Reality didn't break.
It folded.
The chamber shattered around them like glass dipped in starlight, each fragment holding a different version of the sky—some alive, some burning, some already forgotten.
And through the falling shards walked a figure.
Cloaked in ash.
Silence trailing behind like a death bell.
Eyes stitched with stars, not as ornaments—but as locks.
The marks on the five didn't just burn.
They screamed.
Even Azerai—born outside memory, tethered to nothing—trembled.
Kael whispered, "Is that the throne?"
Azerai shook her head slowly. "No."
"That's what the throne is afraid of."
The figure walked forward without sound.
The threads around them unraveled.
The laws that held the Vale together—gravity, memory, meaning—fractured.
Juno gasped as the ritual tattoos on his arms dissolved. "What… is it?"
The figure stopped at the center of the wreckage.
And spoke.
One sentence.
> "I wrote the first thread, and now I've come to sever it."
Silence.
Not the kind that waits.
The kind that ends.
Rin's knees buckled. "He's not bound to fate."
"No," Mace growled, stepping in front of her. "He unties it."
Kael stepped forward, heart racing.
"You wrote the first thread?"
The figure tilted its head. "I was the first thread."
Juno staggered. "That's impossible. The throne—"
"The throne is a child," the figure interrupted, voice both calm and cataclysmic. "Built from a fragment of what I left behind."
Azerai whispered, "You're not a god."
"No."
"Then what are you?"
The figure turned to her. "I'm what came before choice."
Suddenly, the marks on the five flared—then died.
They didn't vanish.
They were absorbed.
Into the sixth.
The mirror mark now hovered between them, no longer reflecting.
Now, it was recording.
Time fractured.
Each of the marked was pulled into a different thread of memory—not their own.
Kael saw the first war—not of light or dark, but of intention.
Rin saw the birth of the throne—its creators arguing over whether fate should be fluid or fixed.
Juno saw the writing of the original script. Not ink and paper. Flesh and sorrow.
Mace saw a cradle. Inside, an infant surrounded by infinite threads—and all of them burning.
Azerai saw herself—unwritten from all those histories.
Alone. A blank page cursed to remember what everyone else forgot.
Then—snap.
They were back.
The figure watched them, eyes glowing with unread constellations.
"You were not chosen."
"You were written as erasures."
"Because the system predicted rebellion. So it built you to feel like resistance… while still being part of the weave."
Kael clenched his fists. "So all of this—our pain, our marks, Azerai—was just planned chaos?"
"Yes."
Juno shouted, "Then what's the point of us?"
The figure raised a hand.
And the sixth mark pulsed.
"You're the ending I didn't write."
Reality convulsed.
The Vale collapsed.
Not exploded—rethreaded.
Mountains became rivers. Stars became roots. Time became water.
And the marked—scattered.
Rin fell into a world where the throne had never existed.
She was a stranger in a land of absolute freedom—and absolute anarchy.
Mace awoke in a battlefield locked in endless war—where the throne ruled everything, and rebellion was a bedtime story.
Juno opened his eyes in a library so vast it had no ceiling—where every book was a life that never happened.
Azerai found herself bound again. But not by chains—by questions. In a chamber of mirrors, each one asking, "Who erased you?"
Kael…
Kael stood alone.
At the place where threads begin.
Not a birthplace.
A loom.
And before him—
a needle.
The figure appeared beside him.
"You can write one thing," it said.
"One change."
"One truth."
"One lie."
"One name."
Kael whispered, "What do I pay?"
The figure's stitched eyes opened for the first time.
"Everything."
Kael took the needle.
And chose.
Somewhere, the sixth mark etched itself into the sky.
The throne screamed across all realities.
And the story—
began again.