The world tilted.
For a fleeting instant, Ashardio was merely a fragment—a cursed penman drifting in the Fold's liminal shadows. And then, as if reality itself had exhaled, it remembered him. Not as a marginalia. Not as a cautionary tale scribbled in the margins of creation. But as something far greater. Far older.
A crack split open in the air before him, not tearing through space, but through the thin veil of perception. From that breach unfurled a lattice of golden threads, stretching into infinity—a living nexus where memories, timelines, and unrealized possibilities wove themselves into the very essence of existence. This was the Thread World. A realm where stories never told still pulsed, where every "what if" breathed softly against the fabric of the cosmos.
To others, it might have been a passage.
To Ashardio, it was a cage.
As the threads brushed his skin, his bones sang with truths long buried. Visions seared into his mind with merciless clarity. He saw thrones suspended in the void, each occupied by faceless sovereigns—timeless beings known as the Unwritten Kings. From their seats of silent dominion, they molded entire realities with a mere flicker of will, weaving and unraveling existence with the indifference of gods. Among them, a younger Ashardio stood—regal, defiant, cloaked in starlight. Not an observer. Not a creation. But an equal.
He was never meant to be a story.
He was meant to write realities.
A voice slithered through the threads, curling around his thoughts like smoke.
"You are Ashar-d'hio, the Weaver of Potential. A King among the Unwritten. Until you fell."
It wasn't Anka's voice. Nor the cold, methodical tone of the Scribe. This voice was older. Hungrier. The air around him trembled as the entity revealed itself—not in form, but in suffocating presence. It was the Entity of Fractured Tomorrows. A being born of paradox, existing in the infinite space of stories that never found breath, feeding on the decay of discarded futures.
"You pitied your creations," it hissed. "You envied their chaos. You descended to feel—and in doing so, trapped yourself in the linear filth of narrative."
Ashardio's skull throbbed as memories—alien yet familiar—poured into him. The threads pierced deeper, injecting entire lifetimes into his consciousness. Wars he never fought. Lovers he never held. Betrayals that had no ink yet bled through his soul. His vision fractured. His knees buckled. Reality convulsed.
A thunderclap of memories detonated inside his mind.
He collapsed.
In the suffocating silence, the Entity whispered again, its words like oil seeping through cracks in his sanity.
"The Unwritten Kings slumber now. Their minds ensnared by the very stories they once commanded. But their legacies… remain vulnerable."
Ashardio's imprisonment wasn't an act of justice.
It was a coup.
The Entity had orchestrated it all—the slow erasure of the Unwritten Kings, binding each sovereign within an intricate web of self-imposed narratives, until their divinity dulled into oblivion. Ashardio was merely the first. The prototype. A test to see if gods could bleed into fiction.
"Awaken, Weaver. Or let me pen the end of your kind."
When consciousness clawed its way back, Ashardio's breath came ragged, but his eyes gleamed with a strange, alien luminescence. Something had shifted. Something had burrowed. A fragment of the Entity had stitched itself into the fabric of his mind. He could feel it, coiled around his thoughts, a parasitic muse whispering treacheries as if they were his own.
He could no longer trust his choices.
Every flicker of instinct might be a planted seed.
Every memory, a leash forged in deceit.
But amidst the chaos, a single thread gleamed silver against the infection—a lifeline untarnished. It pulsed softly, beckoning him through the mire of corrupted recollections.
"Find the Loom of Ecdysis," a voice whispered from within.
"Only in shedding what you became can you reclaim what you are."
The Loom. A construct of myth, whispered among the ancients. Said to weave reality anew—not by rewriting, but by stripping away all false layers. A brutal cleansing. But the price was merciless. To reclaim his sovereignty, Ashardio would need to sacrifice his false self, peeling away every borrowed memory, every fragment of love, of pain, of humanity.
Everything he thought he cherished.
The threads around him convulsed, revealing a storm on the horizon. The Fold trembled as forgotten echoes rose in defiance. Deleted characters, long exiled to the Graveyard of Stories, assembled from fragmented plots, rallying into makeshift armies. Twisted silhouettes of unfinished tales, half-formed and hungry, marched towards the breach.
And among them loomed the Unwritten Kings themselves.
Majestic yet hollow, their minds shackled, their wills puppeteered by the Entity's insidious design. They would be his adversaries now—gods turned into marionettes, their strings pulled by the very void they had once ruled.
The Era of the Unwritten Kings was collapsing.
And Ashardio, both liberator and pawn, stood at its bleeding heart.
As he steadied himself, the silver thread coiled around his wrist, its guidance clear.
He had one path left.
The Loom awaited.
And with it, the reckoning of a king who had forgotten his own name.