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."

But she knew better. As the thrum synchronized their pulses—hers, Thorne’s, and the machine’s—the Thirteenth Strand whispered a name that chilled her to the core—her own, yet twisted: *Voss?*—coiling tighter around the spindle like a noose from the void.