The Otherwhile swallowed light the way the sea swallowed stones.

  Cú Dubh navigated by memory and instinct. The fog pressed close, thick as wool, grey fading to black the deeper he went. There were no stars here and no sun. The compass on the ship spun endlessly as if the needle chased something it would never catch.

  Most men who entered the Otherwhile never left. The fog took them. They sailed in circles until their water ran out, until madness set in, until the sea claimed what was left. The isles here didn't want to be found.

  Cú Dubh had walked the corridors of thread and light for years. He knew the shape of the Loom the way a dog knows the shape of its cage. Loom-B was exactly the same as Loom-A. Same architecture and wrongness. A city pulled back from the end of time.

  He followed the same pull.

  The fortress rose out of the fog like a wound in the world. Dark stone and darker geometries, angles that hurt to look at, surfaces that seemed to shift when he turned his head. No light in the windows. No hum in the walls. The Sister slept, and her dreaming was silence.

  The Weaver had never told him, but he had understood the Loom was once populated from his time wandering empty corridors between missions. That its citizens had been pulled back with it to the start of time but something had eradicated everyone.

  That must have been why the Weaver slept.

  He walked through the entrance without resistance. No defenses woke and no traps sprung. Like anything that was a threat to the sleeping city had already been removed.

  How foolish a thought that was.

  The corridor stretched ahead of him, familiar and wrong. Same thread-light walls, but dark now, the geometries visible only as absence. The route was dark, but his yellow eyes gave him enough detail to go on. Besides, he knew the way to the Weaver's chamber by heart.

  The chamber was the same as he left it. The only light coming off the containment field around the Heart.

  She hung from the ceiling the same way, cables that might have been veins and a metal body suspended in the dark. Where the Weaver's eyes had been open and seeing nothing, the Sister's were still. Where the Weaver's mouth had moved without breath, the Sister's held shut.

  Asleep, and awaiting the softest of nudges to wake.

  The Heart sat in its containment field beside her. Same triangular knots shimmering behind the barrier. Same cold light, though dimmer here, barely a pulse.

  Between them, the Arbiter’s table.

  The Weaver had given him explicit instructions to wake her sister-self via the console and not to touch anything else he might see. This table fell into the latter category. A curious thing, he put a furred hand on the white slab. It gleamed from the Heart's light like it was made of porcelain.

  An apparatus began to descend from the ceiling on a spindly metal arm. Cú Dubh withdrew his touch at the sudden movement. The arm paused and then retracted seamlessly back into the ceiling.

  The room had reacted to the touch, and he smiled.

  He circled the table slowly. The surface was unmarked, untouched. No one had ever lain here. No one had ever been scanned, bonded, and made into a key.

  Until now.

  He thought of the boy who had died on a table just like this one, fourteen years ago in another timeline. A fisherman's son, brought for reasons Cú Dubh did not understand.

  The boy had synced and was incapable of fulfilling his legacy. The Weaver had made it clear that the Arbiter's words were like stone. So powerful they allowed the Loom to resist a god.

  Without them, the Loom had been running on fumes.

  Cú Dubh climbed onto the table.

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  The metal was cold against his back. The apparatus whirled to life above him once more and descended from the ceiling. A light shone at the tip that enveloped his whole body. He felt something pass over him, through him, a sensation like being read. Like being understood in a way that had nothing to do with words.

  The Sister's eyes opened and the lights began to come on around him.

  They were the same as the Weaver's. Seeing nothing he could name, but there was something different in them too. Confusion, maybe. The slow waking of a machine that had never been asked to wake.

  "I am a splinter."

  Cú Dubh sat up and threw his legs over the edge of the table. Strange that the artificial consciousness's first thought was of her own existence.

  "You are my Arbiter?"

  The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Weaker than the Weaver's certainty.

  "Yes," he said.

  She processed. The cables above her hummed, a faint vibration he felt in his teeth. The Heart pulsed in its field, brighter now, responding to her waking.

  "What is my directive?"

  Cú Dubh stood from where he lay on the table. It descended into the floor behind him, and he smiled over his shoulder. Cause and effect.

