Chapters: 16-25. The Supernatural & Dark Fantasy Manga Web Novel - CRIMSON HIGH: THE BLOOD PACT by Abrar Nayeem Chowdhury
Chapter 16: A Thread to Cut, A Fate to Choose
It was, indeed, a scene such as no mortal writer might compose with mere pen and ink—a realm torn asunder by the conflicts of gods and ghosts, of fate's architects and its would-be inheritors. The sky, now stripped of its azure grace, resembled a canvas of pale silk drenched in the remnants of a celestial inkpot. Ragged clouds, frayed at their edges like a lady’s well-worn lace shawl, floated aimlessly overhead, as if the heavens themselves observed this strange theatre of fate with breath held and threads fraying.
A bitter wind swept through the ruins of Crimson High, tugging at fractured archways and whistling through the hollowed bones of towers, as if mourning the innocent design the world once bore. The ground lay veiled in soot and memory, and the very air was perfumed by ash and consequence.
Riku Kurobane stood at the centre of this desolate court—unmoved by the flickering of time around him, unflinching beneath the unravelling of all that had been written before. The thread of his own fate, radiant and trembling, danced between his fingers like a candle's final flame. And the Loom, now conscious and watchful, whispered as gently as the sigh of wind through a chapel's broken glass.
“One thread remains, Master Kurobane.”
There was a stillness in his expression, save for the tightening of his jaw, resolute, melancholic. The firelight of fate cast shadows across his brow, shadows that did not belong to his body alone.
"My thread?" he repeated softly, the words escaping him as if they had always been known to him but had never found breath.
Behind him stood Reina, her face stern, her hands clenched. She looked upon Riku not as a god nor a puppetmaster, but as a boy who once shared her lunch beneath the shade of the school courtyard, before any of this—before the blood, the threads, the betrayals.
"You must not cut it," she said, her voice calm but aching. "You are already more than a man. Must you lose that which makes you still human?"
The Loom, ever-watching, answered in silence. The winds gathered now, as if nature itself debated the boy’s path. Ash swirled like petals around them, whispering fragments of half-told destinies.
Kaito, at Riku’s side, said little, but his countenance bore the weight of too many revelations, too many enemies, and the gnawing dread that perhaps none of them would live to see another thread woven.
A voice, not of this world, fractured the air—Akihiro, who stood far yet ever-approaching, his form now towering and amorphous, clothed in writhing shadows and crowned in the remnants of broken contracts.
"Why delay the inevitable?" his voice echoed, though his lips barely moved. "You dither at the edge of glory, Riku, while I have already become the next age. Cut your thread, and you become what you pretend to be."
The Forgotten Weaver, that faceless deity older than idea itself, remained still. Its form shimmered like candlelight viewed through tears, its silence both judgment and anticipation.
Riku’s lips curved into a small, haunted smile.
“There is wisdom,” he said slowly, “in restraint that power often forgets. When we cease to fear death, we may become that which brings it.”
The Loom glowed brighter. The winds howled louder.
He lifted the thread. It shivered like a frightened creature.
“This is not just my end, is it?” he murmured, more to the wind than to any man or god. “This is the beginning of an age that does not need me.”
The moment was sharp. A decision sat upon the precipice of all creation. And then, he let go.
He did not cut the thread.
As his hand fell from the glowing line of fate, something in the Loom shifted. It had expected surrender or sacrifice. It had not expected… mercy.
The Loom pulsed. Not in power. But in respect.
The Forgotten Weaver’s form shimmered once more, uncertain, unbalanced. “You would defy me, yet keep your humanity?”
Riku nodded. “Because it is not strength to kill what you were. It is a strength to remain, despite the temptation to evolve into something lesser that merely looks greater.”
A hush fell.
Even Akihiro’s monstrous form paused. He did not understand this kind of defiance, for his ascent had demanded destruction. He had consumed his humanity and, in doing so, had become a god-shaped void.
But now he looked at Riku with something dangerously close to envy.
“He will not fight like us,” Akihiro sneered, stepping forward with cracks in his form, “but I will show the world what happens when man clings to weakness.”
As Akihiro surged forward, a beast of pulsing darkness and devouring madness, the Loom did not stand idle.
It pulsed once, twice, then glowed with such radiance that the shattered heavens above stitched themselves momentarily whole.
And from that light, an army of echoes emerged.
They were not ghosts, nor memory, nor shadow.
They were versions of Riku that never came to be—the paths he could have taken, the lives he could have led.
Each held a piece of him.
Each wielded choice.
And they stood between him and Akihiro, not to protect—
But to say, in countless unheard voices:
“He chose to remain human. That is a strength.”
Akihiro struck, but the Loom shifted again—each echo turning into a shield of fate itself, pressing back against the abyssal king.
The battlefield was once more uncertain.
And fate, though trembling, was no longer afraid.
Chapter 17: Threads Among Tempest and Fire
It is a truth, perhaps reluctantly acknowledged, that, in times of greatest peril, men speak most clearly of what they truly believe. And so it was, upon a battlefield no mortal hand had dared sketch nor eye imagined, that such confessions, not of love nor fortune, but of fate itself, were offered up like prayers lost in storm.
The sky, once orderly and adorned in its accustomed blue serenity, had become a theatre of chaos. Clouds, thick as ancestral guilt, rolled overhead in slow, mournful spirals. They gathered like scandalous whispers around the edges of heaven, their undersides lit by a sickly orange glow as though the stars themselves had caught fire. The air bore the scent of smouldering time—a curious blend of ash and forgotten possibility.
