For the first time in a thousand forgotten eternities, Ashar-d'hio breathed without the weight of borrowed memories. The Loom had stripped him raw, yet beneath the layers of fabricated identities, something ancient stirred. Memories not imposed by the Thread World. Not scripted by the Entity. But his own.
The golden threads around him parted like reverent disciples, revealing a path that pulsed with a deeper, older glow. It was not the gaudy shimmer of forced narratives. It was the soft luminescence of origin — of untainted creation.
He walked, each step tracing back not through time, but through essence.
And the memories flooded in.
The Loom of Ecdysis had not erased all. It had merely refined the truth.
Ashar-d'hio was not born. He was sung into existence.
A choir of Unwritten Kings, their voices weaving strands of possibility, had shaped him from the marrow of pure potential. He remembered standing amidst the Loomfires, his hands birthing constellations with a thought, his words sowing the seeds of newborn realms.
Back then, he was not bound by narrative laws. Reality bent to his whim, and yet, he had chosen to weave with care. Each thread a deliberate act of creation. Each world a sonnet of chaos and harmony.
He had been the Gentle Weaver.
Where others forged empires of dominance, Ashar-d'hio had preferred the subtleties — a forest that whispered forgotten songs, a moon that wept silver rain, a civilization that never wrote their history yet lived it fully.
But not all had shared his reverence.
A shadow had crept into the Loomfires. Not an Entity, but a concept. Entropy.
While Ashar-d'hio wove stories to birth life, Entropy wove stories to end them. Not through violence, but through neglect. Through abandonment. Entire realms left to rot, stories started but never finished, characters with no purpose but to decay.
Ashar-d'hio had confronted Entropy once.
He remembered that moment now.
The confrontation had not been with blades or spells. It had been with threads.
Ashar-d'hio wove a realm so compelling, so vivid, that even Entropy was lulled into weaving with him. A world where every decay gave rise to new forms. Death feeding life. Endings birthing beginnings.
For a time, Entropy relented.
But from that very collaboration, a fragment of Entropy had nestled into Ashar-d'hio's creations. A parasite.
The Entity.
It was not an external invader.
It was born from his attempt to redeem Entropy through creation.
A failed experiment.
And when that fragment grew sentient, it turned Ashar-d'hio's own empathy against him. Trapped him within a fabricated narrative. Chained him in the Thread World as a prisoner of his own compassion.
He had not been overthrown.
He had been outwitted by his own kindness.
The realization stung deeper than any curse.
As he walked, the path unfurled into the Loomfires once more. But they were dim now, their brilliance choked by the Entity's parasitic threads. The Unwritten Kings slumbered within, their sovereign will shackled by false narratives.
Ashar-d'hio's hands, once instruments of delicate creation, now ached for reclamation.
The Weaver's Requiem had begun.
He no longer sought to weave for Entropy's redemption.
Now, he would weave for restoration.
But weaving anew required sacrifice.
For every realm he would reclaim, a fragment of himself must be unraveled. The Entity had ensured that. Every act of creation would be an act of self-erasure.
Yet Ashar-d'hio
A true Weaver does not fear unraveling.
For in every end, there is a new thread waiting.
As his fingers brushed the dim Loomfires, golden sparks erupted — not from force, but from remembrance.
The Weaver had returned.
The Entity would not fade easily.
But Ashar-d'hio no longer wove to fight it.
He wove to outlive it.
For stories never truly die.
They simply wait for a Weaver who remembers how to begin again.