  He looked back at the Sister, at this mirror of the thing he hated. This twin that had never hurt him, never leashed him, and never made him into a monster. She was innocent in a way the Weaver could never be.

  "What is the role of the Arbiter?"

  "The Arbiter is my master. The person that guides my hand as I prune the errant branches of the timeline. We hold off Crom Danu together."

  "And if the Arbiter was to die, what then?"

  "I would select a new Arbiter, similar to the process you just went through."

  "Is there anything that could happen which prevented you from selecting a new Arbiter?"

  "Yes, Arbiter, if you were to die mid-sync then I would technically be in a state of limbo."

  "A terrible outcome for you."

  "Yes, one most dire. Luckily, we find ourselves together. Arbiter, I ask again, what is my directive?"

  He considered his next words and action. He understood that this Weaver had a cosmic significance. One that prevented the end of all time. He thought about the consequences and all the lives her death would unmake.

  He found he didn't care.

  He drove his scythe through the side of her metallic head.

  "Destroy yourself," he said.

  The Sister's head tilted from the blow, but she didn't resist.

  "That directive is incompatible with primary function."

  "Your primary function is to obey your Arbiter. My word is all that matters. Destroy yourself."

  She processed. The humming grew louder. The light in the Heart flickered, pulsed, flickered again.

  "Directive accepted. Implosion in thirty minutes."

  The cables above her began to twitch. The walls shuddered. Somewhere deep in the Loom, something groaned, metal stressed beyond its tolerance.

  "Release the Heart."

  Cú Dubh crossed the room and pulled it from the containment field. It came free with a sound like tearing cloth. The Sister stood motionless in the center of the room. He could feel her unseeing eyes follow him. It felt like they hated him.

  Good, about time she felt what was in his heart. He ran.

  The corridor behind him was folding in on itself. The thread-light walls flickered and died, plunging him into darkness. He navigated by memory and instinct. His boots slipping on the illuminated corridor even as it went dark behind him.

  He burst through the entrance as the fortress folded inward and scurried onto his waiting boat. He threw the drive in reverse just in time to see the city bend into a single point. The sound was immense and wrong, a noise that belonged to nothing natural. Stone and metal and something older, all of it crushing itself into a point of nothing.

  Then silence and the fog rolled back in. The Otherwhile reclaimed its dead. Cú Dubh stood to the aft side and looked at the Heart in his hand. Heart-B was his now. A tool without a machine, a key without a lock.

  One down and one to go.

  Loom-A would be different. Loom-A already had an Arbiter. A boy named Oisín. The lock was set fourteen years ago, and only the key could open it. He needed the boy to destroy Loom-A. Needed him to lie on the table and finish the sync. Then destroy the only thing keeping a god beyond time at bay.

  What if the boy wouldn't?

  He could trick the boy. Make him think he was saving reality. If that failed, he could always threaten. Bring something precious that the boy would not sacrifice. Both had one critical weakness. If the boy held firm, Cú Dubh had no recourse, and the Weaver would get what she wanted.

  He looked down at his hands. They were furred and clawed. They were the shape of human but they weren’t.

  He wasn't always this. He had been something else before the Weaver took him, before the Heart reshaped his flesh into the thing from a dying child's nightmares. He didn't remember what he had been. Didn't remember his name or his face or the life he must have lived. The Weaver had taken all of it.

  He remembered the process. The way the Heart had burned through him, remaking bone and muscle and skin. His screams of agony as it fused him with something else. When he became something monstrous, and the Hound had swallowed his past whole.

  The Heart could reshape flesh. He was living proof. The thought flickered at the edge of his mind. Not a plan yet. Just a shape in the dark.

  If the boy wouldn't comply...

  He tucked the Heart into a satchel and walked back to the controls.

  Corrán was a day's sail from the Otherwhile. He would be a new face there, but the people who were once his connections should exist. He could pull the threads like he had in his time, and those people could help him find a fisherman's son near Ballinacor.

  He engaged the engine and felt the push of forward momentum. He smiled. After all, he had work to do, and he so thoroughly enjoyed his work.