Riku Kurobane stood alone, and yet not alone. About him, the battlefield pulsed with echoes—not soldiers, not ghosts, but alternate selves, fragmented possibilities of the boy he might have been: scholar, tyrant, coward, martyr. Each moved with a silent reverence, wielding no sword, but shimmering will. Their eyes were not of judgment, but of remembrance.
At the far end, where the world fractured and the sky bent into a crooked smile, stood Akihiro, newly enthroned in his monstrous shell. His voice, when it rose above the hush of broken fate, cracked like glass underfoot.
“So this is your army? Dreams? Failures? The boy you never dared to become?” His grin was not one of humour. “I will crush them, and then I will unravel you thread by thread until the Loom forgets your name.”
Riku’s gaze, calm as a winter pond, never faltered. His countenance was not of fear, but contemplation. The faintest quirk of his brow—no more than the curl of a withered page—was his only betrayal of emotion.
“Then perhaps,” he replied, in tones too still for war, “it is not me the Loom will remember—but the choice I made to remain.”
A gust of wind stirred, flinging ash into the air like confetti at a funeral. The echoes took form—one stepped forth, dressed in scholar’s robes, another in battle-worn armour. A third bore the garb of a prisoner, and yet walked upright like a king.
Reina, watching from a distance, torn between horror and awe, clutched Kaito’s hand. Her voice, shaken though not weak, whispered, “He is not fighting with power. He is fighting with possibility.”
Kaito’s brow furrowed. “Can possibility defeat corruption?”
“When power forgets mercy,” Reina said, her voice a trembling violin, “possibility is the last sword left.”
Akihiro charged—his form trailing tattered black wings, each feather a thread stolen from the dead. His right arm pulsed with red-veined corruption, his third eye blazing with devouring hunger.
“I am not fate,” he roared. “I am its undoing!”
And yet, as he struck, his claws meeting the first echo, the warrior recoiled. The echo did not fall. It did not bleed.
It reflected him.
Akihiro stepped back, breathing heavily. The corruption on his arm pulsed faster.
“What trick is this?”
Riku, eyes shining not with dominance but serenity, answered, “It is not a trick. It is who I am without vengeance.”
Another echo stepped forward—a version of Riku that had accepted the pacts, not rewritten them. This echo raised his hand, and around them, the ground shifted, folding into a corridor of possibilities.
Akihiro screamed.
“Stop showing me what I could have been!”
The Loom, far above them, glowed brighter. Its voice whispered like rain upon cathedral stone:
“He who denies all choices becomes a prisoner of one.”
And just as Akihiro faltered—his power cracking, his breath growing ragged—the sky split open once more.
From that seam in reality, the Forgotten Weaver returned, its form more complete, more terrible than before. It did not walk. It spilled into the world like a memory too large for the mind.
Its voice echoed, and the air tasted of cold iron and ancient blood.
“I warned you once, Riku Kurobane.”
All fell silent. Even Akihiro.
“You defied me. You spoke of mercy and choice. But you forget—the Loom was not built for mortals to understand. It was forged to contain.”
**“And now—you must decide what you shall contain.”
A great hand formed of woven light and shadow reached downward, not toward Riku, but toward Akihiro. The sky bent like a bowstring.
Riku, astonished, asked, “You would erase him?”
“He is corruption incarnate.”
Riku stepped forward. His jaw tensed. His voice steadied.
“Then let me be his judge. And his warden.”
Before the hand could strike, Riku lifted both arms, threads spiralling from his palms. But these were not crimson. Not golden. Not black.
They were silver—quiet and soft as moonlight.
They wrapped around Akihiro—not to restrain, but to remember.
And from them echoed every version of Akihiro that could have been—brother, friend, protector.
Akihiro dropped to one knee, his monstrous form cracking like old porcelain. He looked up, tears in his eyes.
“Why?” he whispered.
Riku knelt before him, placing a hand over the darkened core pulsing in his chest.
“Because even gods deserve the chance to return to the boy they once were.”
And then… silence.
The Loom pulsed once more.
The Forgotten Weaver withdrew.
And the battlefield stood… still.
Chapter 18: The Thread that Never Was
The morning that followed the undoing of Akihiro was unlike any the world had known before. There was no sunrise in the common understanding; no golden spill of dawn upon dew-wet grass, nor the polite rustling of leaves in gentle breezes. Instead, the sky remained a soft grey—an ambiguous shade caught between dusk and rebirth, as if the heavens themselves could not quite decide what manner of world they now looked upon.
The battlefield, once the grand stage of calamity and conviction, lay silent, solemn. The ruins of Crimson High stood cloaked in fog and contemplative stillness, its shattered towers like the aged bones of some long-forgotten titan, weathered by grief, glory, and something more intangible: memory that did not belong.
Riku Kurobane stood upon a stone platform, its edges half-swallowed by ash and creeping moss. His expression bore the subtle tension of a man not burdened by loss, but by the possibility of what still might be lost. His eyes were sharp with thought, though soft with restraint—a youth whom power had touched not with fire, but with a slow, haunting chill.
Reina approached, her cloak sweeping across the broken flagstones, her shoulders drawn but not bowed. Behind her came Kaito, silent and watchful, ever the companion more inclined to hear a man’s silence than his speech.
“They’re remembering things that never happened,” Reina murmured as she came to stand beside Riku, her voice like the echo of a prayer left unfinished.
