The thread snapped.
Not with sound, but with silence — a pulled breath that never came back. Then came the fall.
Four figures tumbled through shadow, flung like dice across a stone floor older than memory. Dust spiraled upward in slow, golden clouds, catching the last glimmer of something that vanished the moment it touched air.
Eria hit the ground first, palms scraped, breath knocked clean from her lungs. She gasped and coughed, blinking up into darkness far too high above. Somewhere beside her, Heartroot landed hard, grunting as his staff clattered away into the dust.
Khafan cursed creatively from behind a half-collapsed column. “That… was not a gentle exit.”
Seraphine didn’t land — she arrived. Feet down, knees bent, coat flaring like she’d rehearsed it. The threadwalker’s equivalent of sticking the landing.
Eria sat up, cradling her wrist. “Is that—” She looked around. “Is that a tomb?”
It wasn’t just a tomb. It was still.
The kind of still that pressed against the teeth, that hummed behind the eardrums. No wind. No thread. Just layers of air too heavy to move and walls lined with carvings that looked suspiciously like they were breathing when no one watched directly.
The walls rose high — impossibly high — vanishing into black above. Sigils ran across every surface, etched deep but blurred at the edges like half-remembered words. A thread shimmered near the ceiling, but it didn’t descend. It hung there like it had changed its mind.
Khafan dusted off his coat and scowled upward. “Rude.”
Heartroot retrieved his staff and scanned the chamber with eyes that didn’t blink often. “It’s not a tomb,” he said, voice low. “It’s a vault. Tombs forget. This remembers.”
Sera stepped toward the wall, fingers twitching like she wanted to draw something unseen. “Some of these symbols match the thread-markings. But they’re… broken.”
Eria stood slowly, gaze following hers. “So where are we?”
Sera’s eyes didn’t leave the wall.
“Inside something unfinished.”
It was Khafan who noticed it first — not because he was looking, but because he tripped over it.
“Oof—hells, that’s not a floor tile,” he muttered, catching himself on a nearby wall. Beneath his boot, the edge of a stone tile had shifted, revealing a thin seam in the ground — a perfect square. No dust settled on it.
Sera was there in moments. “Step back.”
Khafan raised both hands. “By all means. Take the lead, oh mistress of hidden hinges.”
Eria snorted. “Wow, that’s the most polite I’ve seen you all day.”
“I’m very respectful of imminent doom,” Khafan replied. “Especially when it’s hiding underfoot.”
Sera crouched, brushing her fingertips across the seam. Symbols began to shimmer — soft blue lines blooming like old ink in rain.
“It’s not a trap. It’s a lock.”
Eria leaned in. “A threadlock?”
“No. Older,” Sera whispered. “Pre-split. Pre-thread. But whoever made this… they understood.”
“Understood what?” Khafan asked, already pulling a flask from his belt.
She tapped the glowing symbols gently. They rearranged themselves under her touch, shifting like sliding tiles, only half-consensual.
“That puzzles aren’t about answers,” Sera said. “They’re about invitation.”
Khafan whistled. “Philosophical locks. My favorite kind. Next you’ll be telling me it needs a riddle and a drop of blood.”
“It might,” she murmured, already lost in the pattern.
Eria leaned closer to Khafan. “You know, I think she’s smiling.”
“She does that when she’s communing with stone. It’s unnerving.” He sipped. “I once saw her reassemble a shattered tomb dial by touch.”
Eria blinked. “That’s either deeply impressive or deeply worrying.”
He grinned. “Why not both?”
Sera didn’t look up.
The puzzle had begun to hum.
The puzzle clicked.
A low chime echoed from deep beneath the floor — not metallic, but vocal, like the sigh of something ancient waking up with poor intentions.
Sera froze. “That wasn’t me.”
From the wall beside the door, the stone shifted. Not crumbled — moved. A broad slab peeled outward, shedding dust in great choking clouds as it unfolded into arms, legs, a head. Its chest bore the same thread-mark as the door… but inverted.
Eria’s head snapped up. She tilted it slightly, nostrils flaring. “Something’s coming.”
Khafan took a cautious step back. “Uh, yes. Big. Stone. Angry. Just your type.”
Eria smiled — wide, toothy. “Is it slow?”
“Looks it.”
“Perfect.”
The golem stepped forward, and the whole room groaned. Its footsteps landed like falling trees, shaking dust loose from the ceiling in thick curtains. Symbols along its arms flickered — warnings, commands, memory — all unreadable.
Eria didn’t need eyes for this. Her staff was already spinning in her hands.
“Don’t break the puzzle!” Sera shouted, not looking up from the wall.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Eria called back, stepping forward to meet the thing head-on.
Khafan muttered, “You’re not not planning anything…”
The golem swung. Eria ducked under the wide arc with a grin like she’d just come home.
“Finally,” she breathed. “Something that doesn’t talk.”
Her staff cracked against its knee. The stone barely chipped — but the sound told her enough. Hollow in the joints. She moved faster, letting it chase her, spinning and leaping with a dancer’s grace.
Heartroot, watching from the shadows, did not move. His eyes followed Eria like watching a storm decide where to land.
Khafan uncapped his flask again. “Should we… help?”
“No,” Sera said flatly. “Let her dance.”
The golem swung again — wide, slow, relentless. Eria ducked under its reach, staff cracking across its side like thunder in stone. Chips flew. She laughed.
Behind her, Heartroot stepped forward at last, slow and steady. His voice, when it came, was clear and sharp across the dust:
“Duck.”
