I thought of Atrius. Thought of the Bloodborn.
Show me something more, Weaver, I asked the goddess.
You are not looking in the right direction, she whispered.
I stopped short.
It was rare that I heard the Weaver’s voice in my sessions. Her voice sounded like little more than a distant echoing breeze. Yet, it drew my entire body still, a chill rising to my skin.
Slowly, I turned around.
Darkness. The same thread, running backwards, extended into mist.
I walked this path.
The mist didn’t dissipate. It just grew thicker, and thicker. Each of my steps grew labored, painful. The thread here was sharper than ever, as if I walked on the polished edge of a blade. My bloody footprints remained perfectly formed in the water behind me.
It was cold, and growing colder, and colder, until my breaths came in little silver puffs, my bare arms covered in goosebumps. The sky had gotten inky dark. Stars surrounded me, so bright and bulging I felt like I could reach out and grab them.
I was now walking uphill, though the surface of the water remained perfectly still. The mist cleared enough to reveal jagged, snow-capped peaks, stained red.
These did not look like the mountains of Alka. It was warm there, and the mountains weren’t tall enough for snow.
No, everything about what I was seeing seemed… foreign. Like I was peering into a world a universe away from my own.
The mountains shifted, encircling me. The stars grew larger. The moon, full and round, slowly rose from beyond the horizon line, so big it stretched across my vision, a shadow falling across it with each step I took.
An eclipse.
Blood slicked my feet now. I was fighting hard to go so deep into the threads. But I had the overwhelming sense that I was seeing something important. I would not turn back.
Another step, and I crested the peak of the mountain. The moon was now a glowing, black circle, monstrously large, unavoidable as an all-seeing eye.
And there, right in the center of that circle, was Atrius.
I recognized him immediately, even from this distance. He was younger, yes, and his back was turned to me, but his presence was unmistakable—even though that, too, was a little different. Brighter, maybe. More hopeful. His hair was a bit shorter, flying out behind him against whips of wind. He had no horns.
Beside him was another man who wore matching armor to his, though more ornate, and a circlet upon a head of silver-streaked, ash-blond hair. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, or see what they were looking at beyond the ridge of stone.
I forged ahead and nearly stumbled—my feet were so bloody now that I slipped on the thread. Frantically, I righted myself. When I lifted my head again, a gasp ripped from my throat.
A goddess stood before them.
She was beautiful—more than beautiful. She was a natural phenomenon, something so entrancing, so otherworldly, that her mere existence left you changed. Her eyes were pits of star-speckled darkness, her hair long tendrils of ebony ink, her body dips and curves of silver.
My heart beat faster.
The fear set in slowly at first, sneaking in beneath the amazement until suddenly, it was as strong as the jaws of a python around a rat. It constricted, tighter, tighter.
The goddess’s face was as big as the moon. She smiled, blood dripping from her lips, but it was a horrible, furious expression—the last thing one sees before death.
I was so afraid I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The thread cut deep into my feet, so deep I swore it touched my bones. I couldn’t move, though.
This was dangerous, to be stuck in a vision. Dangerous to fall from a thread. A voice screamed this at me in the back of my head, but my body wouldn’t move.
I just stood there as the goddess rose into the sky, laughing down at us with cruel anger. A wave of pain, of betrayal, of grief rolled over me, so strong it left me gasping for air.
In the distance, Atrius’s companion was nothing but black blood in the snow, and Atrius was on his knees beside him, bowed and broken.
Despite the distance, I still heard his voice so clearly, cracking with desperation: Wake up, my prince, he begged. Wake up. Wake up.
“Wake. Up.”
I started awake, and tried to lurch upright on instinct, but couldn’t because a firm grip held my shoulders down. Atrius leaned over me, serious and perhaps just a little bit annoyed. Sweat plastered my clothing to my body. The fire, nearly encroaching on my toes, blazed high, a wall of light that silhouetted Atrius’s form.
“Why did you wake me?” The words came out in heaving gasps.
“I know the signs of a seering gone bad.”