He glanced at her then, only briefly, and then to the fog that hung like a curtain over the scorched hills.
“Possibilities,” he said, his voice no louder than the breeze, “are not so easily erased.”
“But this—” she hesitated, searching for words she could trust, “this feels different. I walked past Ayane, and she looked at me as if I had died. She wept. And yet, I have never died. Not in any life I remember.”
Kaito’s brow furrowed. “The Loom should not allow that. It rewrites threads, but it does not cross them.”
Riku turned fully now. His gaze, once distant, now sharpened. “Unless…”
He paused, his mouth pressing into a line of reluctant suspicion.
“Unless something has begun weaving without the Loom’s permission.”
They walked together through the skeletal remains of the great hall, where sunlight filtered through cracks in the high ceiling and dust swirled in long, graceful ribbons, like thoughts not yet formed.
As they passed into the western corridor—once a place of laughter and lockers and less consequential things—a voice rang out, startling them not by volume, but by familiarity.
“Ah! I have been waiting for you, Riku.”
The speaker was a girl, no older than seventeen, with copper eyes and hair that moved without wind. She wore a uniform of no house, bore no sigil upon her skin, and yet the very floor seemed to pulse softly beneath her shoes, as if recognising a sovereign step.
Her smile was not unfriendly, and yet it lingered too long.
Riku stiffened. The corners of his eyes twitched with a memory he did not yet possess.
“Who are you?” he asked, and his voice bore the weight of a question no one wished answered.
She approached with elegance, the fog curling behind her like a veil of intention.
“A thread,” she said lightly, “that never should have been woven. But was.”
Kaito stepped forward, tense. “You’re not part of the Loom.”
The girl’s expression did not falter. “Neither were you once. Yet here you are.”
Reina narrowed her eyes. “You’ve come through the tear, haven’t you? Through the wound left behind by the Forgotten Weaver.”
The girl tilted her head. “You speak well for one whose soul was never whole.”
The fog thickened then—not as weather, but as presence—and from it, flickers of shape began to form. People. Places. Lives not lived, and yet... remembered.
Riku’s knees weakened. He dropped to one hand. Around him, memories began pressing in—not his own, and yet terribly familiar.
He saw himself as a soldier, dying on a cliffside. As a healer, I saved Akihiro’s younger brother. As a traitor, imprisoned beneath the school.
These were not echoes.
These were threads that had never been spun.
The girl knelt beside him, her voice soft as frost. “Do you understand now? You broke the rules. But someone—something—has begun to notice.”
Riku looked up, sweat beading along his brow.
“What are you?”
She offered a faint, sad smile.
“I am the first consequence.”
Above them, the sky pulsed. The Loom—the grand design that had once declared itself alive—flickered in pain.
Its voice whispered low, broken.
“She is not written.”
“She is not known.”
The girl turned her gaze upward. For the first time, her voice darkened.
“You thought yourself complete, Loom. But you were always missing one thread—the thread of what should not exist.”
Chapter 19: The Thread Beyond All Knowing
There are moments in one’s life—be they born of love, tragedy, or revelation—that do not arrive with warning or sense. Rather, they descend like a sudden snowfall in spring: curious, lovely, and wholly disconcerting. It was precisely such a moment that now surrounded the halls of the ruined Crimson High, where three companions stood not merely in the shadow of war, but in the trembling hush of something unwritten.
The air, though still, bore a sharpness—an unnerving clarity not unlike the eerie silence following a clap of thunder. No birds called, no dust stirred; even the wind, so often in companionship with fallen places, had abandoned its course. The clouds above loitered, pale and bruised, as if reluctant to observe what now walked among the threads of fate.
Riku Kurobane stood facing the girl—she who had arrived bearing neither name nor memory, and whose gaze unsettled the very weave of time. His countenance, though stoic, betrayed a flicker of unease. A tension gathered ‘round his mouth, and his eyes narrowed with the quiet strain of a mind not yet willing to surrender to what it feared.
Kaito, ever the watchful observer, whispered with narrowed brow, “There is no mark upon her. Not of the Loom. Not even of the Forgotten Weaver.”
Reina’s hand found the hilt of her blade, though she did not draw it. “And yet she walks as if the world itself once answered to her.”
The girl regarded them with an expression both amused and mournful—an unusual combination not often worn by those who speak plainly.
“You need not fear me,” she said, her tone possessing the peculiar rhythm of one who has heard her own voice across lifetimes.
“Fear,” Riku replied, “is not the thing. It is understanding that eludes me.”
She took a step forward, her shoes clicking against the cracked marble floor of what once had been the Headmaster’s grand corridor. The air around her shimmered faintly—not in light, but in probability.
“And when has understanding ever been a condition for change?” she asked, not unkindly.
Riku’s brows furrowed. “If you came not to destroy, nor to heal, then why come at all?”
Her eyes glinted. “To remind the Loom that it is not the first story to be written.”
Drawn by intuition more than purpose, the girl led them to a chamber long buried beneath the ruins—a place spoken of only in riddles carved into forgotten sigils. They passed beneath a stone archway, now warped with time, into a chamber lit not by torches but by the faint luminescence of threads not yet spun.
Here, the air was warm, dense with the scent of old parchment and something metallic—something like blood, but not quite. Around them, the walls were inscribed not with language, but with impressions—memories that hummed faintly beneath their fingertips, whispering half-lives and abandoned tomorrows.
