Chapter 26: The Rise of the False Thread Bearer and Reina’s Broken Memory Quest. The Supernatural & Dark Fantasy Manga Web Novel - CRIMSON HIGH: THE BLOOD PACT by Abrar Nayeem Chowdhury

Chapter 26: The Rise of the False Thread Bearer and Reina’s Broken Memory Quest

The sun, though risen in name, offered no true declaration of dawn. It's light, pale, and reticent, hesitated at the edge of the horizon like a guest unsure of their welcome. Gone were the warm, buttery hues that typically bathed the ruins of Crimson High in softened amber; instead, the day began in shades of uncertainty—a palette painted more by silence than by colour.

A thin mist lingered low upon the ground, curling about the twisted roots of the Reflecting Tree, whose leaves—once glimmering with a thousand living memories—now hung limp, dulled, as though burdened by a truth too heavy to shine through. The garden, usually vibrant with the hum of layered threads and the gentle rustling of possibility, stood still as if holding its breath. Even the wind, that most democratic of companions, had receded into some unseen distance.

In this hush, Reina Hoshino sat cross-legged upon the stone that once bore the academy’s founding inscription. Her figure, though poised and unmoving, seemed tethered to a vibration not visible to the eye. Her layered thread, now woven deep into her spirit, shimmered faintly beneath the neckline of her tunic—each pulse like a heart remembering more than it should.

Her gaze was fixed—not ahead, but inward.

And though no tears graced her cheeks, the furrow between her brows betrayed a burden neither physical nor recent.

"Something is missing," she murmured aloud, though none were near enough to hear. "A face without a name, a sorrow without its shape."

The stone beneath her, warmed only by her presence and not by the shy sun above, did little to offer comfort. The threads in the air, once playful in their loops and arcs, now sagged like tired ribbons, unspooling with hesitance, as if uncertain whether they should be seen at all.

Birdsong did not greet the morning. Nor did the usual echoes of distant voices—those many versions of herself and others that had once wandered the garden. All was strangely, unnervingly quiet. It was the sort of silence that did not invite peace, but instead whispered that something essential had departed.

It was then that Riku, solemn as ever and wrapped in his usual black, appeared over the rise of the hill. His presence, always tethered to some secret tension, seemed heavier this morning—as though he, too, sensed the hollowness behind the air.

He did not speak until he reached her side, and even then, only after long pause.

"You feel it too," he said.

Reina did not turn.

"I do. And not just a vanishing. A distortion. A memory that has… broken apart."

He looked around the garden, eyes scanning the horizon as if the trees themselves might betray the truth.

"Something’s rewriting the past, Reina. But not as you do—not through love. It’s twisting it."

At last, she turned to meet his gaze, her eyes reflective like still water before a storm.

"Then I must find what was lost. Before someone else decides how it ends."

And the mist coiled tighter around them—as if it had, all along, been listening. Watching. Waiting.

It is not uncommon in tales of great upheaval that the darkness which rises is not some beast sprung from myth, but rather the quiet suffering of one who was once overlooked—whose sorrow, left unaddressed, calcifies into wrath too complex to be called evil and too precise to be dismissed as madness. And so it was that, even as Reina pondered forgotten faces beneath the Reflecting Tree, the air shifted far to the north, in a place where the Loom’s light could no longer reach.

The sky above this region bore none of the mercy found in the garden. Its clouds were thick and unruly, coloured not with shadow, but with the bleak steel of memory denied. The fractured silver Loom, an incomplete arc above the horizon, spun in halting, erratic jerks—as though confused by the thread it had been forced to include.

Beneath its mournful turn stood Toma Renji.

He was not impressive to behold. His shoulders were narrow, his cloak ill-fitting, and his stance unremarkable—but it was in the stillness of him that power gathered. Around him, the ruins of a forgotten classroom—one never remembered by Reina nor acknowledged by the Loom—lay splintered and moss-bitten. Within its floor, a thread had begun to writhe, grey-black and pulsing with imitation.

Toma extended a pale hand.

“You see,” he whispered to no one, his tone intimate and fevered, “I exist now because I remember it differently.”

Behind him, flickers began to take form. Not people. Not echoes. But fabricated versions of his past—scenes invented, yet worn with the grain of truth. A child dragged from a classroom. A sister who never was. A teacher’s betrayal, never spoken. These phantoms bowed their heads before him like obedient lies.

