They entered the valley under a sky that had forgotten the sun.
It wasn't night, not exactly — the stars still glittered in weak defiance, and the air still held the scent of earth and pine. But overhead, the eclipse no longer moved. The two moons, once dancing, were locked in unnatural orbit, casting the land below into a permanent state of hushed shadow.
"Elara," Lyra said as she adjusted the hood over her silver-marked eyes. "This place is... wrong."
Elara felt it too. The earth beneath their boots trembled at odd intervals, like it remembered being part of something whole. The trees twisted not from wind, but as if they were trying to turn away from something.
Kaelen called it the Null Breath—a phenomenon born when the weave of fate collapsed too tightly, choking the world of progression. Magic couldn't grow here. Only echoes remained.
Yet this was where Veyne waited.
They reached the first ridge by nightfall—if time still had meaning here—and looked down upon the ruins of a once-great observatory. Its domes had crumbled, telescopes shattered like broken limbs of ancient beasts. Elara recognized the crescent insignia of the Celestial Archivists, scorched into stone.
"This is where he was made," Cassian murmured, surveying the rubble. "Where he uncovered the flaw."
Lyra kicked aside a cracked star map. "Where he decided he was the only one who could fix it."
Kaelen knelt, fingers tracing an unfamiliar sigil burned into the ground. "He's rewritten the glyphs here. Aligned them not to the stars—but to the void behind them."
Elara felt a thread pulse in her chest.
"He's trying to bind the eclipse," she whispered. "Not just use it... hold it open."
Cassian's face darkened. "If he finishes that ritual, he'll lock the world into eternal stillness."
"No change. No growth," Kaelen added. "Only a perfect, endless moment."
Lyra exhaled slowly. "Death disguised as peace."
They descended through the ruins, shadows gathering around them.
No monsters attacked.
No ghosts stirred.
Only silence greeted them, which was somehow worse.
In the central chamber, they found the altar.
And Veyne.
He stood beneath the fractured moons, draped in tattered robes of star-cloth and ash. His eyes, once gray with wisdom, now blazed with voidlight. And at his feet: threads. Hundreds of them. Threads of fate, torn from people Elara couldn't name, writhing like dying fireflies on the stone.
He did not look surprised.
"I wondered when you'd come," he said, voice soft but immense. "Have you seen it yet, Elara? The pattern? The flaw that eats everything?"
"I've seen what you've done," she said, stepping forward. "You're unmaking people."
"I'm freeing them," Veyne corrected. "From choice. From suffering. The Loom is broken, Elara. Don't you feel it pulling against you with every step you take?"
She hesitated.
Because part of her had felt it.
The pressure.
The burden.
But then she looked at Cassian. At Kaelen, and Lyra.
And shook her head.
"Pain isn't a flaw. It's a cost. Without it, we lose joy, too."
Veyne blinked, slowly. "Spoken like someone who still has something to lose."
The ritual circle flared beneath his feet.
A pulse of null-light knocked them back. Lyra rolled behind a shattered column. Kaelen slammed his staff into the ground to anchor himself. Cassian barely caught Elara before she hit the stone.
"You still don't understand," Veyne said, walking toward them. "I'm not the villain. I'm the conclusion."
Cassian drew his blade.
Kaelen's magic surged, weaving threads of ice and memory.
Lyra vanished into the shadows, her daggers humming.
And Elara—
Elara called the thread.
Her bond glyph lit up like a nova, and the thread of starlight leapt from her chest, wrapping around her fingers like silk and steel.
"You're not the end," she said.
"You're the warning."
The fight wasn't one of muscle or blade. It was one of will. Of memory.
For every strike Elara landed, Veyne countered with the pain of those he'd "freed." She saw visions: lovers undone, children plucked from fate, cities halted mid-breath.
He was powerful because he held absence.
But they had presence.
Cassian's sword gleamed with all the moments he had chosen to love.
Kaelen's magic burned with every scar he had earned.
Lyra moved like a shadow that had decided to stay.
And Elara—
She wove.
Not destruction.
But continuation.
Every move she made told a story that hadn't finished yet.
In the heart of the broken observatory, light and shadow clashed.
The ritual ring cracked.
The moons shivered.
And Veyne—
Veyne screamed.
But not in pain.
In understanding.
"You bound me," he gasped.
Elara knelt beside him, breathing hard. "No. We wove around you."
He looked up at the sky, where one of the moons had begun to inch forward again.
Time was moving.
The eclipse was ending.
He began to cry.
"I only wanted to fix it."
"You did," she whispered.
Then his body unraveled—quietly, painlessly—into threads of silver, returning to the Loom.
They buried what remained of the Archivists that night.
Cassian stood beside her as the first true dawn returned to the valley.
"You chose the hard path," he said.
"I chose the living one."
And in the morning light, the world breathed again.