Time stuttered.
Not stopped, not reversed, but stuttered — like a record catching on a scratch, repeating the same note with decreasing conviction until it finally skipped forward.
Caelen felt it happen. One moment, Captain Seirin was reaching for the Chronicle in his hands, her Remembering Metal gauntlets gleaming in the lamplight. The next, she was reaching for it again. And again. Each repetition slightly fainter than the last, as if reality was forgetting how to maintain the scene.
On the fourth repetition, her hand passed through the book entirely.
"What—" she began, but her voice echoed strangely, layered with the ghosts of the three previous attempts to speak.
Caelen didn't question the impossibility. He ran.
The Chronicle felt warm against his chest as he sprinted through corridors that seemed to bend away from his pursuers. Behind him, he could hear Seirin shouting orders that arrived before she spoke them, her voice cascading backward through the stuttering moments.
"Seal the Archives! He's carrying—" "—the forbidden text—" "—temporal disturbance in Sector—"
But her words arrived at his ears in the wrong order, and by the time they assembled into meaning, he was already three hallways away.
The building itself seemed to be helping him. Passages opened where walls had been. Stairs descended when he needed to go down, ascended when he needed to go up. Doors that should have been locked swung wide at his approach.
As he ran, a page from the Chronicle fluttered loose and caught the air. He glimpsed a single line before it dissolved:
"Ten there were, in the time before counting. Ten Lords out of the Loom, and each a doorway to what was."
Then the page was gone, absorbed back into the book as if it had never been.
Caelen burst through a final door and found himself in the Merchant Quarter, three districts away from the Archive. The transition was so abrupt it left him dizzy — one step he was inside ancient stone corridors, the next he was standing among market stalls and evening shoppers.
He looked back. No door. Just a solid wall covered in advertisements for dreamstone polish and memory-bright ink.
Time, it seemed, had forgotten where he came from.
In her chambers beneath the Lightweaver Tower, Lyssira Elowen was learning that light had a memory.
It had started when she tried to extinguish her reading lamp. The flame went out obediently, but the light itself lingered. Not as an afterimage, but as actual illumination — soft, sourceless radiance that revealed things the lamplight had never shown.
The walls of her room, for instance, weren't really walls.
Through the persistent glow, she could see the building's true architecture: passages that twisted through impossible angles, chambers that existed in the spaces between officially recognized rooms, and everywhere — everywhere — the faint outline of older construction bleeding through like a palimpsest.
She could see the bones of what had been built here before the current structure. Not just an older building, but something that operated on entirely different principles. Walls that curved with the flow of natural forces rather than following straight lines. Spaces that expanded and contracted based on need rather than rigid measurement.
And in her mirror — the same mirror where her reflection had acted independently — she could now see other reflections overlapping her own. Herself, but different. Wearing robes of pure starlight. Standing in rooms that didn't exist. Speaking with people who weren't there.
Or perhaps she was the one who wasn't there, and they were real.
The most disturbing reflection showed her standing beside a figure whose face she couldn't quite focus on. Every time she tried to look directly at him, her eyes would slide away, but she caught impressions: robes that seemed to be cut from dusk itself, hands that moved with the deliberate care of someone rearranging the fundamental structure of reality, and an aura of profound, ancient sadness.
In that reflection, she was laughing at something he'd said. They looked... comfortable together. Familiar.
But she had never met anyone who matched that description.
Had she?
She pressed her palm against the mirror's surface. The glass felt warm, almost alive. When she pulled her hand away, her reflection remained pressed against the mirror for three heartbeats longer than it should have.
This time, instead of fear, she felt a strange sort of recognition.
"Who are you?" she whispered to the lingering reflection.
Her other self mouthed a single word: "Remember."
Three districts away, in the Dome of Golden Bells, the Sevenfold Assembly was in chaos.
The lower tiers had been summoned without explanation. Threadlings and Strandlings filled the outer galleries, their whispered conversations creating a susurrus of anxiety that echoed off the dome's crystalline interior. They knew something was wrong — the bells had tolled eight times, an impossibility that violated the basic principles of the Loom's ordered reality — but no one would tell them what.
Weavehands moved between them, trying to maintain order while clearly having no more information than their subordinates. The Patternseers stood in tight clusters, their enhanced sight allowing them to perceive the temporal distortions spreading through the city like ripples in a pond, but they'd been forbidden from discussing what they saw.