The girl approached a dais in the centre of the room, where a solitary loom stood—an ancient version, elegant and unfinished. Unlike the great Loom above, this one had no master. No weaver. Only silence.
“This is the First Thread,” she said. “Not the one the Forgotten Weaver built. The one that was denied.”
Riku stepped closer, expression taut with caution. “Denied by whom?”
She tilted her head. “By the Loom itself. It feared what this thread would become.”
Kaito frowned. “A thread that can write without a weaver?”
She nodded. “A thread that writes itself.”
Reina stepped back, her eyes wide with something that might have been awe—or dread. “But… if a thread writes itself, then there are no rules. No fates. No consequences.”
The girl turned to her, softening.
“Or perhaps, Reina, no limits.”
The chamber trembled slightly as if in answer. The unfinished loom stirred, as though waking from a centuries-long slumber. Threads began to move on their own, forming shapes, possibilities.
They saw flickers of futures where Riku was the destroyer. Others, where Reina wore a crown. Even one where Kaito was never born.
And one image lingered longer than the others—a world entirely unlike their own, where Crimson High was a memory, and threads were never needed.
The girl spoke softly, but her words carried the weight of destiny reimagined:
“The Loom has guarded reality like a jealous lover for too long. Perhaps it is time we let something else try.”
Riku, eyes narrowed and breath even, at last spoke again.
“Power that writes itself is not freedom. It is madness.”
The girl studied him.
“And yet, all madness begins with a moment of truth.”
He stepped between her and the ancient loom.
“If you intend to awaken it, I will stop you.”
Her expression did not change, but a faint sadness touched her lips.
“You are brave,” she said, “but even bravery bends under the weight of what was never meant to be named.”
The threads behind her stirred again—this time sharper, bolder.
Kaito muttered, “She’s not trying to write fate. She’s trying to erase the need for it.”
Suddenly, the chamber dimmed. The ancient loom began to pulse not with light, but with the heartbeat.
And in the distant sky, the real Loom shuddered.
A second tear appeared across the firmament.
From it, threads poured out—not red, gold, or silver—but colourless, undefined, chaotic.
The girl turned back, her eyes wide at last.
“It has begun…”
Riku grabbed her wrist. “What have you done?”
But she looked not afraid.
She looked… hopeful.
Chapter 20: Reina’s Remembrance and the Loom of What Might Be
It is, perhaps, an oft-overlooked consequence of war—whether of blades or of threads—that the heart must carry not only the weight of what has occurred, but also of what never did. Thus it was, in the soft hush that followed the awakening of the First Thread, that Reina Hoshino, a girl once content to be sword to justice and shield to loyalty, began to remember the life she never lived.
The sky above remained a strange, silver-tinted parchment, as though the heavens themselves had become a draft of some unwritten manuscript. Clouds gathered in unnatural clusters, unmoving, as if suspended by indecision. The wind, which for days had wandered like a mournful lover through the remnants of Crimson High, had quieted into a breathless stillness.
Within the old observatory—now long stripped of its telescopes and stargazers—Reina stood by a fractured window. Her reflection in the dusty glass shimmered as if caught between two selves. And behind her, the soft sound of footsteps: Riku, Kaito, and the girl who bore no name but walked like she had lived a thousand endings.
“Something is wrong with me,” Reina said, her voice composed, but her eyes bright with uncertainty. “Or perhaps, everything is finally right.”
Kaito leaned against the archway, his brow furrowed. “You’ve been quiet since the Loom reacted.”
She nodded, hands clasped before her. Her posture—proud, contained—betrayed little, but the subtle tremble in her knuckles told a story no tongue had yet told.
“I am seeing people I’ve never met,” she whispered, “and loving them like I’ve known them all my life.”
Riku stepped closer, a crease in his brow. “Visions?”
She met his gaze, unflinching.
“Memories.”
The room grew colder, and the girl, silent until now, lifted her gaze.
“She is beginning to remember her unwoven selves.”
Reina’s hands clenched at her sides. “There was a version of me who became Headmaster. Another who died saving Akihiro. One who… married you.”
A small flicker passed over Riku’s face, too swift to read fully.
Kaito turned sharply. “But those futures never happened.”
Reina inhaled deeply, her chest rising like the breath of an unread poem. “And yet, I grieve them.”
The girl took a step forward. Her eyes, so often unreadable, now softened.
“You were closer to the First Thread than the others. You walked the boundary between fate and choice without knowing it.”
“Why me?” Reina asked.
“Because you never fully gave yourself to the Loom,” she replied. “You obeyed it. You respected it. But you never let it define you.”
A sudden gust tore through the broken ceiling. The ancient loom pulsed from below, and the air filled with shimmering particles, like falling snow, but alive.
They gathered around Reina. She did not move.
One by one, the threads began to form shapes—shadows of her former selves.
One bore royal regalia.
Another, a tattered cloak.
Another, a mother with children she had never held.
Each looked upon her with eyes full of knowledge and longing.
“I don’t know which one I am anymore,” she whispered.
Riku moved toward her, gently. “You are the one who still stands.”
She looked at him then, and the moment slowed. Her lips parted slightly—not in fear, but in some realisation too vast for words.
“And if I remember them too clearly?”
“Then carry them,” Riku said, voice steadier than his heartbeat. “But don’t let them carry you.”
Suddenly, the floor beneath them hummed. A small thread—a strand of silver and lavender—rose from the earth and curled into Reina’s palm.
