It rained the day after.
Soft, steady. A kind of cleansing.
Eliara stood on the roof of Grind & Bloom, watching the city breathe. It felt… real again. The colors more grounded. The air less heavy. As if the world had finally stopped holding its breath.
Rowen joined her, two mugs in hand.
She took hers. Black coffee, still steaming. Familiar and solid. The world had gone strange, but this—this stayed.
"How's the shoulder?" he asked.
"Still sore." She shrugged. "Still alive."
He smiled and leaned against the railing beside her. "Not everyone comes back from the Weave's core."
"I didn't come back," she said softly. "Not completely."
Rowen looked at her, question in his eyes.
"I left something behind," she continued. "A thread. A memory. Maybe a piece of myself. But I think… that's the point. We're not supposed to walk away unchanged."
They'd sealed all seven breaches. Bound the Maw. Locked the Whisperer behind layers of woven reality. The world had stopped unraveling.
But that didn't mean the Veil was done with her.
Eliara still heard it sometimes—in the quiet. In dreams.
A humming under her skin.
A thread waiting to be pulled.
Later that night, she visited her mother's grave for the first time in years.
No visions. No breaches. Just stone and silence.
She sat in the grass, pendant wire around her wrist, fingers tracing the carvings.
"I used to be afraid of forgetting you," she said. "Now I think remembering hurts more."
The wind stirred the trees.
"I remember the shouting. The nights I cried under my bed. I remember loving you anyway. And I remember the day you were gone."
She exhaled.
"I still love you. Even with the cracks."
In the following weeks, the world began to shift in strange ways.
A fog that never lifted in a small town out west… suddenly cleared.
A rash of unexplained disappearances in Europe stopped overnight.
People who'd been haunted by voices for years woke up silent.
The Veil had been mended. Imperfectly. Gently. But it held.
And across the world, new Weavers stirred.
Some felt dreams grow heavier.
Some noticed time bend.
Some began to see the threads.
Eliara was walking home one evening when she heard it again.
A whisper.
Not in words, but meaning.
There is still more to see.
She turned slowly.
And there, on the sidewalk beneath the streetlamp, was a girl.
Not the child from the hospital. Not a memory.
Someone new.
She looked no older than fourteen. Her eyes were strange—violet with rings of white.
"Is this where I find you?" the girl asked. "The next one?"
Eliara blinked. "Next what?"
The girl tilted her head.
"The next breach."
"Or maybe," she added, "the next beginning."
Eliara didn't flinch.
She just smiled.
And reached for the thread.