“You have all forgotten me,” he continued, his voice trembling with conviction. “But I... I have remembered myself back into being.”

In his left hand, he held a shard of thread—not earned, but taken. From the remains of broken memory, from the loosened ends of others’ recollections, he had stitched together a false thread. It wrapped around his wrist like barbed wire and pulsed not with colour, but with absence.

And it began to layer.

A child’s voice. A young man’s despair. A lover’s bitterness. A villain’s charm. All versions of Toma, none of which were ever allowed to live, but all of which now cohabited within his frame.

And unlike Reina, who bore her selves with empathy and grace, Toma’s selves screamed over one another, seeking dominance with each breath.

One voice rose among them, clearer than the others.

“She was the sun. You, the shadow. But the shadow remembers where the light cannot reach.”

He looked up then, toward the south, where the Loom’s heart still spun over Reina’s garden. His face twitched—not with sorrow, but with pleasure too long denied.

“You gave her every thread,” he said to the sky. “Now I will take hers. And hers. And hers.”

His hand closed.

And somewhere, faint and far, a memory that did not belong to him—a girl learning to cast threads for the first time—flickered.

And then, it changed.

There is something to be said—indeed, must be said—about the way great power speaks not with thunder, but with restraint. A mother’s tightening hand. A priest’s pause in prayer. A lover’s breath, held before confession. The Loom, in all its majesty and measureless reach, had once sung to the world in elegant silence. But now, it murmured with unease, and that murmur was a warning.

The garden at the heart of Crimson High—though more a place of memory than of earth—trembled. Petals, once iridescent and eager, curled in on themselves as though recoiling from a coming cold. Threads suspended overhead, glistening in hues only layered lives could perceive, now began to shudder, their forms flickering at the edges like sentences unspooling in half-sleep.

Kaito was the first to feel it.

He had not touched the Reflecting Tree, nor bent himself to memory’s mercy. But his body, ever attuned to the practicalities of danger, tensed as though some ancestral instinct within him recognized the taste of catastrophe.

He stood by the southern arch, hand to the hilt of his blade—not drawn, not aggressive, but ready in the way that says: I have been here before. I have seen this kind of silence become the storm.

Riku descended the steps of the eastern colonnade, his cloak rippling behind him not from wind, but from the pull of magic—or something like it. His gaze, always watchful, now narrowed with purpose.

“You feel it?” Kaito asked, his voice low, not to disturb the tension in the air.

Riku nodded once. “The Loom is trying to speak.”

But speak it could not—not in the way men do. Instead, it conveyed its discomfort in threads that frayed not from time, but from conflict. Several loops overhead—threads that once bore images of joy, pain, longing—began to turn grey at the edges, as if memory itself had gone ill.

And then came the sound.

It was not a roar, nor a scream. Rather, it was a sigh, carried through the fabric of the sky—a sound like a child being forgotten. Not dramatic. Not loud. But finally.

One of the minor Looms—a delicate arc of amber threads that governed the quieter memories of mundane days—shivered and dimmed. A single thread snapped at its centre, vanishing mid-glow, like a thought dismissed before it could be born.

Riku's hand clenched by his side.

“That thread… was one of Reina’s. A quiet one. A moment of kindness. It’s gone.”

Kaito’s eyes flicked toward the horizon.

“This isn’t fading. It’s consumption.”

And then, for the first time since its reshaping, the Loom spoke aloud—not with words, but with a presence. The clouds parted slightly, not for the sun, but for the threadlight, and from it a tremor echoed through the ground.

A voice rang not in their ears, but behind their eyes.
A voice that was not a voice at all.

“One walks among us… with threads not his own.”

Kaito drew in a breath.

“Toma.”

The Loom continued, its tone now fractured, halting—like a song being sung while drowning.

“The false bearer… weaves backwards. Takes from what was lived. Distorts what was loved. Each stolen thread… unravels the rest.”

A pause. And then:

“She must remember what cannot be remembered… or all will be unwoven.”

At the base of the Reflecting Tree, a single black thread appeared. Unlike the luminous strands of layered memory, this one bore no shimmer. It was matte, silent, and it twitched.

