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Beneath me, my father's body arched off the floor. A sound escaped him now. A moan, low and animal and utterly unlike the man who had commanded rooms with a single glance. His fingers found my wrist, gripping with surprising strength.

“Don't,” he rasped. “You don't understand—without it—I'll have nothing⁠—“

I pulled again. The thread stretched, but it did not break. It was too deep. Too entangled. Years of feeding had woven it through every part of my father's soul, and I couldn't find where the corruption ended and he began.

My vision flickered, grey at the edges. My knees buckled.

I was failing.

Through the haze, Lily moved.

Her hands found my shoulders. Her warmth pressed against my back. And through the bond, through the golden thread that connected us, that had made us us, she was reaching.

Not for the corruption. For me.

I'm here, she sent. Let me help.

You can't. If it takes me, it could take you too.

It won't. Her voice in my mind was steady. Certain. We do this together. The way we've done everything.

She reached past me. Reached through me. Her Void Caller magic flowed into the bond, filling what had been empty.

The pendant in my pocket grew warm, alive. It had been my mother's, it had passed to me because I was the most powerful Weaver of my generation. It was responding to Lily's magic. Amplifying it. Channeling it through the bond and into me.

Her power merged with mine, restoration and severance, remaking and release. Two magics that should have been opposites.

Instead, they harmonized.

The corruption shrieked.

It had been fighting me, one Threadbreaker, exhausted and bleeding. But this was something else. This was the two of us, woven together, channeling through a focusing stone that had belonged to the woman who created the Unraveling.

We were a bridge.

The word rose unbidden in my mind. It wasn't my thought but Lily's, a memory or a vision she'd had three months ago. When the threads pulled her into the river, a word spoken from the threads themselves.

Bridge.

Together, we were unprecedented.

My father screamed then. A real scream this time, torn from somewhere deeper than his throat. His back bowed. His heels drummed against the floor. The corruption was losing its grip, and he could feel every fiber of it being pulled away.

I reached for the corruption again. This time, Lily's Void Caller sight bled through the bond, and I could see it. Truly see it. The full horror of what my mother had accidentally created.

The Unraveling was a tangle. Threads upon threads upon threads, all knotted together, all woven through my father's soul. I saw gold among the black, flickers of it, scattered and trapped. The Weavers he had erased. They were in there. Pieces caught.

And at the center of it all⁠—

I stopped breathing.

Woven into its very heart, was a thread I recognized. A thread I had known before I knew anything. A thread that smelled of crushed roses and the lullabies she used to sing before the world went dark.

Mother.

The word cracked something open inside me. Twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years I had believed her gone. Burned to nothing. A cautionary tale my father told when he wanted to remind me what love cost.

But she was here. She had been here all along. Trapped inside the very thing she had created. Watching through my father's eyes as he used her failure to destroy everything she had loved. Every Weaver he dissolved. Every child he erased. All this time, she had been in hell.