The surface had shifted.
By the time Elian emerged from the Whispering Deep, the sky was no longer a ceiling — it was a wound.
Cracks spiderwebbed between dying stars, thin and bright like fractures in a stained glass dome. The rotlight veins pulsed slower now, like a heart struggling against its own decay.
Everything was quieter.
Not peaceful.
Tense.
The kind of quiet that came just before a predator lunged.
The girl stood near the crater's edge, clutching a piece of broken stone.
The rotborne woman crouched low, muscles tensed, sniffing the twisted air with narrowed eyes.
Neither of them spoke when they saw him.
Neither dared.
Because Elian wasn't the same anymore.
He wasn't just walking out of the Deep.
He was bringing something with him.
[Threadmaker Status: Updated]
[Passive Mark Detected: Soulwrought Memory]
[Warning: User now partially visible to Pre-System Entities]
[Side Effect: Threadmarks visible to user]
[Risk Assessment: Terminal]
The message flashed once — a heartbeat of cold — then disappeared.
Elian smiled faintly.
Risk.
Potential.
They were the same thing.
He inhaled deeply through his nose, feeling the difference even in the air. It wasn't just wind anymore — it was saturated. Threadlines bled openly into the world now, thin trails curling from every surface, every shadow, every living thing.
Most were frayed, broken, or tangled.
Some were still burning faintly.
Some were already dead.
And a few… a precious few… pulsed with hidden violence.
He could see it all.
Threadmarks.
The invisible fingerprints left by survival, by failure, by ambition.
It was beautiful.
It was disgusting.
It was his.
The girl swallowed hard.
"What happened to you down there?"
Elian turned his head slowly — not sharply, not aggressively — just enough to meet her gaze.
His eyes had darkened.
Not just in color.
In depth.
The weight of something ancient pressed behind his stare now, something that even the Deep hadn't managed to extinguish.
"Nothing happened to me," he said, voice low.
"I happened to it."
The rotborne woman snarled under her breath, stepping half a pace back.
Instinct.
Smart.
There was a moment — just a moment — where even the girl's hand tightened around her stone like she wasn't sure if she was going to throw it… or use it
Elian smiled slightly.
"I see you now," he said softly.
"Both of you."
Their threadmarks shimmered faintly in his vision, flickering with fear, uncertainty, a desperate tether to hope.
Fragile.
Breakable.
He turned away, uninterested in their weakness.
Something stronger was calling.
The ground shuddered — not a quake, but a pulse.
A ripple running through the ash and rot, waking things that should have stayed buried.
The Seed — the broken relic they had buried — emitted one last shuddering ping beneath the soil.
And Elian heard it.
Not with his ears.
With the new fracture stitched into his soul.
A memory unfurled in his mind — broken, half-erased:
A ruin.
A place where threadlines tangled so deeply they no longer obeyed time.
A graveyard of purpose.
The name rose from the ashes of forgotten systems:
The Threadgrave.
The girl gasped as the image brushed her mind, bleeding through Elian's presence.
The rotborne woman stumbled back, clawing at her own arms as if to tear something unseen away.
Elian?
He just smiled wider.
"Finally," he whispered.
"A place that remembers what the system wants to forget."
He turned, the cracked sky stretching overhead.
The world wasn't broken because of him.
It had always been broken.
He was just the first to tear open the lie wide enough for the truth to crawl through.
[New Objective: Locate the Threadgrave]
[Estimated Survival Rate: 0.6%]
[Advisory: Immediate Retreat Recommended]
[Override: Denied]
Elian moved.
Not because he was ready.
Because he was meant for this.
The system had failed.
The gods had fled.
The monsters were already rotting from the inside.
All that remained now was the long, slow fall into a world that no longer wanted to be saved.
And Elian?
He wasn't here to save anything.
He was here to watch it burn.