The Loomspire was not built.
It was *woven*—from silence, from loss, from every forgotten promise the Keepers had made and failed to keep.
The spiral stairs shimmered as Elara led the ascent, the Heart glowing brighter with each step. Every floor they passed showed them things: moments from the past, unraveling like ribbons.
On one landing, Sira saw her mother's face again—before the war.
On another, Kael saw the moment he turned his back on the Keepers.
Even Rin faltered briefly as a younger version of himself stepped from the wall, asking, "Why did you stop believing?"
But the illusions faded when touched.
Only memories.
Only threads.
At the top, the air changed.
They emerged into a chamber where there was no floor—only a vast tapestry, suspended in nothing. It rippled like a sea, glowing with lines of fate. Threads curved and collided, some bright, others dark, all moving. Some were fraying. Some had snapped.
And at the center hovered a single, burning knot.
The *fracture*.
It pulsed with wrongness.
It was where Elsewhere had bled into the world.
Elara stepped forward, the Heart in her hand responding with a painful hum.
It didn't want to be close.
But it had to be.
"This is it," Maris whispered. "The moment of undoing."
Rin's voice was low. "Can we fix it?"
"No," Elara said. "We can *reweave* it."
Sira frowned. "What's the difference?"
Kael stepped forward. "If we fix it, we try to make it like it was. But if we reweave it… we make something new."
Elara lifted the Heart. Threads of light burst from it, intertwining with the strands of the fracture.
The tapestry resisted.
The knot writhed like a living thing, threads screaming in a language none of them knew. From the corners of the chamber, shadows rose—forms stitched from broken time. Faceless. Endless.
"We've got company," Sira growled, blades flashing.
Maris raised her hands, pulling light from the air. "Hold them off!"
Elara stepped onto the tapestry. It held her like memory.
She reached into the Heart—and then into the *threads themselves.*
It was not magic.
It was story.
And she was the one telling it now.
She wove.
One line for hope.
One for grief.
One for every name the fire had taken.
One for Naelith.
One for Eiden.
One for her father, still watching from the base of the Loomspire.
The knot began to loosen.
Sira held the shadows back, blade after blade slicing illusions into nothing.
Rin took a wound and kept fighting.
Kael burned his last spell.
Maris sang an old Keeper's refrain, her voice cracking with effort.
And in the center of it all, Elara rethreaded the fracture—until it no longer pulsed with wrongness.
Until it pulsed like the Heart.
And then—
**Silence.**
The tapestry stilled.
The shadows evaporated like morning fog.
And the fracture—
Was gone.
Not hidden. Not sealed.
*Healed.*
---
They descended in silence. The sky had changed—lighter now, filled with threads that shimmered like falling rain. Elsewhere no longer trembled. It breathed.
At the Door Without a Lock, her father waited.
"You did it," he said, tears in his voice. "You finished what we couldn't."
Elara shook her head. "We didn't finish. We *began again.*"
Behind her, the others stood tall—not just survivors, but *storytellers.*
Keepers.
The new kind.
Together, they walked through the gate.
Back into a world waiting to be rewritten.