Threadless : A growing novel

"It didn't start with a scream.

It started with a sentence that stopped writing itself."

Kaen stood in the empty workshop with Aro — still as iron, eyes glowing faintly from heat forgotten, not rage.

"I remember you," she said softly. "Not now-you. You-before. From the forge beneath the forge."

Aro's pulse quickened.

This was the first time someone outside her circle had voluntarily broken through.

But before Kaen could say more—

She twitched.

Her body blurred for a moment, like a photo that had been half-deleted.

Aro stepped forward. "Kaen?"

Kaen opened her mouth—

But no sound came.

Just static.

Letters began to spill from the air behind her. Unbound, flickering, breaking mid-form.

Then her name on the wall—

K__N

The letters started retracting.

Erasure.

Intentional.

From the system itself.

Then it stopped.

Mid-glitch.

The walls of the workshop shook softly. The forge behind them flared, not hot — resistant.

And above the retracted letters, two symbols stitched themselves into the air:

🜂

🜁

Thread-marks.

Two presences.

Watching.

One wrote from the pattern: clean, stabilizing loops.

The other from instinct: bold, slanted marks that bled through margins.

And then, like an echo layered into the world, two voices pressed into Kaen's vanishing shape:

Weaver (Veyne):

"This thread is entangled. You will not sever her."

Threadwriter (The Hidden Author):

"If she is removed, I will write her again — louder."

The world convulsed.

Not violently.

Like it had been caught in a lie.

Kaen gasped and collapsed to her knees, whole again.

The letters reassembled behind her.

She looked up at Aro, stunned.

"…I was almost gone."

Aro reached out a hand.

"I would've remembered you anyway."

Above them, in an unlit corner of a story never meant to include resistance, the developers stood in silence.

One wrote:

"They're not deleting anomalies anymore.

They're protecting them."