The passage through the light was not a crossing.
It was an unmaking.
Time did not pass—it folded, like origami drenched in starlight. Shapes flickered through Orion's vision: a hand reaching through water, a child building a world from dreams, a universe ending not with fire, but with a forgotten name.
Then—
Stillness.
Orion gasped as breath returned to him, as if he hadn't needed it until now. He stood on a platform woven from strands of memory, suspended in a void that shimmered like spun silk. Below them, fragments of worlds drifted—realms they had touched, fought through, failed in. Echoes of choices made and unmade.
Lyra stood beside him, her expression unreadable. Kael knelt at the edge, eyes narrowed, as if listening to the silence itself.
This place was not a realm.
It was a loom.
And it was not empty.
Across from them stood a figure—not human, not divine, but familiar in a way that bypassed language. It looked like Orion, if Orion had never chosen. If he had waited instead of acted. It bore no eyes, no face, only the suggestion of both.
The Weaveless.
The one who had abandoned the cycle.
"I was the first," it said, voice like rustling pages. "The one who chose not to choose. I watched everything… and became nothing."
Kael drew his blade instinctively. "Why are you here?"
The Weaveless gestured to the strands around them. "Because your story was never only yours. Every choice you've made echoes across realities. And some of us… chose silence instead. That silence wants to live."
Orion stepped forward. "We ended the Nameless King. The Veil is gone. The orchard grew."
"Yes," the Weaveless murmured. "And now there's space for things that should not have waited."
Lyra's flame pulsed, reacting to something in the loom. "What's coming?"
The Weaveless stepped aside.
From the threads behind him, something stirred.
It was not large.
It was not loud.
But it frayed the loom itself.
A ripple that unraveled everything it passed—realities, memories, laws of causality. A concept with no anchor, birthed in the wake of the Nameless King's fall.
A Child of Absence.
Born from what wasn't chosen.
"What does it want?" Kael asked.
"It wants a world," said the Weaveless. "Any world. It's not evil. It's what's left when too many paths are erased."
Orion looked down at the threads, then back at the being before him. "Then we need to weave something stronger. A tether."
The Weaveless tilted its not-face. "You would bind it? Or teach it?"
"No," Orion said softly. "We'll offer it a story."
Lyra nodded, understanding forming. "A new one. A thread it can follow."
Kael sighed. "Every time we think it ends, it just begins again, doesn't it?"
Orion smiled. "That's the point."
Together, they stepped toward the unraveling.
And for the first time, the Child of Absence paused.
As if listening.
As if… wondering.