Page 131 of The Threads Between

Lily saw it too. Her understanding hit me a heartbeat later.

Elowen hadn't just created the Unraveling. She had poured herself into it. And when she burned out trying to take it back, part of her had stayed. Trapped. Watching.

August. Lily's voice in my mind. Soft. Aching. I can reach her. I can reach all of them. But you have to cut them free.

I understood. If I just severed the corruption, if I cut it loose and let it scatter, the threads would be lost forever. The Weavers. My mother. All of them, cast into the void with no one to find them.

But if Lily pulled while I cut. If she gathered the threads as I freed them.

Together, she sent. Now.

I cut. And Lily reached into the void.

The world turned to light.

CHAPTER 36

LILY

In the months since my powers had awakened, I had reached into the void blind. Feeling for threads in the darkness. Pulling back what I could touch but never truly seeing.

I was still learning what I was. Still fumbling with magic I barely understood.

Now, connected to August, channeling through the pendant that centuries from now would find its way to me, I saw. And it was vast.

The void stretched before me like an ocean without end. It wasn't empty but full of threads. Millions of them, scattered like stars across an endless night. Gold and silver and colors I had no names for, all of them drifting, all of them waiting.

The Unraveled.

Never gone. Just lost. Scattered into the darkness with no one to find them, no one to gather them, no one to weave them back into the world they had been torn from.

Until now.

Somewhere far away, my body still knelt on the floor of Elowen's drawing room. My hands still pressed against August's back. The warmth of him, the solid reality of muscle and bone and the man I loved. An anchor to the world I was about to leave behind.

His exhaustion bled into me along with his focus, the razor-sharp concentration of a man cutting corruption away from his father's soul, thread by thread by thread. He trusted me to hold the other end. Trusted me to catch what he freed.

That trust pressed against my ribs like something with edges. Because he didn't know. He still didn't know what I was about to do.

August's power sang through the bond, severance, release, the clean cut of freedom. He was slicing through the corruption, freeing the threads tangled in its grip. And as each one came loose, I felt them.

Lorien's thread brushed against my awareness first, and I nearly sobbed. Lorien, who had untangled my severed threads when I didn't even know what I was. Lorien, who had been captured while I ran, helpless, not knowing how to save her, was here.

I reached for her. Gathered her thread in hands made of light and absence and held on.

More came. A flood of them now, pouring through the gap August was cutting. The Oxford Weavers, the ones he had been forced to Unravel while the corruption controlled him. Their confusion, their fear, their desperate hope. They had been lost for months. They had forgotten what being found felt like.

I gathered them all.

Ysella's thread was older, worn smooth by years of wisdom and sacrifice. She had saved me once. Now I would save her.

I pulled harder.

And then I found Elowen.

August's mother. The woman who had started all of this. Her thread was woven through the very heart of the corruption, not tangled in it like the others but part of it. She had created the Unraveling from her own magic, her own soul. When she burned out trying to take it back, the deepest part of her had stayed behind.

She had been trapped. Watching her husband use her failure to destroy everything she loved.