Ren ran.
Every breath burned, every step sent pain lancing through his body, but he didn't stop. He couldn't.
Fate clung to him, unraveling and reweaving all at once, the very fabric of his existence flickering between certainty and collapse.
But none of that mattered.
Because the golden thread was still there. Calling him.
It wove through the ruins ahead like a single path of light, stretching from his chest to something waiting beyond. It wasn't a trick. It wasn't a mistake.
Someone had left this here.
For him.
Behind him, the shouts of his pursuers echoed through the trees. They were closing in, fast.
But the ruins were closer now.
And so was whatever was waiting for him.
The forest gave way to stone.
Massive pillars loomed in jagged formations, ancient and broken by time. Weaving marks still lingered on their surfaces—faint remnants of fate-bound magic, too old to hold power, but not forgotten.
At the center stood an altar.
It was untouched.
Deliberately left behind.
And upon it, pulsing faintly in the moonlight—a fragment of woven fate.
A relic.
No—a memory.
Ren reached out, his breath shallow.
The moment his fingers brushed the golden thread, the world fractured.
It wasn't just sight.
It was sensation.
Not pain. Not light. Not darkness.
Threads.
Everywhere.
Not just woven into reality. Carved into it.
He was inside the Loom.
No, he was beyond it.
A figure stood before the great weave, hands outstretched, weaving something vast, something incomprehensible.
A voice whispered, distant and familiar.
"You are not bound to fate."
The words weren't spoken. They were woven into the very essence of existence.
"You are what lies beyond it."
The vision shifted.
A different scene.
A man stood at this altar, his robes torn, blood streaking his hands. His expression was not one of despair—but of purpose.
He had been waiting.
Not for salvation.
For someone like Ren.
"This was never meant for them," the man murmured, his voice echoing across time. "Only for those the Loom could not contain."
Ren's breath hitched.
The Unraveled.
Before he could move, before he could speak—
The golden thread at his chest pulled.
And the Loom shattered.
It wasn't slow.
It was violent.
His body collapsed inward and expanded all at once, his threads unraveling, tearing apart strand by strand—but they didn't vanish.
They grew.
They evolved.
For the first time, he could see them fully.
His true form.
Not a collection of weak, frayed strings barely clinging to existence—but something whole. Something unshackled.
The golden strands within him were no longer passive.
They burned.
They stretched beyond his physical form, spiraling outward into intricate, fluid patterns—vast, living Weaving that obeyed no script, no pattern dictated by the Loom.
This wasn't just an advancement.
It was a remaking.
Raw power surged through him, but it wasn't chaotic, wasn't something he had to wrestle into submission. It understood him.
No.
It recognized him.
For the first time in his life, Ren wasn't clawing at fate's edges, struggling to survive its whims.
He was weaving it.
He was no longer a Spellbinder.
He had become a Weaver.
And the world would never be the same.
A shout.
Ren's eyes snapped open.
The ruins had returned, but they no longer felt distant, no longer felt like relics of something greater.
They were woven.
And he could feel them shifting around him, responding to his presence, bending in the slightest ways to his awareness.
A presence crashed through the trees.
Then another.
They had arrived.
Ren turned.
Golden threads flickered around his fingertips. Not just reacting.
Anticipating.
The first of his pursuers stepped into the ruins.
And for the first time since the trial began—
Ren wasn't afraid anymore.