Eria didn’t.
The golem’s backhand caught her square in the ribs. Not full force — not bone-shattering — but enough to send her spinning sideways into a pillar with a solid thud. She hit the ground with a hiss of pain and a string of curses best left untranslated.
Khafan winced. “That’s gonna be a bruise.”
Eria pushed herself up, staff still in hand. She didn’t reply — just rolled her shoulders, spat blood, and turned back toward the golem with a grin that had nothing to do with teeth.
The next swing came in hard and fast.
“Duck,” Heartroot warned.
This time, she did.
The golem’s arm whistled over her head. Her counter-strike landed clean in the gap beneath its ribs, followed by a quick two-step back and another jab to the knee. Dust bloomed around them like applause.
She didn’t thank him.
She just grinned wider.
Across the chamber, Sera was muttering to herself, fingers brushing a new symbol on the wall — one that had appeared only after the golem activated. It glowed faintly, pulsing like breath. Another symbol flickered beside it, but shifted every time she looked straight at it.
“Language loop,” she said. “Adaptive script.”
Khafan leaned in. “Meaning?”
“It’s rewriting itself based on who’s reading it.”
He squinted. “That’s rude.”
“It’s deliberate.” Her fingers hovered above the shifting lines. “You don’t solve this by reading. You solve it by understanding.”
“Great,” he muttered. “Understanding’s not my strong suit. Got anything in ‘vague historical reference’?”
Sera didn’t reply. She was already lost in the shifting pulse of the wall — and whatever it was trying to show her.
Behind them, Eria spun past another blow and cracked the golem across the hip with a satisfying crunch.
The fight was still on — but so was the puzzle.
And both, somehow, were listening.
The golem raised its arm again, slow but unstoppable — a stone tide with no will but momentum.
Eria didn’t flinch. She moved in close, too close, where its reach faltered. Her staff swept up in a sharp arc, catching the faint hollow just beneath its ribs. A crack bloomed. Dust hissed from the break like breath escaping the dead.
At the same moment, Sera pressed her palm flat against the wall.
A symbol flared. Not bright — but deep. Like a thought remembered.
The golem froze mid-step. Its arms jerked, once, twice… then fell slack.
Not broken.
Not defeated.
Just… still.
The silence that followed wasn’t quiet. It rang.
Eria stepped back, panting. Her staff hung loosely in her grip. A smear of blood ran from her temple, mixing with dust.
“…Did we win?” Khafan asked, voice cautious.
“No such thing,” Heartroot murmured. He stepped past the golem’s hushed bulk and helped Eria to her feet. She didn’t resist. Didn’t speak. Just nodded, once.
Sera backed away from the wall. “It’s open.”
A portion of stone, opposite the golem’s alcove, had folded inward — not like a door, but like a mouth forming a new word. Beyond it: a corridor sloping down, lit by nothing, yet faintly green.
Eria leaned on her staff. “Looks like forward.”
Khafan peered in. “Looks like ‘trap,’ with extra stairs.”
Sera smirked. “You’re welcome to stay here with the statue.”
He muttered something unheroic and followed her in.
Heartroot paused beside Eria. Laid two fingers gently to her side, just above the bruise. A flicker passed between them. Not light — not warmth — just easing. The ache dulled.
Eria didn’t thank him.
She just said, “I ducked that time.”
Heartroot smiled. “I noticed.”
They walked on.
The corridor narrowed as they descended — walls pressed close, carved with symbols that pulsed faintly green and whispered of meaning just out of reach. The air grew warmer, damp in the way sealed things get, like breath left too long in a jar.
No one spoke much.
Their footsteps echoed differently here — softer, swallowed by something listening.
Sera moved ahead, her coat brushing symbols that flickered in her wake. She didn’t touch them, but they responded all the same. Her lips moved once, quietly — a word Khafan couldn’t catch — and whatever passed between her and the wall stayed there.
Khafan broke the silence first. “Anyone else feel like we’re being… watched?”
Eria huffed. “I feel bruised.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
Behind them, Heartroot ran his fingers along the carved lines without looking at them. “Places like this don’t remember names,” he said, more to himself than to the others. “They remember choices.”
At last, the passage opened — not grandly, not with any ceremony, just a widening into a chamber that waited.
It was round. Stone, smoothed by time or hands or threads. No doors. No ceiling, just blackness above. At the center stood a plinth, and from that plinth rose a single thread — glowing faint green, swaying in a breeze that didn’t exist.
It shimmered like it knew they were coming.
Eria approached first, tilting her head toward it.
“It’s… humming,” she said.
Khafan squinted. “It’s… taunting.”
“No,” Heartroot said gently. “It’s offering.”
Sera stepped to the edge of the circle and sat down without a word. She pulled a tool from her coat — something that wasn’t quite chalk and wasn’t quite a blade — and began to sketch a sigil into the stone. Not for the thread. For herself.
Eria watched her a moment, then turned to Heartroot. “Thanks,” she said, voice low. “For earlier.”
He nodded once and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You ducked.”
She smiled.
No one said it, but they all felt it: the thread wasn’t just a way forward — it was a question. A dare, dangling in silence.
Khafan uncapped his flask and raised it toward the green shimmer.
“To whatever comes next,” he said. “May it be less dramatic than today.”
Eria snorted. “Doubt it.”
Then, without fanfare, she reached out and took the thread.
The world shifted — not with sound, but with silence.
And they were gone
