~ "Even if the world forgets, the thread remembers." ~
The light was too soft.
Too still.
She opened her eyes to the ceiling above her bed the real one, the one with the cracked paint and the faint stain shaped like a spider. Her blankets smelled of old lavender. Her room was exactly as it had always been, untouched by wind or magic or blood moon skies.
Spidey blinked.
There was no Web.
No shimmer in the air. No hum in the walls. No threads brushing the edge of her sight.
Her heart pounded.
She sat up slowly, as if afraid the moment would shatter. The mirror across the room showed her reflection, just as it used to: tired eyes, tangled hair, a face too quiet to be noticed. But her eyes weren't just tired now.
They were hollowed. Softened at the edges by loss. And knowing.
She opened her mouth to speak.
Nothing came out.
Not even a breath of sound.
Her voice was still gone.
She touched her throat, gently, as if it were something sacred and broken. A silence lived there now but it wasn't empty. It echoed. It remembered.
And then she felt it.
A warmth, subtle but sure, glowing gently against her chest.
She looked down.
A pendant.
Black as obsidian, smooth as glass, threaded with faint red runes that pulsed like a heartbeat. It was shaped like a teardrop familiar, alive, hers.
Spidey reached for it with trembling fingers.
And as she curled her hand around the pendant, the hum of something ancient and kind bloomed in her chest.
> Nyxi.
The moment her skin touched the stone, it pulsed once, gently, like a hand squeezing hers.
---
The world outside her window looked the same.
The neighbor's cat sunbathed on the fence. A bicycle lay tipped over by the gate. Her mother's voice drifted from the kitchen, humming a tune she hadn't sung in years.
No sky was cracked.
No lantern glowed.
No one screamed in fear of the Silk Demon. No one whispered of the Web. No one remembered.
Not her mother. Not the books lining her shelf that once pulsed with runes. They were just stories now. Empty pages. Dust.
Even her own journal had no trace of what had happened. No proof.
She wasn't even sure what her voice had sounded like anymore.
She wandered through the house like a ghost in her own life.
Not forgotten.
Erased.
---
That night, long after the lights dimmed and the world fell quiet, she sat by the window knees hugged to her chest, the pendant clasped tightly in her palm.
And from somewhere beyond words, a warmth rose in her ribs.
A whisper, not heard but felt.
> "I'm still here, little thread."
Nyxi's presence shimmered through the silence gentle, amused, protective.
Spidey's throat tightened. Tears welled, spilling fast and soft.
She tapped the pendant once, then twice. Their code.
One for I'm scared.
Two for Don't leave.
The pendant pulsed back. Steady. Patient.
> Never.
---
In the days that followed, Spidey spoke through gestures, through notes scribbled in crooked lines. She moved differently now. Softer, but not weaker. Like someone who had danced with gods and still remembered how the stars tasted.
She didn't try to explain.
No one would believe it.
But in the quietest hours, when dusk painted the sky in silk tones and the breeze carried the smell of thread lilies, Spidey would sit beneath the oldest tree in her garden and press her fingers to the pendant.
And she would feel her again.
Nyxi, curled like a secret heartbeat, humming lullabies of the forgotten Web.
They didn't need to speak. They wove instead.
Small moments. A breeze that shifted. A thread that appeared on her windowsill. Dreams where the moon whispered her name.
And sometimes when the silence wasn't so heavy she'd see shadows moving across her ceiling, drawing little sigils of protection before melting into the dark.
---
One night, she took out her needle again.
Not to fight. Not to undo. But to stitch.
And in the corner of an old scarf, she embroidered a single symbol: a spider hanging from a cracked moon, wrapped in thread.
For her. For Nyxi. For the story no one else would ever know.
It was enough.
---
Years would pass.
She would grow, live, change the world would forget.
But the pendant would stay.
And whenever she touched it in grief, in joy, in quiet wonder it would answer.
With one soft pulse.
To remind her:
*She was never alone.*
---
THE END.