Page 140 of The Threads Between

“You can . . . ” My voice cracked. “You're . . . ”

“A Mender,” she said gently. “Nothing remarkable, I'm afraid.”

Nothing remarkable. The words hit harder than the magic.

She studied me for another moment, eyes softening further. “Do you have someone you can call?”

I shook my head, because the only person I wanted was standing in a century that had closed behind me like a door.

Her mouth tightened, sympathy flickering across her face. “Come on,” she said quietly. “You shouldn't be out here alone in a panic.”

She offered her arm, not tentative, not unsure. The gesture of someone accustomed to helping strangers because it was simply what decent people did. Because women like her had been allowed to exist long enough for kindness to become ordinary.

She guided me down the street and into a small coffee shop that smelled of roasted beans and warm sugar, a scent so modern, so painfully normal, it made my throat close again. No one stared at my clothes. No one recoiled.

A young woman behind the counter flicked her fingers and a ribbon of gold light warmed the milk in a metal pitcher without ever touching a flame. The movement was so casual it might as well have been breathing. I watched with the stunned focus of someone witnessing a miracle no one else considered remarkable.

A newspaper sat on the counter. The date read February 17, 2026.

She led me to a seat next to the window and pressed a cup into my hands, ceramic, warm, grounding, and waited until the shaking eased enough that I could hold it without spilling.

“Thank you,” I said. “For your kindness.” I took a slow sip of the warm coffee, trying to gather the right words to not appear mad. “Can you tell me about Weavers? Tell me their history.”

She spoke of magic the way one might speak of weather. Of infrastructure. Of something woven so deeply into daily life that its absence would be more remarkable than its presence. The hunts. The Unravelings. The imprisonments. The disappearances. Entire lineages wiped out under laws written by men who feared what they could not control.

My chest tightened. That part, at least, had not changed.

What had changed was the ending.

“They nearly succeeded,” she said quietly. “In the late nineteenth century. There was an attempted eradication. But it failed.”

Failed. The word struck like something physical.

It was surreal sitting here, listening to this modern woman speak calmly about a war that, to me, had ended only moments ago. One breath I had been in August's arms, watching him sever the corruption once and for all. The next I was here, fluorescent lights, polished tables, the low hiss of an espresso machine. My hands still remembered the weight of him. Still remembered letting go.

“A Weaver couple stopped it,” she continued. “Exceptionally powerful, by all accounts. Restoration and threadbreaking magic beyond anything documented.” A small, uncertain smile. “A love story of sorts. Two people from different worlds fall in love, and that love saves the Weavers. History tends to exaggerate, though. Everyone loves a love story.”

Exaggerate. If anything, they had not said enough.

My body remembered the impossible strain of holding power so vast, the way reality itself had fought me, the way the air had tasted like metal and lightning as I forced threads back into place. The burning. The dissolving. August's hands finding my face, his voice breaking on my name.

“They saved them,” the woman continued softly, misreading my silence as interest rather than grief. “That much is consistent. The Weaver communities that survive today trace their lineage to that intervention.”

Saved. The word hollowed something inside me. I had saved them. But not alone.

My hand drifted to my sternum before I could stop it. The bond still lingered there, thinned to a filament, distant as starlight, but alive. Alive because some part of him had refused to let me vanish entirely. Alive because he had cut me free instead of letting me burn.

He would still be there. Still breathing. Still walking beneath the same sky I had left behind. Carrying the echo of a bond that would never resolve, never fade, never become memory because it was still alive. He would spend the rest of his life knowing I existed. Knowing I was somewhere beyond his reach.

My throat burned.

“And the hunters?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. My ribs still ached where Constance's knife had pressed. “What happened to them?”

She studied me for a moment, not suspicious, just thoughtful. Perhaps she assumed I was a history student. Perhaps she simply didn't care.

“It wasn't clean,” she said finally. “Some laid down their weapons the night the Unraveler fell. Others . . . ” She turned her cup in her hands. “Others took years to stop. Ambushes in villages. Murders in the night. Men who believed they were righteous, even after the laws changed.”

I thought of Morrison. Of the hunters at the Iron Spire. Of all the men who had looked at Weavers and seen monsters instead of women.