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Twenty-seven years. She had been gone for twenty-seven years. I had mourned her. Carried her loss like a stone in my chest. Built my entire life around the hollow space she'd left behind.

And now she was here.

Through the broken door, more sounds. Gasping. Crying. Voices calling out in confusion and wonder and fear.

Garrick's arms loosened. He stood, moved toward the doorway.“August.” His voice was barely a whisper. “August, there are⁠—“

More gasps. More voices. From deeper in the house. From outside. From everywhere.

“Oh God,” Mira breathed. She was staring past me, through the broken doorway, her hand pressed to her mouth. “Oh God, they're coming back.”

Beatrice moved to the window. Pulled back the heavy curtain and looked out into the darkness beyond.

Her hand flew to her mouth.

“There are people on the lawn,” she said. Her voice shook. “Dozens of them. More. They're just appearing. They're alive.”

Lily had brought them all back. The Oxford Weavers. Ysella. Lorien. Every soul my father had scattered into the void for twenty some years. Every thread she had gathered in those final, burning moments.

And Elowen. The mother I had lost when I was five years old.

She had given me everything.

And it had cost her the world.

The Unraveling was gone. I had cut it away thread by thread while Lily held the other end, and now what remained was just a man. The silver at his temples had spread, and his hands, the hands that had controlled me, commanded hunters, directed the destruction of an entire people, trembled against the wood floor like the hands of a child waking from a nightmare.

My mother knelt beside him.

I could not yet look at her for long. The sight of her kept shorting out something in my brain, the impossibility of her presence colliding with the years of grief until my mind simply refused to hold both at once.

She was touching his face. Gently. The way you touch someone who has hurt you beyond reason but whom you cannot stop loving.

“Elias,” she whispered. “Elias, look at me.”

He did. His blue eyes found hers, and the sound he made was not a word. Just a raw, gutted thing that came from somewhere deeper than language.

“Elowen.” He said her name like a prayer. Like a curse. Like the only word he had ever known. “You're—how⁠—“

“I was there.” Her voice was thin, fragile, a voice that had not been used in twenty-seven years. “I was inside it. Inside you. The whole time.”

His face crumbled.

“I know what you did,” she continued. Her hand didn't leave his face. “I watched every moment. Every Weaver you unraveled. Every child. Every mother.”

He flinched as though she had struck him.

“And I watched you grieve.” Her voice cracked. “Every night. Alone in this room. Talking to my embroidery frame as though I might answer.”

The candles had all gone out. Moonlight was the only light now, cold and silver, falling across two people who had loved each other across a chasm of years and unimaginable cruelty.

“I couldn't stop,” he whispered. “Without the corruption, without the Unraveling, I was just a man who had lost his wife. And that man was too broken to survive.”

“So you broke the world instead.”

“Yes.”

No defense. No justification. Just the hollow admission of a man who had let grief consume everything. I understood it better than I wanted to. The temptation to let loss become rage, to let rage become purpose, to let purpose justify anything. I had felt it pulling at me for months. The difference was that someone had pulled back.