew upside-down, their roots flowering, their leaves underground. And across the land flowed rivers of memory, clear and uncontainable, winding in loops, erasing their own banks.
Lira stepped onto the shifting path of light.
Behind her came Ashrel, Kaelen, and Davin.
Each had passed through fire. Each had changed.
But here, in the Threadlands, even change could be unmade.
"It's wrong here," Ashrel murmured. "The past touches the future like water touches itself."
Kaelen stared at a tree that was bleeding stars.
"This place remembers… too much."
Lira said nothing.
She could feel them—names, all around her.
Wandering. Waiting. Watching.
Not ghosts. Not spirits.
Just… people who were unremembered.
Then the sky shivered.
A voice, thousands layered into one, whispered from the river's edge:
"Speak your name, or be taken by the tangle."
Kaelen stepped back.
Ashrel's hand went to his blade.
But Davin, always the risk-taker, stepped forward first.
"Davin of the Saltforge. I have never forgotten."
The Threadlands paused. Approved. Moved on.
Ashrel stepped next.
"Ashrel Nakarai, sworn to the Flame but bound by blood."
A faint breeze brushed his hair. Time accepted him.
Kaelen followed.
"Kaelen Adari… I don't know what I am anymore. But I remember who I was."
That, too, was enough.
Then came Lira.
When she spoke, the world held its breath.
"Lira of the Emberline," she said. "No longer a name. Now a mirror. And I reflect all who were lost."
The Threadlands went still.
Even the memory-rivers froze.
And the sky whispered a phrase none of them understood—but Lira did.
"The Weaver has returned."
Ashrel turned. "What did it say?"
Lira didn't answer right away.
She was staring at something in the river.
Not a reflection.
A person.
A woman with silvered skin and no face—only light—and a crown made of broken thread.
She reached out.
Lira reached back.
And the world rippled.
They were pulled forward—not by force, but by truth.
The Threadlands unfolded like cloth drawn back from a wound.
And beneath them, deeper than roots, deeper than flame…
…was a loom.
Massive. Endless. Ancient.
Woven from fire, memory, sorrow, and light.
And beside it sat a figure, turning a spindle of names.
One hundred and twenty.
One for each name the world had been made to forget.
Lira approached the loom.
The figure didn't turn.
It simply said:
"You've come to take them back."
"To restore them," she corrected.
The figure nodded.
"Then you must weave them into yourself. One by one. With your voice. With your soul. With your choices."
Lira looked back at her friends.
Each had changed. Each would change more.
But only she could speak what had been buried.
She placed her hand on the first thread.
It whispered a name.
"Serai."
She wove.
The loom stirred.
And the First Flame remembered who it used to be.