Chapter 18
LILY
The room was thick with expectation, the air humming with something unspoken. The silver-haired woman—Ysella, as I had come to know—watched me, waiting for something I wasn’t sure I could give.
Someone tried to sever you from your thread.
Her words rattled through me, unsettling something deep in my bones.
I had spent my whole life thinking I was just another ordinary person, just another girl trying to make sense of the world. My family wasn’t special.
My grandmother had told me stories. Legends of strong women, of fate and power, but that was all they had been.
Stories.
Not history. Not truth.
And yet, the threads I had seen in the woods told me otherwise.
“That’s not possible. No one in my family has magic.”
Ysella’s gaze didn’t waver. “Perhaps not anymore.”
A shiver traced down my spine. “What does that mean?”
She exchanged a glance with Syra before stepping closer. “Some bloodlines were severed. Some were unraveled, their remaining lines hidden away so they would not suffer the fate of the others.” Her expression darkened. “So they would not be hunted.”
The implications settled into my bones, but before I could dwell on them, Ysella nodded toward a figure I hadn’t noticed before.
A young woman stepped forward, no older than me, her warm brown eyes carrying a kindness that eased the tension in the room. Her dark curls were pulled back loosely, a few strands escaping to frame her face. She looked at me not with suspicion, but with something else entirely—understanding.
“This is Lorien,” Ysella said. “She’s a Mender. If anyone can help you, it’s her.”
Lorien smiled, gentle but sure. “I can untangle your threads. If you’ll let me.”
My throat tightened. If you’ll let me. So simple. So much trust given to a stranger.
I nodded. “Okay.”
She gestured for me to sit, and I hesitated before lowering myself onto the worn rug covering the rocky floor. The others stepped back, giving us space, but I could feel their eyes on me. Watching. Waiting.
Lorien knelt in front of me, resting her hands on her lap. “This might feel. . . strange.”
I exhaled shakily. “Define strange.”
Her lips twitched. “Like you’re being unraveled. But don’t worry, i’ll put you back together.”
I didn’t know why, but I believed her.
She reached forward, fingers hovering just above my forearm.
A warmth flickered at the edges of my skin, like sunlight filtering through glass.
Then the air shifted—and I saw them. Golden threads.
So many it stole my breath. They were tangled and knotted as if someone had tried to bury me inside time itself.
An audible inhale from Lorien made the circle rustle.
I looked at her, my pulse hammering. “What?”
Her fingers barely brushed over one of the threads, and something shifted inside me, like a door creaking open. “Your weave is. . . vast. Strong. More than it should be for someone who has never trained.”
Syra stepped closer, with flint-bright eyes. “She comes from an old line.”
Lorien swallowed. “A powerful one.”
The room grew still.
A part of me wanted to shrink under the weight of their attention, to laugh it off, to tell them they had it all wrong. But I couldn’t. I never fit in. There was a reason I was brought to this time. Maybe this was it.
“Can you fix it?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “I can untangle what’s left.” Her eyes fell to my bandage and bruised neck. “I can mend that too if you would like?”
“You’re lucky August came when he did,” Lorien said softly as her hands hovered over the tangle.
“How do you know what happened?”
“Menders feel the thread as much as see it. The pain lingers in the weave itself.”
She pressed her palms lightly to my arms, and this time, when she pulled, something came loose.
Not only did the pain in my body fade, but a rush of warmth bloomed in my chest. Something clicked into place.
Silence pooled. The air shifted, the energy recognizing me now.
I wasn’t just anyone.
I was one of them.
And only then did I understand what that truly meant.
Syra stood beside Ysella, her voice cool and steady. “We should show her.”
I turned to face her. Syra—taller, more commanding—met my gaze without hesitation.
“The Weave holds memory. Holds stories even after those we love have been unraveled. This is a story that every Weaver must hear,” Ysella said.
“What story?” I asked, though something in my chest already knew the answer would change everything.
The twins moved in unison, their hands rising to trace patterns in the air. Golden threads materialized between their fingers, thickening, multiplying, until the entire chamber hummed with accumulated power.
“The story of how it all began,” Syra said. “The night the hunters were born.”
