Chapter 19: Fractures in the Loom
The next morning, the Pale Assembly summoned them again—not through words, but symbols. Carved discreetly into a broken fountain in the western garden district, Loki and Selena found three interwoven marks: a shield-shaped loop, a jagged lightning slash, and a spiral curling back into itself.
Selena traced them with her fingertips. "Three voices. Same chorus."
They returned to the mask-chamber beneath the Cauldron Market, this time to find it no longer empty. The merchant stood flanked by three veiled figures, each clad in garments that shimmered with conflicting textures: silk, ash-cloth, and woven roots.
"We thought the Assembly was one thing," Loki said under his breath.
"It never is," Selena murmured.
The merchant stepped aside. "Allow me to introduce the three Threads of the Assembly: the Preservers, the Severants, and the Weavers."
The first figure—veiled in blue silk, face painted with steady lines—spoke first. "We are the Preservers. We believe the current pattern, flawed though it may be, was stitched by entities whose wisdom transcends ours. Our role is to maintain it. If not the divine design, then at least the equilibrium."
The second, a tall woman wrapped in charred robes, her mouth covered in blood-red linen, spoke with a voice like cracking coal. "We are the Severants. The loom must burn. All of it. The gods lied. The Sequences are prisons. We would see the whole pattern undone."
Finally, the third stepped forward, cloaked in moss-green and root-brown. They had no face visible, only a mask carved with hundreds of tiny mirrored shards. "We are the Weavers. The past is a guide, not a chain. We believe new patterns can be spun from old threads. You, Trickster and Seeker, may yet help us rewrite what others blindly follow."
Loki raised an eyebrow. "And what do you want from us?"
"That depends on who you listen to," said the Preserver.
"Or what you choose to destroy," added the Severant.
"Or what you're willing to become," finished the Weaver.
Over the next few days, the duo became entangled in Assembly work, but not all missions were clear. Sometimes they were sent to deliver relics to temples that no longer existed. Sometimes they guarded sleeping strangers said to dream on behalf of the world. Other times, they simply followed symbols scratched into cobblestones until they found answers to questions they had not yet asked.
During these missions, Loki and Selena learned more about the shape of the world—how the Sequences were only one layer of reality, crafted to keep the deeper layers from rising.
They met a cartographer who had mapped the places where history forgets to exist.
They spoke with a child who remembered her own death in three different timelines.
They sat beneath a starless sky, drinking tea brewed by a woman who claimed to be the last surviving Witness of the original pacts.
And more than once, they were watched. Not by people, but by places—buildings that seemed to lean closer when they passed, doorways that appeared where none had existed before. Selena suspected the city itself had begun to respond to their movements, or perhaps to the truths they uncovered.
Loki handled the pressure in his usual way—with charm and cleverness—but beneath his wit, Selena saw the shift. He was becoming more dangerous, more precise. Less a trickster playing with fire, and more the fire itself.
Selena, growing ever more precise in her clarity, noticed how every new truth led back to their bloodlines. Loki's tricks weren't learned—they were inherited echoes. Her own intuition had begun veering into dangerous foresight. Each time she used it, she felt something watching from the edge of comprehension, as though the very act of perceiving made her more visible to unseen forces.
"The families think they hold the city," she said one night.
Loki, lounging on the rooftop beside her, replied, "But someone else is holding them."
"The one weaving behind the loom," she murmured.
They stared into the clouds. Neither said it, but both knew the same name was stirring on the tip of their tongues:
The Watcher. The Closed Eye. The Sleeper-Beneath.
Whatever it was—god, myth, relic, mistake—it hadn't forgotten them.
And it would soon demand an answer.
They returned once more to the Assembly chamber for a gathering of the Threads—a rare conclave held in a dome of glass and dusklight. There, each faction made their case.
The Preservers warned of collapse, describing the realms that had perished when ancient Sequences were broken.
The Severants mocked them, showing visions of cities built on lies, their glory fed by chained gods and buried truths.
The Weavers brought forth living examples—people whose threads had been altered, whose fates had been diverted by sheer will. They introduced an old woman with memories that shifted each hour. A mute child who dreamed in forgotten alphabets. And finally, a man with no name, whose body bore seven shadows.
Selena felt a pull toward them all. But her instincts warned her: no choice here was clean. Every Thread had blood on it.
After the gathering, the merchant approached them alone.
"You were never meant to be pawns," he said, offering no smile. "But neither are you kings. What you carry in your veins is not inheritance—it is ignition. When the old threads unravel, it is your kind that must choose what is tied next."
He handed Loki a token—a coin etched with the ouroboros and the closed eye.
"The next door you pass through will be one that remembers you. Whether it opens willingly... is another matter."