The girl blinked. Her breath caught.
“It’s offering you authorship.”
Reina looked down at the thread. Her face, once unreadable, now shone with something like awe and dread.
“It wants me to write a path of my own?”
The girl nodded.
“No versions. No pre-written design. You would become the first true possibility—neither chosen, nor foretold.”
Kaito stepped forward quickly, concern darkening his eyes. “Reina—don’t. If you take it, you may forget who you were.”
She looked at Riku.
And in that glance was every version of love that had never happened.
“And if I don’t?” she asked, voice trembling.
“Then you’ll never know who you were meant to be,” Riku said gently. “Not according to the Loom. But according to you.”
Reina’s fingers closed slowly around the thread. Her eyes glistened. The room was utterly still.
“I choose,” she said. “To be no one’s version of me but my own.”
The thread disappeared into her skin. Light radiated outward, not burning, but illuminating the chamber in a soft violet hue.
The Loom pulsed once, recognising her.
Not as its child.
But as its peer.
And somewhere, deep beneath fate, a new thread began to spin.
One not shaped by prophecy.
But by free will.
Chapter 21: The Shadow That Wears Her Face
It is, I dare assert, no great surprise that when a person—especially one of thoughtful disposition and quiet strength—steps beyond the expectations of fate, the world does not simply yield. It responds. And often, with a voice that resembles one’s own, yet bears none of one’s grace. Thus it was, as Reina Hoshino embraced the thread not written by any hand but her own, the wind began to stir with an unfamiliar tone.
The day, if indeed it could be called so in the waning light of a sky unmoored, offered no warmth. The clouds moved like polite intruders across a parchment sky, brushed with the hues of storm and old sorrow. The light that filtered down bore no origin—it seemed to radiate from the air itself, as if the Loom were no longer willing to part with secrets so easily.
Reina stood near the southern garden, or what little remained of it. Twisted branches clawed toward the greying sky, and remnants of long-dead roses rested among shards of forgotten stone. The lavender thread she had taken—now nestled just below her collarbone—pulsed softly, like a heartbeat separate from her own.
“You feel different,” Kaito remarked as he approached, his boots crunching over broken tile. His brow, though furrowed, held not suspicion but a wary affection.
She turned slightly, the corner of her mouth tugged with thought. “And yet I remember everything. Even the things I did not do.”
His breath hitched. “Like what?”
She looked to the east, where the wind had changed direction. Her fingers clenched softly around the hilt of her blade, but not in fear.
“Like a version of me,” she said slowly, “that never stopped obeying the Loom.”
Later that evening, the sky having adopted the colour of drowned vellum, Riku joined them beneath the remains of the courtyard arch. The stones there held heat no longer, and a low mist had begun to rise, weaving itself through the ruined columns like a story retold.
“Something is moving through the fringe,” he said, his voice firm but low. “Not of the Loom. Not of the Abyss.”
Kaito’s shoulders tensed. “Another Weaver?”
Riku shook his head, just once. His gaze turned to Reina.
“It’s you.”
Her lips parted—not with protest, but with a dreadful understanding.
Before she could respond, a sound—not unlike laughter—echoed through the stones. It was cold, and yet not without elegance.
A figure stepped from the mist, cloaked not in shadow but in a twilight that seemed to cling to her like old perfume.
She bore Reina’s face. Her voice, when she spoke, was velvet-edged with steel.
“At last,” she said, eyes glimmering with secrets. “You’ve become what I never dared to be.”
Reina stepped forward, shoulders squared, though her heartbeat quivered like a leaf in a storm.
“And you are what I might have become… if I had not chosen?”
The other smiled. “No. I am what you still could be—if you abandon the burden of self-authorship.”
They stood in mirrored posture—one cloaked in freedom, the other in the elegance of submission.
“Choice,” the shadow-Reina said, “is not liberation. It is exile. I remained within the lines of fate and was adored for it. I was made Headmaster. I brought peace.”
Reina raised her chin. “You became an instrument. Not a soul.”
A flicker crossed the shadow’s eyes. “But I was certain.”
Kaito stepped forward. “You’re not real. You’re just a memory made flesh by the First Thread.”
The shadow’s lips curled.
“Then why do I remember every moment as if I lived it?” She turned to Reina. “Do you not also ache when you see what I saw? The children you taught, the peace you brought? The throne you turned away from?”
Reina closed her eyes for the briefest moment.
“Yes,” she said softly. “And that is why I must be the one who chooses.”
The mist behind the shadow thickened. Threads formed and tangled, but none bore colour, nor connection.
Riku narrowed his eyes. “You’re not a projection.”
The shadow turned to him. “No. I am not.”
“Then how are you here?”
A long silence passed, broken only by the rustle of wind through dead ivy.
Her voice, when it came, was quiet and final.
“I broke through.”
Reina’s blood chilled.
“How?”
“Because the Loom began to remember me.” Her eyes now glowed with the light of long-buried truth. “It cannot forget what was once obedient. And now, the First Thread—chaotic and merciless—seeks to make room for all who were never chosen. All forgotten Reinas. Forgotten Rikus. Forgotten everything.”
Riku stepped forward. “You're not here to observe. You’re here to replace her.”
The sky trembled, and threads began to spiral. The Loom's voice, distant and trembling, echoed faintly:
“This must not be.”
Reina looked upon her other self, eyes gleaming with both sorrow and strength.
“Then let us end this—not with swords, but with truth.”