Reina stepped toward it, her expression set but somber.

Riku followed, voice low.

“Do you know what it is?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. Her eyes remained on the thread, lips parted as though memory itself danced on the edge of her breath.

Then she said, simply:

“A broken memory. His. Mine. Both. I don't know. But I think he’s already rewriting something I swore I buried.”

And the thread began to slip into the roots of the tree, as though daring her to follow.

It must be observed, by any heart well-acquainted with sorrow, that the most perilous journeys are not those made by foot or sea or sky, but rather the quiet and harrowing descent into one’s own memory, especially when that memory resists being known. And so, as Reina Hoshino reached out toward the black thread now nestled among the roots of the Reflecting Tree, she did not do so with haste, but with the solemnity of one preparing to walk into a funeral that never received its mourners.

The thread pulsed, not with light, but with absence. It was not cold, yet touching it sent a shiver through her fingertips, as though it were made of forgotten promises. Around her, the garden did not stir. The air grew heavy, thick with stillness, and the sky seemed to bow closer, as though the Loom itself wished to listen—though even it, now, did not dare to interfere.

Kaito and Riku stood just behind her. The former tense, every muscle drawn taut like a thread near its snap; the latter calm, but only in the way a storm is calm before its first strike.

“Are you certain?” Riku asked, his voice hushed as if to respect the gravity of what lay ahead.

Reina nodded once. “This is not one I entered before. It was always close to me. Too fractured. Too dark.”

Kaito spoke next. “And if it’s not just yours?”

She turned to him. Her eyes were steady, though something deep within them flickered—an uncertainty she had never allowed anyone to see.

“Then I must learn whose it became. Before he makes it someone else’s entirely.”

She pressed her palm fully to the thread, and the moment she did so, the garden vanished.

There was no falling. No tumbling spiral of magic nor dramatic shift. It was simply gone, as though it had never existed.

She stood now in a place not shaped by space or time, but by unresolved feeling.

The world around her was cracked, incomplete—shards of memory floating in the air like broken mirrors. The sky was not sky at all, but a patchwork quilt of jagged images—some hers, some foreign, stitched by a hand that did not care for consistency or kindness.

A corridor appeared beneath her feet—stone and ash. She recognised it not with her mind, but with her breath.
The East Wing, on fire.
The day she had failed.

“This is where I left him,” she whispered.

Her voice echoed—not in the corridor, but in her own ears. As if the memory had turned itself inside out.

A flicker ahead. A child’s silhouette, framed in smoke. His back was to her. His shoulders were small. The thread wound around his chest—not silver, not crimson, but a dull, wounded grey.

“Toma…”

She stepped closer. The corridor changed as she moved—walls warping, memories rearranging to suit a narrative she had not written.

The boy turned. But his face was wrong. Too smooth, as if someone had erased and redrawn it too many times. His eyes were glassy and unreadable.

“You never came back,” he said.

Her heart clenched.

“I tried.”

“No. You remembered everyone else. You layered them into your thread. But me?” His voice rose, trembling and sharp. “You buried me under better versions of you.”

The thread at his chest began to bleed shadow, and the corridor shook.

Reina dropped to her knees beside him.

“I couldn’t save you. But I never stopped carrying you.”

He turned his head, and in that moment, she saw not Toma, but herself—as she had been then. Frightened. Young. Capable of great power but terrified to look backward.

“Then why do I only exist in your broken places?” the boy asked, voice brittle.

She reached out—not with magic, but with a hand.

“Because I was ashamed.”

Above them, the corridor began to burn—not just with fire, but with rewriting. Threads lashed the walls, some from Reina’s thread, others unmistakably Toma’s false layering, tearing truth and fiction into an unholy weave.

A roar echoed—not from the boy—but from the memory itself, as it began to reject both of them.

Reina rose.

“You have to come with me,” she said to the boy. “If you stay here, he’ll use this memory to unmake more than you.”

But the boy looked up—his eyes full of Toma’s rage now, not just fear.

“He’s already inside me.”

Reina made her choice. She took the boy’s thread—flawed, fractured, unfinished—and pressed it to her heart.

It sank into her chest like a knife. She gasped—but did not fall.

The corridor vanished.

She opened her eyes beneath the Reflecting Tree—Kaito shaking her, his voice panicked.

