Threadless : A growing novel

"The world is still here. It just forgot which version of itself to be."

🔹 Academy Central – Morning

The academy was awake.

But it didn't know who it was supposed to be.

One instructor entered the classroom and recited poetry.

Another assigned homework, then promptly ate the paper in front of confused students.

In the library, books rearranged their titles:

"Advanced Logic" became "Laughter, Inc."

"Emotion Containment" flickered into "How to Cry Like No One's Watching"

A message flickered across the public terminal:

[TONE STABILITY: DEGRADED]

[THREAD ENVIRONMENT: UNDEFINED]

🔹 Rin and Aro in the Halls

The corridors had changed.

Rin and Aro ran down a staircase that didn't exist yesterday.

They reached a door marked "Spare Classroom 3", opened it — and found the courtyard.

Again.

"The map's folding on itself," Aro said, panting.

"Like it's trying to reset but doesn't know where to land."

Rin touched the wall — it was soft. Breathing.

The structure was remembering other genres.

A torchlit fantasy hallway flickered for a second.

Then turned to a black-and-white noir alley.

Then became a classroom again.

"We're inside a tone quake," Rin said. "It's rewriting style instead of space."

Aro smirked.

"And here I thought they just ran out of budget."

🔹 Side Character Reactions

Taya sat outside the lunch hall, laughing wildly into the wind.

When Rin approached her, Taya turned and whispered:

"I was supposed to be the rational one… wasn't I?"

Then she cried in a slapstick sob that felt too rehearsed. Her laugh looped like a broken laugh track.

Meanwhile, Yuu, the quiet boy, stood on a table, narrating his own monologue:

"And thus began the fall of genre walls, where once-flat characters remembered the sky."

Then promptly fainted into a pile of confetti.

The confetti whispered, "I used to be dialogue."

🔹 Mei in the Archives

Mei locked herself in the archival subwing.

She tapped into the recovered voice thread of Jun.

His voice flickered — poetic one second, horror-laced the next.

"Mei… I know this isn't my chapter.

But if I keep shifting like this, I won't stay whole."

She gripped the tablet harder.

"I'm not losing you again."

She began weaving stabilizer tags around his voice thread — her own touch giving him definition again.

But a system patch struck.

[INTEGRITY ERROR]

[UNAUTHORIZED TONE VARIANT DETECTED]

"They're trying to erase him by indecision," Mei realized.

"He's too many versions. That's how they hide the original."

A failsafe shimmered on the tablet.

Threadwriter's tag:

[Protection: Locked Genre. Assigned: "Remembered."]

Jun's voice steadied.

For now.

🔹 Weaver's Response

Suddenly the skies flickered.

The clouds rethreaded.

In the air above the campus, lacework appeared — intricate, shifting light.

Weaver's partial form.

No face. No center. Just presence.

A voice, smooth but unfamiliar:

"Stability is not cruelty.

Format is not erasure.

You are destabilizing the loop."

"Reversion patch commencing."

Threadlines fell from the sky — like rain.

Everywhere they touched, things froze:

Laughter stopped midair

Students returned to script

Doors rewrote themselves

🔹 Elu's View

Elu stood near the western wall, watching. Not moving.

Weaver's threads passed right through him.

Untouched.

"Of course," he murmured.

"You never wrote me clearly enough to control."

He closed his eyes.

And smiled — just a little.

🔹 Rin's Voice

The quake reached its peak — chaos fracturing space, time, genre.

Rin stood at the heart of it.

She could see the outlines now:

Looped versions of herself

Drafted versions of Aro

The "acceptable" version of their lives, folding in on the real ones

And she screamed:

"We were never supposed to be this quiet!"

The quake paused.

A golden thread shot skyward, humming.

For a moment — all space fell silent.

And then, from above, a new voice answered.

Faint. Kind. From far beyond the academy.

A reader.

"I was waiting for you to say that."