The two reached toward the air, and threads, ancient and new, spiraled around them. One thread of possibility, lavender and silver. One thread of tradition, gold and bound.
And they began to weave. Not to destroy—but to reveal.
The threads wove faster, forming visions around them.
-
One Reina, adored but shackled.
-
One Reina, feared but free.
-
One world, quiet.
-
One world, broken and singing.
The Loom cracked once, visibly. A sound like distant thunder shook the stones.
Two realities now existed—one we must follow, one we must confront.
And only one Reina may remain.
Chapter 22: The Splintered Loom and the Garden of Every Self
It has long been presumed—in libraries both sacred and arcane, in the hushed parlours of scholars, and upon the lips of philosophers who dared to sip the tea of fate—that the world, in its wisdom, chooses but one version of each of us. The rest, discarded like yesterday’s drafts, are relegated to the attic of possibility. But seldom, if ever, is it asked: What if the world changed its mind?
The weather, that customary herald of mood and omen, offered no ordinary signs. There was no rain, and yet the air was moist as if the clouds themselves wept silently. The sky had fractured—not with storm, but with threads, descending like divine confetti, flickering in silver, lavender, crimson, and shades unknown to mortal sight.
Beneath this curious firmament stood the true Reina, hands trembling yet outstretched, and before her, her shadow-self, regal and unflinching. The ancient garden of Crimson High, long resigned to the bitterness of ruin, had begun to bloom again—yet not with roses, nor lilies, but with memories. Blossoms opened bearing glimpses of other Reinas, other Rikus, other truths.
And then—the Loom broke.
It did not shatter with sound, but with silence.
A silence so complete, it was as though all breath had been held by the cosmos.
Kaito, ever the first to voice alarm, whispered hoarsely, “The threads—they’re... unbound.”
From above, the great tapestry that had once governed fate unraveled in slow, agonising ribbons. They drifted like strands of forgotten dreams, their ends glowing faintly as though remembering they once had purpose.
Reina’s shadow-self looked skyward, her expression unreadable save for a faint twitch at her brow.
“You’ve undone everything,” she murmured. “And yet—nothing has collapsed.”
Reina lowered her arms. Her breath was steady. Her eyes are clear.
“Because we were never meant to be singular.”
The ground beneath them shifted. No quake, no tremble—but a hum, deep and sacred. The broken school transformed before their eyes—stone reknitting itself into many halls, many staircases, each leading not to classrooms, but to lives.
“It is a garden,” the girl with no name said at last, her tone reverent. “A garden where every version can bloom.”
Riku, though composed, pressed his lips tightly as he surveyed the vision unfolding. Around them, other versions began to appear—not as ghosts, nor illusions, but beings.
One Reina approached wearing a cloak of stars, her voice calm.
“I became a prophet.”
Another came, bloodied but smiling.
“I died for peace.”
A third, silent and alone, knelt by a tree.
“I left everything. And I still survived.”
The shadow-Reina looked upon them and asked softly, “Then what am I now?”
Reina reached for her, placing a hand upon her shoulder.
“You are a part of me. And I will not banish you to make myself whole.”
Above, where the Loom once stretched across reality in a single, sovereign threadwork, many Looms now spun. Each gleamed in different hues—some disciplined and gold, others erratic and wild, others soft and unassuming.
The nameless girl, who had walked silently through the story like a footnote come to life, smiled for the first time.
“It did not die. It learned.”
Riku turned toward her. “What will it become?”
She shook her head gently. “What it always wished to be.”
Kaito frowned. “Which is?”
Her eyes sparkled.
“A library. Not a prison.”
The world had not ended. It had not burned. It had bloomed.
Where once only one life could flourish, now infinite selves walked beside one another, not in conflict, but in harmony.
Some would choose to forget.
Others to lead.
A few vanish entirely into tales never told.
And Riku, standing at the heart of this new realm, turned to Reina and asked simply:
“Do you regret unbinding it?”
Her smile was soft, serene, and certain.
“No. Because now, no one is forgotten. Not even the ones we never got to be.”
Chapter 23: A Visitor Without a Thread, and the Reina Who Begins to Vanish
It is, I think, a condition most curious—that just as the soul begins to rejoice in peace newly won, the world should offer yet another riddle, as though harmony were a garment ill-fitted to mortal shoulders. So it was, upon the trembling calm of the Loom’s new plurality—a realm blossoming with a thousand lives, a thousand selves—that unease began once more to settle its long, cold fingers upon the hearts of those who had dared to reshape existence.
The morning air was still—eerily so. The mist clung to the gardens like an overfamiliar guest, and the light bore a grey hue not born of cloud, but of question. Though the new Looms spun gently overhead like constellations made manifest, one could not help but feel watched by something that did not belong. Birds had ceased their song, and the air had grown too quiet, as if even nature herself held her breath.
Reina—our Reina, whose soul now bore the rare mark of self-authorship—stood among her echoes. The garden that had flourished from the broken school now held versions of herself in laughter, conversation, and meditation. Yet as the hour turned, so too did their eyes… to the space beside her.
And one was no longer there.
Kaito arrived first, his brows knitted with familiar concern. “There were eight Reinas yesterday,” he said. “Now there are seven.”
Reina’s mouth parted, her expression unreadable save for the trembling of her hand. She looked to the bench beneath the scarlet-threaded tree—a space once occupied by the Reina who had become a teacher, beloved and wise. Now, there was only an empty breeze.
