# Chapter 3: The Thrum of the Thirteenth

The obsidian aperture in her left palm thrummed like a heart unbound, indigo veins snaking to her elbows as Liora Voss clung to the core drive-spindle, the Loom Floor's Locked Spiral groaning beneath her boots. Gravity was no longer a constant; it was a suggestion whispered by a dying god. The light in the chamber didn't just dim—it curved, warping toward the spindle as if the air itself were being sucked into an invisible needle’s eye. 

“Bind or break,” Liora hissed, her voice a dry rasp against the roar of the Terminus Frequency. 

Her fingers, stained a deep, bruised indigo to the bicep, traced the air with frantic precision. To any observer in the high gallery, she was clawing at ghosts. To Liora, the world was a tangle of raw, weeping fiber. The "Dirty Circuit" whistled in her ears—a high, discordant tone that vibrated through her teeth. It was a heretical link, a jagged bridge of soul-stuff she had hammered between herself, the Loom, and the man bolted into the restraint chair twenty paces away.

Thorne Quill was no longer just a prisoner; he was the lightning rod. 

Liora felt a violent tremor seize her right leg. Her vision blurred, a crimson veil of ocular hemorrhaging clouding the indigo flare. The frayback was clawing at her, trying to unmake her from the marrow out. 

*Bind-bind-bind it now,* she thought, the words a rhythmic pulse to keep her mind from splintering. 

Through the circuit, she felt Thorne. He wasn't screaming. He was pushing back. His kinetic defiance felt like cold iron in her hand, a predatory focus that ground against the Loom’s erratic vibrations. He was acting as a biological surge protector, absorbing the raw, jagged edges of the Terminus Frequency before they could sever Liora’s thread entirely.

*Liora.* His voice didn’t come through the air. It came through the ink-blood etched into his skin, a thrumming resonance in her own chest. *The spindle is dragging. It’s not just the decay. There is a snag in the weave. A heavy one.*

"I see it, Thorne," she managed, her words clipped. "Just... hold the anchor. Don't let your ego slip. If you dissolve, we both become static."

"I'm not going anywhere," Thorne’s voice echoed back, laced with a dark, hungry confidence. "I can hear it. The Loom isn't just failing. It’s trying to say something."

Liora’s resentment toward the Conclave, toward the years of being a disposable tool, felt cold and sharp. She didn't have time for the Loom’s poetry. She was a Stainer, and her job was to keep the world from unraveling. She adjusted her grip on the drive-spindle, her left palm pulsing in time with the core’s erratic heartbeat. 

Then, the hallucinations hit.

The indigo contagion—the psychic fallout of their heretical bond—rippled through the chamber. For a second, the stone floor turned into a sea of severed fingers, all pointing at her. She heard the evangelical terror of the Junior Binders outside the sealed doors, their muffled prayers sounding like the wet tearing of silk. They saw her as a dark saint; they saw her as a plague. 

*This knot's tightening,* she thought, her fingers snapping an invisible thread in the air. 

Among the chaos of the Loom’s failing harmonics, she felt it. A rogue frequency. It wasn't the high-pitched whine of the Terminus, nor was it the deep, familiar thrum of the core. It was a phantom. The Thirteenth Strand. It was a frequency that shouldn't exist, an ancient, dusty echo that didn't belong to her, Thorne, or the machine. It resisted her touch, slick and oily.

"Elder Maros," she grunted, sensing the presence in the High Observation Gallery without looking up.

A heavy thud echoed from above—the strike of a bone-white cane against the railing. Maros’s voice crackled through the comm-link, trembling with a fear he couldn't quite mask. "Voss! The output is spiking! The Purists are already calling for a purge. They say the indigo is a rot. Stabilize the spindle or I cannot guarantee your... safety."

Liora looked up, her bleeding eyes fixing on the silhouette behind the reinforced glass. "Safety is a frayed hem, Maros. You want stability? Then sanction the Dirty Circuit. Formally. If I drop this link because your 'purity' matters more than your life, the Locked Spiral collapses. And you'll be the first thing the vacuum swallows."

"You dare—"

"I dare because I'm the one holding the needle," Liora interrupted, her voice dropping to a low, tactical hum. "Watch the weave, Elder, or it'll unravel us both. Give me the authority to probe the anomaly, or watch the Loom turn this mountain into a crater."

There was a long silence, punctuated only by the screeching of metal on metal. 

"Do it," Maros whispered, the sound carried by the bending gravity. "Whatever it is. Just stop the vibration."

