The air above the Pahtem platform still carried the smell of shattered crystal and burned intent. Salemadon had won his first true battle, but victory tasted unfinished — like closing a book in the middle of a sentence.
Bali-Prime, the fractured world stretching beneath the skies, was rearranging itself after the clash. The chrome city skyline flickered like a dying signal. Waterfalls on the paradise side flowed upward for seconds, then corrected, splashing back into gravity's original agreement. Echoes of sound — fragments of footsteps, falling debris, whispered syllables from the fight — looped briefly before dissolving into silence.
Salemadon stood motionless at the center of it all, his ceremonial armor dimmed but intact, the white cape behind him rippling in a wind that technically no longer existed. The threads of Pahtem swirled around his wrists like cautious animals deciding whether to return to their keeper.
Maweh floated several steps behind him, her silhouette framed by the split realities. She said nothing. But silence, in her presence, was never empty. It instructed without speaking.
Salemadon exhaled. The breath glowed faintly silver — residue of Pahtem's high charge. He watched the threads recoil and weave back into equilibrium around him.
"They adapt fast," he murmured.
Maweh finally replied, voice low but resonant, "Yes. But now the Red Thread adapts faster than them all."
Salemadon turned slightly. "The Red Thread?"
She raised a hand. In the sky above them, the Gemini constellation shimmered brighter, the twin stars pulsing like eyes blinking awake.
Then it happened.
The Red Thread Awakens
A single crimson line split open from the heart of the constellation and descended like a meteor drawn in slow motion. It did not roar. It did not announce itself. It simply arrived, cutting cleanly through the atmosphere and embedding into the platform at Salemadon's feet.
The moment it landed, all other threads froze.
Not intimidated — recognized.
The Red Thread was ancient. Older than technology, older than waterfalls, older than the treaties of reality itself. It was thin, elegant, terrifyingly simple. Unlike Pahtem's black and white ribbons, which behaved like braided rivers, this one felt like a vein.
A pulse traveled up it. Once. Like a heartbeat testing the dark.
Then the thread stood up on its own, lifting from the ground, rising to Salemadon's height, hovering between them like a spear made of blood and starlight.
Salemadon felt the pull before the threat. His threads twitched toward it instinctively, like iron toward a magnet.
"What is it doing?" he asked, cautious, calculating.
"It is not doing," Maweh corrected. "It is choosing."
The Red Thread drifted forward until its tip rested gently against Salemadon's chest armor. The contact produced no explosion, no fracture — only a sound.
A soft tone. A note. A hum. One that had never existed before in the universe.
The platform shuddered — not breaking, but remembering.
Salemadon's eyes widened. "It sings."
Maweh whispered, almost reverent, "It speaks. But only to those who can carry the first echo."
The thread pressed harder. Not to pierce him, but to test the resonance of his spirit.
Salemadon raised a hand, threads flaring around him protectively. "If it chose me… what does it want?"
Before Maweh could reply, the sky fractured again.
But not like before.
The Redaction Responds
The fractures that opened this time were not chaotic mirror breaks — they were rectangular, calculated, architectural. Precision-made gates, glowing red at the edges like censored documents burning through paper.
Then figures stepped out.
Not agents. Not sentinels.
Redaction Heralds.
Tall, faceless beings in obsidian robes lined with pulsating red sigils. Their faces were smooth surfaces like sealed scrolls. Their footsteps produced no sound at all, making them more silent than the universe itself.
Maweh narrowed her eyes. "They heard it."
Salemadon felt the Red Thread vibrate against his armor — agitated, warning.
"They're after the thread," Salemadon realized.
"They are after the sound it made when it touched you," Maweh corrected again. "The Redaction does not erase only worlds. It erases firsts. You have become one."
The Heralds formed a circle around the platform. Then they extended their own threads — red, rigid, digital-organic hybrid strands that moved like code executing in the air.
Salemadon did not panic. He calculated. He had learned from Chapter 6.
One Herald pointed at him. A thread shot forward.
Salemadon snapped his hand outward and the black-white threads surged, intercepting it not with brute force, but with a counter-lattice spiral, bending the red line into a harmless curve that whipped back into its own gate.
The Herald staggered.
Another attacked. Salemadon stomped his heel, sending a shockwave of Pahtem into the platform, splitting his threads into 12 tactical strands that each targeted a Herald's thread source rather than their bodies.
This was combat by dismantling syntax, not flesh.
The threads wrapped around the red strands and pulled them into light, exposing them. Once exposed, Salemadon whispered a new rhythm — not S-M-D this time, but a counter-tone the Red Thread had taught him unknowingly.
The red strands dissolved like deleted ink.
The gates flickered angrily.
The Heralds retreated backward into the fractures.
Not defeated — interrupted.
The Mark of Choice
The Red Thread detached from Salemadon's chest and coiled upward into the sky again, watching him from above. It hovered there, curling like a question mark written in blood.
Salemadon touched his chest. The armor had not cracked, but a red symbol now glowed beneath his hand, burning through the ceremonial plating and embedding into his spirit, not his body.
A mark. A signature. A contract he had not read but had just signed.
"It marked me," Salemadon said, calm but heavy.
Maweh nodded slowly. "Yes. The Red Thread writes the name of the chosen, but only the chosen can read it. Others only see red."
Salemadon closed his eyes. Threads whispered around him like pages turning. The mark translated itself in his mind:
"First Carrier of the Pahtem Echo."
His eyes snapped open.
Maweh stepped forward. Not too close. Just enough for her presence to feel like guidance, not rescue.
"What happens now?" he asked.
"The Redaction will hunt you with purpose," she replied. "And the thread will test you again, but not to harm — to confirm."
"And you?" he asked. "Will you help me?"
Maweh turned her head slightly. Her voice stayed composed, but softened in a way Salemadon could not yet interpret:
"I do not pull your threads for you, Salemadon. But I will make sure you never stand where there are none."
A cryptic answer. But not a cold one.
The Echo Spreads
Far below, in Bali-Prime, villagers looked upward at the sky, sensing a disturbance without knowing the shape. Elders felt a vibration in their bones. Hunters paused mid-step. Market sellers blinked as if forgetting something important but not knowing what.
A first had happened above them.
The universe now had a new sound.
And the Redaction knew its frequency.
But so did Salemadon.
Chapter Close
The skies sealed into stillness again. The platform dimmed. Threads of Pahtem returned to their slow cosmic dance around him. The chrome city steadied. Waterfalls obeyed gravity once more.
But one thread remained above, red and elegant, swaying like a pendulum over destiny's unwritten hours.
Salemadon looked up at it.
He did not know Maweh was destined to become his Queen-Mother guide later.
He did not know this mark would change his battles forever.
He only knew one thing now:
He had been chosen by a force older than silence, and louder than war.
And Chapter 7 had just begun writing back.
"Some threads are meant to be touched. Others are meant to bleed. Salemadon will learn the difference."