Lin hit the ground running.
Not because she meant to, but because stopping was not an option her body remembered how to do.
Her shoes scraped across something that looked like earth but didn’t feel like it. The surface had the dead give of packed soil without the scent, without the grit, like the idea of ground had been pressed flat here and left unfinished. She stumbled three steps, one hand flying out on instinct, ribs flaring with a hot, echoing ache that made her teeth click together.
She stayed on her feet.
That was the first relief.
The second came a beat later, colder and stranger: she was heavy.
No glow streamed from her fingertips. No translucence softened the edges of her body. Her skin was skin again, warm where it could be, cold where pain lived. The air did not vibrate with threaded music. Nothing shimmered around her. The light that touched her was the honest light of distance and stars.
Lin bent forward, hands braced on her knees and breathed until the world steadied.
Her shoulder throbbed where the ichor had grazed her. Her side protested with every inhale, pain blooming and fading in slow pulses like bruises forming from the inside out. She swallowed, tasting nothing but her own fear.
When she straightened, the horizon met her in every direction.
Barren.
No trees. No buildings. No streetlights. No Sound in the distance. Not even a suggestion of city glow. Just an endless dark plain rolling out beneath a sky so crowded with stars it felt less like looking up and more like standing at the bottom of a deep, glittering ocean.
But, more than that, she noticed...
... the stars were strange.
Not strange as in unfamiliar. Strange as in close. They did not sit politely at infinity. They seemed active, alert, like eyes staring down at this new arrival. Across the firmament, constellations traced themselves in pale lines as if someone had taken a piece of chalk to the night and drawn shapes with deliberate care.
None of them were any she recognized.
Lin turned slowly, searching for anything that made sense. The movement hurt. She grimaced and forced her shoulders to relax.
It was so quiet that at first she thought she’d gone deaf.
No wind. No insects. No distant traffic. No soft electrical hum. Just nothing except the steady, relentless beating of her own heart.
Where the hell did I land?
She waited for the threads to answer.
Habit had her lifting her chin, focusing inward, reaching for the familiar warmth that usually gathered just behind her sternum. She breathed the way she had been when maintaining her light—slow, steady, attentive—listening for the hum that meant the Pattern was close.
Nothing answered.
Lin frowned and tried again, more deliberately this time. She pictured the way her body had thinned into brightness, the way motion had peeled echoes from her wake. She remembered the music, the tempo, the lift of the thread carrying her forward.
Her chest stayed stubbornly dark.
No glow came.
A small, unwelcome knot tightened behind her ribs.
She lowered her hands, flexing her fingers as if circulation alone might wake something dormant. They were just hands: scraped knuckles, a faint tremor from exhaustion, skin cooling in the open air. Entirely, frustratingly human.
Okay, she told herself, forcing the thought to stay level. That’s fine. So, I can't call my light. This doesn’t mean—
She stopped that line of thinking before it could finish.
Lin took a few careful steps forward. The ground held, but it felt unreal beneath her boots, like walking across a stage set built to resemble a place rather than be one. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the plain again, hoping for a landmark she’d somehow missed.
There was nothing.
The silence pressed in harder the longer she stood in it. Without the threads’ constant presence—without their soft chord beneath the world—everything felt stripped bare. Too wide. Too empty.
This was what Hlin had warned her about.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The thought came unbidden, sharp enough to make her swallow. The risk of going somewhere the Pattern did not actively hold. Of stepping outside the weave and finding nothing there to catch you.
Lin wrapped her arms around herself, more for balance than warmth. Her side twinged in protest, and she hissed softly, blinking against the sting in her eyes.
I can’t be stuck here, she thought.
Ariel’s face flickered through her mind, as she knew her: laughing too hard at her own jokes, crouched to Lin’s height, eyes bright and earnest. Holly followed close behind, hands flour-dusted or ink-stained, smiling in that way that always meant love and warmth.
The idea of never reaching them... of this place being the end of her motion, the edge where her song simply stopped... sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with the cold.
Lin exhaled shakily and looked up again, jaw tightening.
No, she decided, quietly but fiercely. Not like this.
The sky did not answer.
The stars continued their watch, brilliant and silent, as Lin stood alone beneath them. Unlit, unanchored...
... And trying very hard not to be afraid.
.....
But then.
.....
A sound came so softly she almost dismissed it as memory.
A single chime: distant, muffled, as if heard through water or some great distance of stone. It did not ring so much as suggest it was present; a brief shimmer at the edge of hearing.
Lin froze.
She held her breath, heart thudding loud in the silence, waiting to see if it would happen again.
Nothing.
She let the breath go, shaky.
You’re exhausted, she told herself. You got hit. That happens.
The chime came again.
Clearer this time.
Lin’s head snapped up.