Higher up, in the amber galleries reserved for the middle tiers, the Loompledged and Threadtouched received fragments of information through official channels:
"Unauthorized access to Restricted Documentation." "Temporal anomalies detected in Archive Sector Seven." "Implement Containment Protocol Sevenfold."
But even they weren't told what they were supposed to be containing.
It was Strandkeeper Matthis Gorvaine who first dared to voice what many were thinking:
"If the lower tiers are being kept in the dark, and we're being kept in the dark, then either the Knotbinders know something we don't, or this goes all the way to the Loomknights."
His colleague, Strandkeeper Lyanna Vers, nodded grimly. "When was the last time the Loomknights involved themselves directly in city affairs?"
"The Temporal Wars," Matthis replied. "Three hundred years ago."
Above them, in galleries they couldn't even see, the Weaveguards and Patternmasters were receiving very different briefings. Their reports spoke of "pre-Loom entities" and "containment breach scenarios" and "activation of dormant contingencies."
But even they were not privy to the conversation taking place in the dome's highest chamber, where Threadwarden Cassian Thorne knelt before a figure whose presence seemed to bend light around the edges.
"The Chronicle of Unbecoming has been accessed," Thorne reported, his voice carefully neutral. "The Veyre boy carried it out of the Archive."
The figure — one of the Loomknights, though which one was impossible to tell through the distortion that surrounded them — spoke in a voice like distant thunder:
"And the temporal signatures?"
"Consistent with what we've seen before. Reality restructuring itself to accommodate an impossibility. Time flowing around obstacles that shouldn't exist."
"He stirs."
"Yes, my lord. After seven centuries of dormancy, the old patterns are reasserting themselves."
A long pause. When the Loomknight spoke again, there was something that might have been weariness in that echoing voice:
"Inform Threadwarden Selic that we may need to implement the Severance Protocols. Full temporal isolation of the affected sectors."
"My lord... that would require erasing nearly a quarter of the city from history."
"Better a quarter forgotten than the whole world remembering what came before."
Thorne bowed deeper. "And the girl? The one showing anomalous light-working?"
"Monitor. Do not engage. If our suspicions are correct, she is beyond our ability to simply erase."
"Because she predates our authority?"
"Because she is the echo of what we replaced."
In the Merchant Quarter, Caelen ducked into an alley between a spice merchant's stall and a shop selling bottled dreams. His heart was still racing from the impossible escape, and the Chronicle felt heavier than it should against his ribs.
He pulled it out carefully. The book's binding seemed more substantial now, as if his act of reading it in the Archive had somehow made it more real. The pages were no longer the thin, gossamer sheets he'd seen before — they had weight, texture, the solidity of genuine parchment.
A new section had appeared near the beginning:
"The Loom was not the first attempt to order reality. It was merely the most successful. What came before was not chaos, as the current histories claim, but a different kind of order — one based on possibility rather than constraint.
Ten beings served as anchors for that older reality. Ten Lords out of the Loom, each embodying a different aspect of unbound potential: Memory, Possibility, Change, Recognition, Paradox, Echo, Divergence, Convergence, Revelation, and Unbecoming.
When the Loom rose, nine of the ten were convinced to sleep. One refused.
He who was called Velkareth, Lord of Echoes, chose exile over submission. His rebellion was not against the Loom's existence, but against the forgetting of what came before.
Now, as the old patterns stir, as the Chronicle finds its way to those who can read between its lines, the question becomes: will the nine Lords continue to sleep? Or will they remember what they chose to forget?"
The text ended there, but in the margin, fresh words were appearing as Caelen watched:
"The sleepers dream of waking. The wakers dream of what was lost. And she who carries the light of the between-time dreams of both, unknowing that she is the bridge."
Above him, the city's bells began to toll again. Not eight this time, but a complex pattern: three, then five, then seven, then—
Silence.
Caelen looked up. Every bell tower in sight had stopped mid-toll, their bronze bells frozen at impossible angles, as if time itself had decided to hold its breath.
In that perfect quiet, he heard something that shouldn't exist: laughter, warm and familiar, echoing from no visible source.
And for just a moment, he could swear he saw a figure in robes of starlight standing at the mouth of the alley, watching him with eyes that held the weight of seven centuries.
But when he blinked, there was only a merchant hawking memory-wine to the evening crowd, and the bells were ringing their normal pattern again.
The Chronicle in his hands grew warm, and he understood: the game, whatever it was, had truly begun.
Time was learning to forget its own rules.
And somewhere in the city, others were learning to remember.
End of Chapter Six