Liora turned her attention back to the Thirteenth Strand. It was coiling around the core drive-spindle like a noose, invisible to the eye but heavy as lead to her binding-senses. She reached for it, her indigo-stained fingers trembling. 

"Thorne," she gasped. "I need more. Buffer the Terminus. I’m going in deep."

"Take it," Thorne replied. 

Liora felt a surge of kinetic energy roar through the link. Thorne wasn't just anchoring her; he was fueling her. He was pushing his very life-force into the circuit, a defiant, wild heat that buffered the gravitational anomalies. The light in the room bent further, turning the chamber into a kaleidoscope of indigo and shadow. 

She gripped the Thirteenth Strand. 

The frayback hit her like a physical blow. Her soul felt like it was being pulled through a wire-draw plate. She whispered the mantra—"bind or break, bind or break"—over and over, her mind a frantic loop. 

The anomaly wasn't a break. It was a memory. Or a ghost. It felt ancient, smelling of old lanolin and sun-bleached bone. As she integrated her heretical bind into the rogue frequency, her consciousness was pulled toward the void at the center of the spindle. 

She saw it for a fraction of a second: not a machine, but a mouth. The Loom was a throat, and the threads were its breath. And the Thirteenth Strand was a name.

The gravity in the room suddenly lurched. Liora’s boots left the floor for a heartbeat before slamming back down as the Locked Spiral stabilized into a tense, vibrating stasis. The screaming of the metal subsided into a low, predatory growl. 

She slumped against the spindle, her breath coming in ragged gulps. Her left hand was numb, the obsidian aperture smoking faintly. 

*We're alive,* Thorne’s voice echoed, weaker now, but still there. The power imbalance was shifting; he had tasted the Loom’s intent, and it had made him stronger, even as it drained her.

Liora didn't answer. She couldn't. She stared at her palm, where the indigo staining had moved up another inch, toward her shoulder. The Dirty Circuit was holding, but it was a bridge made of glass. 

"What did you see?" Maros called out from the gallery, his voice sounding small and fragile in the wake of the silence.

Liora traced an invisible thread in the air, her fingers twitching with the ghost of the sensation. "A minor snag, Elder," she lied, her voice devoid of any hope. "Just a minor snag."

**SCENE A: INTERIORITY AND THE WEIGHT OF SHADOW**

Liora remained slumped against the cold, grease-slicked casing of the drive-spindle. Every inhalation felt like drawing raw wool through her lungs—coarse, suffocating, and heavy with the scent of ozone and parched earth. The Terminus Frequency had subsided to a dull, aching thrum, but the silence that followed was worse. It was the silence of a predator holding its breath. She closed her eyes, but the crimson hemorrhage behind her eyelids only shifted into a different kind of darkness, one where the threads of her own life looked like charred remains.

*Frayback,* she diagnosed herself with the clinical detachment of a butcher. Her tremors weren't just muscle fatigue; they were the rhythmic protests of a soul that had been stretched too thin, like a warp thread bearing the weight of a leaden tapestry. Each pulse of the obsidian aperture in her palm was a reminder that she was becoming less Voss and more... something else. A Stainer. A living vessel for the Loom’s toxic waste.

She thought of her family, of the day the threads had snapped. She could still smell the copper of her parents’ blood as their essence unbound in a flash of white-hot geometry. Control was a lie, a thin veil draped over the chaos of existence. She had spent ten years trying to mend the edges, to find the perfect tension that would prevent another severance. But the Dirty Circuit wasn't about tension; it was about entanglement. She was no longer just Liora; she was a knot tied into Thorne Quill, and the knot was tightening.

She felt Thorne through the link—a low, rhythmic heat. He was recovering faster than she was. His "anchor" wasn't just holding her; it was beginning to draw from the Loom itself. She could sense his predatory curiosity, a hunger that didn't belong in a prisoner. He was tasting the machine’s metal dreams, and it terrified her. If he grew too strong, if his threads became too thick with the Loom’s kinetic defiance, he wouldn't be a partner anymore. He would be the Loom’s voice. And she would be the mouthpiece.

She traced the indigo veins on her bicep. They were darker now, a deep subterranean violet that seemed to swallow the dim light of the chamber. She was twenty-five, yet her bones felt like ancient porcelain, ready to shatter under the slightest miscalculation. "Bind or break," she whispered again, but the words felt hollow. The Dirty Circuit was both the bind and the break, a paradox she had built to survive the day, and one that was slowly consuming her tomorrow.