One of the constellations above her pulsed. Just once. The stars that made up its shape brightened together, lines between them glowing faintly before dimming again. With the pulse came the sound, gentle and precise, like crystal touched by a careful hand.
Her mouth fell open.
Another constellation answered.
Its chime was weaker at first, slightly off, the interval between the two sounds uncertain. Lin watched as it pulsed again, the timing adjusting, the harmony strengthening until the second tone settled neatly against the first.
A third joined.
Then a fourth.
The sky began to sing.
Chimes layered themselves across the firmament, with intention, each new sound finding its place among the others. The harmonies folded inward, lines of light tracing and retracing themselves as the constellations brightened in sequence, the music growing warmer, fuller.
Lin turned slowly, awe stealing her fear. The sound wrapped around her—not loud, never overwhelming—but present, undeniable. It wasn’t the song of the threads as she knew it, yet it carried the same sense of rightness, the same underlying order.
Then the chimes shifted.
They began to change.
The intervals stretched and softened, the tones losing their sharp edges as something else threaded through them. Meaning gathered the way dawn gathers in the dark: Inevitable.
Lin felt it before she understood it.
Intent.
Warm. Attentive. Concerned.
The sound shaped itself further, harmonies compressing, rhythms slowing until the music crossed some invisible threshold and became something else entirely.
The sound shaped itself further, harmonies compressing, rhythms slowing until the music crossed some invisible threshold...
...and Lin felt an understanding wash over her.
She felt her name in the vibration; a recognition conveyed in pulses of light and music. The stars brightened in response, constellations resonating as a single chord that settled deep in her chest.
She swallowed, throat tight.
“Hello?” she said anyway, because silence demanded something human in return.
The sky answered without language.
A layered pulse rolled through the plain, vast and encompassing, carrying meaning the way a tide carries warmth. Fate. Weave. Beginning and ending. Forgotten and remembered. Not as titles, but as states of being that existed all at once.
Tears pricked at the corners of Lin’s eyes, sudden and unbidden. Her knees weakened.
“You’re the Pattern,” she whispered, the realization rising naturally, as if it had always been waiting.
The constellations dimmed and flared in a slow, affirming rhythm.
She drew a shaky breath. “This... this is how you communicate. You guide, through music... through memory.”
The response came as a held harmony followed by a subtle dissonance that resolved itself.
Constraint.
The meaning pressed gently against her thoughts: Silence was never absence. It was limitation.
Another pulse followed, heavier, carrying a concept that tasted bitter the moment it washed over her.
Oblivion.
Lin flinched. Her shoulders tightened as if struck by a sour note.
Images surfaced unbidden: black ichor crawling over light, threads screaming as they tore.
Gloymr.
The sky answered with gravity. The harmonies shifted, carrying a far harsher truth: corruption spreading as conquest that was deliberate, suffocating and intent on drowning all memory beneath it. The shades she had fought were not accidents or gaps; they were footholds, the first places where Oblivion had pushed its way into the weave and claimed ground.
“So it’s not just me,” Lin murmured. “They’re drawn to weakness.”
The stars answered in uneven rhythm. Disruption. Songs forced out of time.
Then the music widened.
Two melodies emerged, braided tightly together: familiar, fierce, unyielding.
Ariel.
Holly.
Lin’s chest ached as the harmonies carried the truth: for centuries the weave had held their resonance as a possible end to Oblivion.
But beneath it—
Another voice.
A counterpoint, subtle and binding.
Lin felt it resonate inside her bones.
Recognition took hold again.
Me.
The affirmation came without triumph as it danced through her mind as melody: It wasn't prophecy that was shaping their fate. Fates can be changed. Altered. It was the choice to act; to fight for what they believed in.
The music swelled as Lin remembered running when stopping meant surrender. Fighting when fear would have been easier.
Her harmony had strengthened.
What was once resonance had become melody.
Then, a reverent silence followed.
Lin clenched her fists, grounding herself as the truth settled.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked softly. “How do I help… if I’m trapped here?”
The Pattern did not answer at once.
Instead, the stillness changed.
A breath moved through the plain. The air stirred. The stars rearranged with deliberate care, opening space rather than filling it.
Wind gathered.
Light bent.
And then—
Presence.
A colossal form resolved from starfire and geometry, vast and indistinct, its edges dissolving into constellation's light. Rings of radiance hovered at impossible angles, echoing the sky’s own lines.
It was not solid.
It was projection: a truth too immense to stand here directly.
Lin felt no fear. Only ancient familiarity, like reaching the edge of a long, unrecognized path.
The harmonies steadied, carrying a final understanding:
This is not your prison.
It is a threshold.
The wind eased.
Another pulse followed, deep and inevitable.
Before the end can be faced, the beginning must be seen.