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Lorien swallowed. “A powerful one.”

The room grew still.

A part of me wanted to shrink under the weight of their attention, to laugh it off, to tell them they had it all wrong. But I couldn’t. I never fit in. There was a reason I was brought to this time. Maybe this was it.

“Can you fix it?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “I can untangle what’s left.” Her eyes fell to my bandage and bruised neck. “I can mend that too if you would like?”

“You’re lucky August came when he did,” Lorien said softly as her hands hovered over the tangle.

“How do you know what happened?”

“Menders feel the thread as much as see it. The pain lingers in the weave itself.”

She pressed her palms lightly to my arms, and this time, when she pulled, something came loose.

Not only did the pain in my body fade, but a rush of warmth bloomed in my chest. Something clicked into place.

Silence pooled. The air shifted, the energy recognizing me now.

I wasn’t just anyone.

I was one of them.

And only then did I understand what that truly meant.

Syra stood beside Ysella, her voice cool and steady. “We should show her.”

I turned to face her. Syra—taller, more commanding—met my gaze without hesitation.

“The Weave holds memory. Holds stories even after those we love have been unraveled. This is a story that every Weaver must hear,” Ysella said.

“What story?” I asked, though something in my chest already knew the answer would change everything.

The twins moved in unison, their hands rising to trace patterns in the air. Golden threads materialized between their fingers, thickening, multiplying, until the entire chamber hummed with accumulated power.

“The story of how it all began,” Syra said. “The night the hunters were born.”

Before I could ask what she meant, the threads between their hands flared brilliant gold—and the world lurched sideways.

I was falling even though my feet never left the ground. The underground chamber fractured like broken glass, each shard reflecting something else, somewhere else, somewhen else. Sound distorted—the Weavers' breathing became wind, became whispers, became silence pressing against my eardrums.

Reality twisted. Snapped. Reformed.

The vision slammed into focus.

I stood in a Victorian parlor I'd never seen before. Wind battered the windows in great, aching breaths. Inside, candles wept wax down their silver stems. The fire in the hearth smoldered low while shadows stretched across the chairs, flickering, as if the room itself was remembering.

But the room was wrong. The air was too thick, pressing against my chest like a physical weight. It tasted like copper and electricity, sharp enough to make my teeth ache and my skin prickle with warning. Magic saturated everything—not the gentle, controlled magic I'd glimpsed in the Weavers' chamber, but something wild and barely contained. Something desperate.

A woman knelt on the bare floorboards, her skirts pooling like spilled ink. Her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders in waves that caught the firelight. She was perfectly still now—frozen in concentration so intense it was as if the entire world was holding its breath with her.

She didn't see me. Couldn't see me. I was a ghost inside her memory, a witness to something that had happened long before I was born. But I could see her perfectly. Could see the way her hands trembled as they moved through the air, fingers dancing between luminous threads that shimmered with impossible light.

The threads were beautiful. Gold and silver. They floated between her fingers like living things, responding to the smallest movement of her hands, bending to her will.

She looked so familiar. I couldn’t possibly know her. Then it hit me. The old picture that was kept in my gran’s box with the necklace.