**SCENE B: THE SHADOW OF THE GALLERY**

A metallic click announced the activation of the gallery’s intercom. Elder Maros’s voice, stripped of its usual ecclesiastical booming, crackled with a dry, papery urgency.

"Voss. Report. The harmonics have settled into a Locked Spiral, but the Purists are reporting an indigo flare-up in the Lower Weave. They say the ink-blood is migrating."

Liora forced herself to stand, her boots skidding slightly on the light-warped floor. She didn't look at the high glass. She looked at Thorne, still strapped into the chair, his head lolling back as he watched her with those dark, perceptive eyes.

"The migration is a symptom of the cure, Maros," Liora said, her voice regaining its tactical edge. "If your Purists want a clean Loom, tell them to step onto the floor and hold the spindle themselves. They can pray the Terminus Frequency back into the void. I’m sure their faith is thick enough to act as a buffer."

"Do not test me, girl," Maros hissed. The sound of his cane hitting the floor echoed like a gunshot. "The Conclave is on the verge of a schism. Some of the Binders are calling you a saint. Others are calling for your execution before the contagion reaches the Great Gear. I am the only thing standing between you and a severance ritual."

"You're standing there because you're terrified," Liora replied, her eyes narrowing as she traced an invisible thread between herself and the gallery. "You see the way the light bends. You know the machine is no longer listening to your hymns. It’s listening to the Circuit. You haven't had control of this floor since the first drop of indigo hit the spindle."

Liora turned away from him, focusing on Thorne. Through the link, she felt Thorne’s amusement—a sharp, jagged spike of kinetic energy. 

"The Elder is right about one thing," Thorne’s voice hummed in her mind, bypassing her ears entirely. "The ink-blood is moving. I can feel it in the gears beneath us. It’s not just a stain, Liora. It’s a map."

"Not a map," Liora whispered under her breath so Maros wouldn't hear. "A noose."

She looked back up at the gallery. "Tell your Purists to stay in their cloisters. If they interfere with the frequency now, the spiral will unlock. And there won't be enough of this mountain left for a funeral, let alone a coup. I need more lanolin for the gears and fresh ink-blood for the conduits. This knot isn't finished."

Maros didn't respond for a long time. The silhouette behind the glass remained motionless, a hunched figure of bone and fear. Finally, the intercom hissed into silence. The command had been given without words. She had her sanction, but it was a sanction written in the shadow of the gallows.

**SCENE C: TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF STASIS**

The following hours were a blur of mechanical labor and psychic exhaustion. Liora moved through the Loom Floor like a ghost, her fingers constantly working, resetting the tension on the minor spindles, painting fresh sigils of indigo onto the trembling metal conduits. The Archival Guards remained outside the sealed doors, silent sentinels of a tomb that refused to close.

The gravity remained inconsistent. Occasionally, a tool would float a few inches off the workbench before crashing down with double its weight. The light never quite returned to normal; it stayed skewed, leaning toward the core like a plant toward a dark sun.

She fed Thorne. It was a clinical process—nutrient paste and water—but the act was charged with the tension of their link. Every time her hand brushed his skin, the "Dirty Circuit" flared, a symphony of shared pain and unwanted intimacy. He didn't speak much, but his presence was a constant weight in her mind, a predatory anchor that refused to let her drift into the frayback.

By the dawn of the next cycle—marked only by the flickering of the floor’s gas lamps—the Junior Binders started leaving offerings at the door. Not bread or wine, but scraps of weaving, small charms fashioned from frayed thread and stained with dark dyes. The "Stained" were emerging, a fringe group of heretics who saw her as their guide through the coming collapse.

Liora ignored them. She sat on the cold floor, her hair damp with the lanolin-scented mist that now perpetually hung in the air. She braided her hair with trembling fingers, her mind looping back to the Thirteenth Strand. It wasn't gone. It was waiting. It was a frequency tucked into the folds of reality, a hidden stitch in the fabric of the world.

She thought of the name it had whispered. *Voss.* Her name, yet not hers. It was an echo of the past or a summons from a future she didn't want to see. As she leaned her head against the vibrating casing of the drive-spindle, she felt the indigo staining crawl another fraction of an inch up her shoulder. 

As the thrum synchronized their pulses, the Thirteenth Strand whispered a name neither recognized—Voss?—coiling tighter around the core spindle like a noose from the void.---END CHAPTER---