“That version of me taught thirty students,” Reina whispered. “She wrote their names in ink and memory. And now…” she swallowed, “…they don’t recall her at all.”
Riku, arriving beside them, studied the space with narrowed eyes. “It’s not death. It’s erasure.”
The air pulsed faintly.
And then it rippled.
As though something had stepped into this world—not from a Loom, but from outside every weave.
A form emerged between two trees—neither shadow nor light. It walked without disturbing the grass. Its clothes were simple, yet none could describe them. Its face was not obscured, yet no one could quite remember it.
The Looms above flickered.
Reina, voice calm but taut, said softly: “Who are you?”
The figure tilted its head. Its voice, when it spoke, was gentle, but empty of any echo.
“I am no one.”
Riku took a cautious step forward. “Every being here has a thread. You do not.”
The figure inclined its head. “I was never woven.”
Kaito’s hand hovered near his blade. “Then you have no right to be here.”
The figure looked at him, not with hostility, but with something far worse—pity.
“Neither did you,” it replied softly. “Once.”
The sky dimmed. Above them, one Loom—the one of golden balance—shuddered, a single thread snapping soundlessly.
Another Reina vanished.
Reina gasped, turning frantically. The Reina, who had become a queen, is now gone. The echoes she had ruled over blinked in confusion, their memories shifting mid-breath.
“What are you doing to them?” Reina cried.
The visitor turned its unseen eyes upon her.
“Nothing. I do not touch what is written. I only remind the Loom what was never meant to be.”
Riku’s voice was grave. “You are the memory of limitation.”
The visitor nodded.
“You created a garden. But gardens attract not only flowers, but also wind. I am that wind. The pull of the unwritten world. And it is growing.”
Two more Reinas flickered.
One blinked, her eyes wide with awareness.
“No—please—don’t forget me.”
And then—gone.
Reina fell to her knees. Her hands gripped the dirt, now cold and trembling.
“They lived,” she whispered. “They mattered.”
The visitor’s voice was like dusk.
“To you. But the Looms—your Looms—are beginning to forget.”
“Why?” Riku demanded.
“Because possibility,” the visitor replied, “must eventually confront weight. The more you make room for, the more the edges fray.”
The garden stood trembling.
Only four Reinas remained.
Reina turned to the visitor, her expression firm despite the tears in her eyes.
“What do you want?”
The visitor was silent for a long time.
And then—
“Not want. Offer.”
“Return to a single thread. The one you were. The one fate chose.”
Reina stood slowly.
Behind her, Riku’s voice was soft.
“And if she refuses?”
The visitor looked to the Looms above, now flickering.
“Then every version of her… will disappear. Except one.”
Chapter 24: The Thread That Must Remain
It is a curious condition of the heart that in the very moment when it most desires to protect the many, it must, cruelly and without apology, decide for one. Such was the state in which Reina Hoshino found herself: not upon a battlefield of blade or banner, but at the precipice of selfhood, where no compass could point with certainty, and no companion might walk beside her beyond the threshold.
The morning had arrived with neither gold nor warmth, cloaked in the uncertain hue of a world unraveling. The garden of many selves, once a vibrant and living testament to possibility, now bore a silence that was not merely absence, but mourning. Where once there had stood dozens of Reinas, fragments of lives diverged, there remained now only two.
And only one of them would endure.
Above them, the Looms—those spinning arcs of colour and consequence—had begun to dim. Their threads slowed, their pulse reduced to the faintest flicker. It was as though, in trying to remember too much, they had begun to remember nothing at all.
Riku stood a pace behind Reina, his features shaded with something deeper than grief: helplessness. He looked not to the sky, but to the ground, as if searching for roots that might still hold beneath the soil of a crumbling story.
Kaito remained silent. He, who once spoke without pause, now bore the expression of a man who feared his voice might bring only further ruin.
The visitor, that threadless shade from beyond the weave, stood opposite Reina in the centre of the garden. Around them, petals fell from flowers that had never truly lived, their descent graceful, but terminal.
“The time has come,” the visitor said softly. “You must choose.”
The last two Reinas looked upon each other.
One, our Reina—unwritten, unpredictable, and yet forged with choice and fire.
The other, silent and pale, flickered faintly, like a candle in a house already abandoned.
Reina stepped forward. Her chin lifted, her face serene, though her eyes held storm.
“I remember her smile,” she said, voice low. “I remember her laughter, though I never spoke it. I remember the pain she bore… that I never lived.”
The other version blinked slowly. “I do not wish to vanish,” she said, almost apologetically.
Reina turned to the visitor. “And if I become what I once was?”
“Then this thread remains,” it replied. “And all else is stilled.”
Kaito stepped forward suddenly. “This is cruelty. There must be another path.”
The visitor’s face, if it had one, bore no malice. “There was. But she closed it when she wrote herself.”
Reina looked at Riku.
His gaze held hers with a weight words could not carry. At last, he said:
“If you forget her, you forget you. But if you save her, you lose the one who dared to choose.”
The wind stirred, and Reina closed her eyes. Her expression remained placid, but a tear traced silently down her cheek.
“What is the worth,” she whispered, “of a self that must destroy all others to be whole?”
The visitor answered simply. “It is the price of identity.”
The garden trembled.
“Then I will pay it,” Reina said.
Reina stepped forward, reaching out her hand, not to destroy the remaining self, but to hold her.
The version shimmered. Her form flickered.
