Tylor's hand hovered over the doorknob as the audio repeated—Lila's voice, cracked with urgency: "…the one we missed…"
The three of them stood frozen. Amaira clutched her sketchbook tighter, her knuckles white. Kayla's breathing slowed, her eyes narrowing. She whispered, "It's a message… but it's tethered to this place."
Tylor turned the knob.
The door opened with a click—no creak, no drama. Just silence. Behind it stretched a narrow corridor of mirror-polished walls, reflecting distorted versions of themselves: older, younger, fractured. Some smiling. Some crying. One version of Tylor wore the Chronarch's armor. Another had no eyes at all.
Each step echoed louder than it should have.
At the corridor's end, a projection shimmered to life—a 3D hologram of Lila, dressed in her old gear, bruised and determined.
"This message is encrypted to only activate if the Loom resets time improperly," she said. "Meaning one core fracture remained unsealed. I tried to locate it—but I ran out of time."
The hologram glitched.
"I don't know who… but someone else knew about the fracture fields. Someone outside the Collective. They never left a name—just a mark."
The image shifted to a jagged insignia: a circle split by a lightning bolt, with binary digits around the edge.
Amaira whispered, "That's not in Mom's journal. Or Elena's."
Kayla stared. "It's not the Collective… It's something older."
Lila's voice dropped. "If this plays… they're already watching."
Suddenly, the corridor darkened. The mirrors began to hum, and their reflections twisted. Not just distorted—wrong. In one, Tylor was being pulled backward by invisible threads. In another, Kayla bled from her eyes. Amaira stood alone in a third, her sketchbook on fire.
Amaira took a step back, whispering, "This place is a fracture. A sealed one—but bleeding through."
Tylor's heart pounded. "Then it wasn't just time the Collective broke. It was… the barrier."
Kayla finished the thought aloud. "Between timelines—and something else."
Suddenly, the corridor buckled. The hologram blinked violently, and Lila's final words hissed through static:
"He calls himself the Weaver. If he's awake—nothing's fixed. Only delayed."
The projection cut out.
Behind them, the door slammed shut. The corridor vanished. They were back in their home.
But something had changed.
Outside, the oak tree now bore a single marking burned deep into its bark—the jagged circle.
Amaira turned her sketchbook. The page she hadn't drawn on yet?
It was already filled.
A perfect drawing of the Weaver's mark. And beneath it, scrawled in a child's writing not her own:
"Thread pulled. One left."
Kayla whispered, "We didn't end the story. We just closed the wrong book."