Before I could ask what she meant, the threads between their hands flared brilliant gold—and the world lurched sideways.
I was falling even though my feet never left the ground. The underground chamber fractured like broken glass, each shard reflecting something else, somewhere else, somewhen else. Sound distorted—the Weavers' breathing became wind, became whispers, became silence pressing against my eardrums.
Reality twisted. Snapped. Reformed.
The vision slammed into focus.
I stood in a Victorian parlor I'd never seen before. Wind battered the windows in great, aching breaths. Inside, candles wept wax down their silver stems. The fire in the hearth smoldered low while shadows stretched across the chairs, flickering, as if the room itself was remembering.
But the room was wrong. The air was too thick, pressing against my chest like a physical weight.
It tasted like copper and electricity, sharp enough to make my teeth ache and my skin prickle with warning.
Magic saturated everything—not the gentle, controlled magic I'd glimpsed in the Weavers' chamber, but something wild and barely contained. Something desperate.
A woman knelt on the bare floorboards, her skirts pooling like spilled ink. Her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders in waves that caught the firelight. She was perfectly still now—frozen in concentration so intense it was as if the entire world was holding its breath with her.
She didn't see me. Couldn't see me. I was a ghost inside her memory, a witness to something that had happened long before I was born.
But I could see her perfectly. Could see the way her hands trembled as they moved through the air, fingers dancing between luminous threads that shimmered with impossible light.
The threads were beautiful. Gold and silver. They floated between her fingers like living things, responding to the smallest movement of her hands, bending to her will.
She looked so familiar. I couldn’t possibly know her. Then it hit me. The old picture that was kept in my gran’s box with the necklace.
Elowen.
The name resonated through me like a tuning fork struck against bone. I didn't know how I knew it—the vision itself seemed to whisper it directly into my consciousness—but I did. And she was attempting something forbidden.
I could feel it in the way reality bent around her. In the way the fire flickered in response to magic it shouldn't sense. In the way shadows gathered in the corners of the room, watching, waiting. She was weaving something that made the universe itself recoil. And she knew it.
I could see the knowledge in the tight line of her jaw, the desperate set of her shoulders, the way her eyes never left the threads even as tears gathered at the corners. This wasn't ignorantly dabbling. This was someone who understood exactly what she was attempting—and was doing it anyway.
“Just one stitch,” she whispered. “Just one change to save them all.”
The threads pulled tighter. Forming a knot so intricate, so perfect, that for one crystalline moment it seemed to hold all of creation in balance. The room went still. Even the fire froze mid-flicker.
Elowen's breath caught. Hope blazed across her features—raw, desperate hope that made my chest ache.
“Please,” she breathed. “Please work.”
For one heartbeat, it held.
Then everything shattered.
The weave collapsed with a sound that shouldn't exist—like reality itself tearing at its seams, the laws of physics screaming in protest. An earsplitting snap echoed through the room, as if the universe itself shuddered apart.
Candles flared into blinding brilliance before snuffing out.
A gas lamp shattered, spilling whale oil across the rug.
The air turned solid. Crushing. Impossible to breathe through, even though I didn't need to breathe in this vision. The pressure built anyway, crushing my chest, pounding in my ears, trying to erase me altogether.
And the magic—
God, the magic turned feral.
It thrashed through the room like a wounded animal, no longer constrained by Elowen's will or the pattern she'd tried to impose on it.
I could feel its hunger, its desperation, its terrible, mindless need to anchor itself to something real, something living, something that could ground the massive power she'd unleashed.
“No—” Elowen's voice was barely audible over the chaos. “No, no, no—”
She tried to grab the threads, to pull them back under control, but they slipped through her fingers like water. Worse than water—like something alive that refused to be contained.
The door burst open. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, his dark coat gaping open, his hair windswept as if he'd been running.
For a moment he was frozen, taking in the scene—the shattered lamp, the wild magic tearing through the room, what I could only assume was his wife kneeling in the center of devastation.
“Elowen!” The name tore from his throat, rough with horror and confusion. “What have you done?”
“Elias—” She reached toward him, one hand stretching across the space between them. Her fingers were still glowing faintly with residual magic, threads of gold clinging to her skin like cobwebs. “I can fix it, I can—”