“You choose yourself?” she asked, not accusing, but astonished.
Reina nodded. “Yes. But I choose you as part of me.”
She pressed their foreheads together, and in that instant, the garden exploded with light. Threads surged downward from the dimming Looms, not in panic, but in grace. And rather than choosing between them, they wove the two Reinas together.
One thread.
But not one life.
The Loom—though slow—learned.
And it began to spin a new kind of thread: not singular. Not divided.
But layered.
Like a novel rewritten, with footnotes intact.
The garden shimmered.
The Looms, once splintered, began to hum anew—not as distant creators, but recorders of will.
The visitor turned toward the horizon, its form already fading.
“You have done what the first weavers feared most,” it said.
“You have made the thread conscious.”
Reina turned back to her companions. Her aura had changed—not brighter, not darker, but deeper.
“I will not forget,” she said.
And for the first time, the Loom whispered not over her…
But to her.
There are, in the long and winding chronicles of existence, moments when the past becomes not merely recollection, but instrument. When memory ceases to be passive and rises, blade-like, to carve the present into something new. Yet, as every thoughtful soul knows well, what may be used to heal may likewise be wielded to destroy. And so it was that Reina Hoshino, newly rewritten and layered with every self she had ever been—or might yet become—found herself not in triumph, but in peril of being unmade entirely.
The dawn broke with an unusual hush, one not born of peace, but of absence. The sky, once adorned in soft rose and reluctant gold, bore instead a pallid hue—like ink thinned too far upon a trembling quill. Threads, usually dancing above the canopy like the ribbons of fate’s grand opera, now hung limp, trembling ever so slightly, as if anticipating something unwelcome.
A scent lingered in the air. Not of smoke, nor blossom, but of emptiness—as if a chapter had been torn from the book of the world, and none dared admit its absence.
Reina stood beside the Reflecting Tree—the only flora in the garden that bore leaves like fragments of glass. Each leaf shimmered with an image: her as healer, her as queen, her as the soldier who bled for others’ mistakes.
She reached out—tentative, reverent—and touched a single leaf.
The world shifted.
And she was no longer in the garden.
The sky was violet. The war had ended. She—this version of her—was walking through the ruined east wing of the academy, speaking softly to a child who clutched a fractured sigil.
But Reina—our Reina—watched it from within. Not as a ghost. Not as a viewer. But as a presence within her own past.
“This child will never be whole,” the memory-Reina whispered sadly.
Our Reina moved her lips, and her words slid through the other. “Then let her live with the fracture. And grow stronger around it.”
The child blinked. Smiled. The memory shimmered.
And changed.
Kaito stood watching the real Reina’s still body, her hand upon the leaf, her breath barely rising.
Riku appeared beside him, eyes narrowed in thought.
“She is rewriting her own pasts,” Kaito said at last. “Not as an outsider. But as a participant.”
Riku nodded. “She is no longer bound by the line of time. She has become its editor.”
Above them, one Loom—slender, silver, fragile—shuddered.
Then, it snapped.
No sound. Only light.
And from that light, a shape emerged. Not sharp. Not grand. But hollow.
A Thing, tall and limbless, cloaked in tattered script, with a face like an erased name.
The wind ceased.
The garden darkened.
Even the Reflecting Tree shivered.
The Thing drifted closer—not walking, but unhappening forward. Leaves turned grey in its wake.
The Thing turned toward Reina, still locked in her memory.
It spoke with no mouth. Only meaning.
“Threads cannot live more than once.”
Kaito stepped forward, drawing his blade.
“Stay back.”
But the Thing only turned its head sideways, like a forgotten thought, and said,
“She has rewritten too much. She must be digested.”
Riku’s voice was low and sharp. “You are not part of the Loom.”
The Thing floated closer. “No. I feed on what the Loom fears: ambiguity.”
Then, Reina awoke.
Her eyes flared violet, the layered thread beneath her skin pulsing in waves.
“You eat forgotten versions,” she said, stepping forward. “But I remember all of them.”
The Thing paused. Perhaps surprised.
She raised her hand, and from behind her, every version she had touched rose up, their eyes glowing.
The air trembled. The Thing pulsed, attempting to move. But the threads around Reina spun fast and tighter, weaving themselves into a net of remembrance.
She spoke not as a girl, not as a queen, but as memory itself:
“You cannot unwrite me. I am not only what I am now—but what I was, what I wasn’t, and what I refused to be.”
The Thing twisted, screeched—no sound, only sensation.
And then—
It unraveled.
Silently. Without resistance.
Its cloak of erasure became strands of light. Its presence—gone.
The Reflecting Tree shimmered.
The sky lightened, soft pinks creeping along the edges of the heavens like forgiveness after grief.
Reina stood quietly. Her breath was steady. The thread within her no longer pulsed—it sang.
Riku approached.
“You’ve become something not even the Loom understands.”
She turned to him with a gentle smile.
“Then it must learn, as we did.”
📜 End of Chapter Teaser:
The Loom now accepts Reina—but not all threads are as willing.
In the distance, something stirs—a fragment of the Forgotten Weaver that escaped being unwritten.
And it has found someone else with a layered thread.
Shall Chapter 35 reveal:
—The new bearer of a layered thread—one who will not use it kindly?
—Or Reina’s attempt to restore a memory too broken to repair?
TO BE CONTINUED...
Chapter 15: https://storylinespectrum.blogspot.com/2025/04/chapter-15-defiance-of-mortal.html
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