Page 143 of The Threads Between

Joy hit first. Bright and unbearable, sharp as glass. Then grief crashed into it, heavier, deeper, an undertow that dragged everything down with it. Because she was here. Because she was safe. Because I had missed every scraped knee, every birthday, every ordinary moment that now lived only in photographs on a wall.

"I should go to them," I whispered hoarsely. "I should⁠—"

But the thought stopped there. I had no idea where they were. No address. No number. No sense of what this version of my life even looked like. For all I knew, I was meant to be somewhere else entirely, this flat just a place I visited. The person whose memories filled these walls was me and not me at the same time.

Tomorrow, I told myself, holding the word steady. Tomorrow I'll find them.

Because if I saw them now, if I heard their voices, felt their arms around me, I was not certain I would survive it.

Right now, there was only one thing I needed to know.

August.

I sank to the floor surrounded by open books and drifting pages, and the hours dissolved around me, soft and irretrievable. The lamp burned low, then lower, casting long shadows across walls I no longer saw. My back ached from hunching. My fingers grew clumsy with exhaustion. Ink smudged my skin where I had turned pages too quickly, too desperately.

Treaties on post-eradication reform. Founding charters. Personal accounts written decades after the fact by people who had not heard the screaming threads, had not seen me tearing apart at the seams. I read until the words swam and blurred, until I could no longer tell if the ache behind my eyes was exhaustion or weeping.

Ysella's name appeared again and again. Not buried in footnotes or passing mentions, but in headings. Titles. Entire chapters devoted to her work.

Something loosened in my chest.

I had brought her back.

She was as clear in my memory as if she stood before me, kind eyes, curly grey hair. Alive. Not fading into nothing. Alive long enough to build something that lasted.

Page after page traced the framework of the world outside my window: laws protecting magical practice, governance structured around Weaver leadership, systems designed not to hide power but to encourage it. Entire institutions grown from foundations she had laid with hands I had watched dissolve into darkness.

She had not simply survived. She had remade everything.

The world I now lived in bore her fingerprints everywhere, in policy, in culture, in the quiet assumption that women with power were not aberrations but authorities. And somewhere beneath all of it, invisible but essential, was the moment I had reached into the void and refused to let her go.

But it was not Ysella's name I was searching for.

I turned another page. Another. The paper whispered beneath my fingers like something alive, and outside the window the darkness began to thin at its edges, the first pale suggestion of dawn creeping across the sky.

And then I saw it.

Hawthorne.

The name stopped my heart.

I leaned closer, hands shaking so badly the page blurred. The passage was dry, academic, the tone of a historian who had never known the cold of that drawing room, never smelled the blood, never watched a man screaming as corruption was cut from his soul.

Elias Hawthorne, known in historical accounts as the Unraveler, was the primary architect of the attempted Weaver eradication from 1865-1893. His campaign resulted in the deaths of hundreds of practitioners before he was stopped by a coalition of surviving Weavers. Contemporary accounts describe him as 'stripped of his power and left to face the weight of his crimes.' He died in 1897 at the family estate in Oxford, cared for in his final years by his wife, Elowen, who had been restored during the events that ended his campaign. Accounts suggest he never recovered from the sudden clarity of what he had done.

I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding.

Elias had lived four more years. Four years of confronting every life he had ended, every thread he had dissolved.

I had brought Elowen back. Not just reached for her thread in the chaos of the burning but actually brought her back. And Elowen had stayed with him. Had cared for the man who had twisted her magic into a weapon because she remembered who he had been before. Because she understood that the corruption had been her creation, however accidental.

I did not know if that was strength or forgiveness or something beyond either. Perhaps all three.

August had gotten his mother back.

The thought cracked something open inside me. All those years he had believed her gone. All those times his father had used her memory as a weapon against him. And I had given her back to him, given him decades with the mother he had lost at five years old.

Tears spilled down my cheeks before I could stop them. Not grief this time. Something fiercer. Triumph and heartbreak woven together so tightly I could not tell where one ended and the other began.