But in her lap now, tangled around her fingers, was Toma’s memory-thread.

Not stolen.
Returned.

But too late, perhaps… for he had already begun writing with it elsewhere.

It is a cruel revelation, though no less true for its cruelty, that even the steadiest hearts-those anchored by loyalty and shielded by stoicism—can be unraveled, not by sword or flame, but by doubt. And in such cases, the attack is often silent. A quiet folding of identity. A hesitation too small to name, but large enough to tip the scales of self.

And so, in the quiet aftermath of Reina’s perilous descent into the broken memory, the garden no longer hummed with hope. The sky, once veined with soft light, had faded to a washed parchment grey. The threads above flickered intermittently, like candles uncertain of their own flame, and among them, one, once golden, taut, proud, had begun to tremble.

Kaito’s thread.

Riku stood by the Reflecting Tree, gazing skyward. He was silent, which in his case was neither rare nor alarming, but today, there was something different in his silence.

“It’s shifting,” he said at last, gesturing toward the thread that curved low and wide across the eastern canopy.

Reina, pale but conscious after returning from the memory fragment, lifted her gaze. The thread Riku had spoken of—Kaito’s—had begun to split, thin strands breaking from its centre like hairline fractures in an heirloom mirror.

“It wasn’t like that before,” she murmured, her hand instinctively reaching toward her own chest, where Toma’s stolen thread now lay dormant—dangerous still, but silent.

Kaito, who had remained stoic through wars, betrayals, and fates rewritten, now stood oddly still—his eyes distant, as though trying to listen for a thought no longer his.

“It feels like someone’s walking through my memories,” he said, his voice quiet. “And stepping on the wrong ones.”

Reina approached him gently. She had once been afraid to see into others—afraid to misremember, to impose. But now, as a bearer of layered memory, she understood that some fractures require company, not solitude.

“Kaito,” she said softly, “let me see. Just a corner of it.”

He hesitated. And then nodded.

She touched the pulse beneath his collarbone, where all threads entered.

The world rippled.

She stood on a bridge—stone, narrow and stretched across a storm-lit sea. The air reeked of iron and loss. On one side: the Kaito she knew—dutiful, fierce, quiet with his grief. On the other: a stranger wearing his face, draped in black and crowned in fire.

This version of him was not corrupted by emotion, but stripped of it. His eyes glowed amber, not with magic, but with voided morality.

He spoke without inflection:
“In this version, I kill you. Not because I hate you. Because it is logical.”

Reina stepped back.

“This is not yours,” she said, voice trembling.

He tilted his head.
“Toma wrote it. But I accepted it.”

Suddenly, the bridge trembled. The storm rose. And the two Kaitos—real and rewritten—stepped toward one another.

Their hands met—not in friendship, but in combat. Memory twisted.

Reina watched as entire sections of Kaito’s past rewove themselves in flashes:

• His father never died—but became the betrayer.

• His sister abandoned the Loom.

• Reina never saved him from the library fire.

Each twist is more severe. More wrong.

The rewritten Kaito struck the real one across the chest, and his thread shuddered, shedding a loop of light.

Reina stepped between them.

“Stop!”

The rewritten version looked at her.
“You can’t undo a thread without fraying the rest.”

She turned to the real Kaito, who now bled—not from his body, but from his spirit. His eyes dimmed. His voice faltered.

“Maybe he’s right,” he said. “Maybe the version where I don’t hesitate... is better.”

Reina took his hand.

“No. The hesitation is your humanity. You chose to care. That’s why your thread resisted being stolen.”

She pulled the broken memory—her own recollection of Kaito staying to save her—and wove it directly into the frayed thread.

The two Kaitos flickered. The rewritten version screamed—and unraveled.

The memory dissolved.

Kaito gasped as he fell back into the garden, Reina beside him, her hands shaking.

He sat up slowly, breathing hard.

“He’s changing others,” he said. “Toma’s writing new truths. Ones that kill the best parts of us.”

Reina nodded.

“Then we don’t just stop him.”

She looked to the horizon, where the Loom shimmered like a tapestry on fire.

“We go in and rewrite him.”

To be continued.....

Chapter 16-25: https://storylinespectrum.blogspot.com/2025/04/chapters-16-25-supernatural-dark.html

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