# Chapter 3: Echoes of the Thirteenth Strand

The Threshold was humming a low, jagged note that tasted of copper and ozone. 

Liora Voss pressed her left hand against the cold brass of the Core Drive-Spindle, her palm aperture pulsing a violent, rhythmic violet. The indigo stain had climbed past her elbow now, mapping its way toward her shoulder in a bruise-colored web that mirrored the circuitry of the Loom itself. Her vision blurred, the edges of the chamber fraying into red-rimmed shadows—ocular hemorrhaging, another gift from the Thirteenth Strand.

"Bind or break," she whispered, the words a dry rasp against her teeth.

She didn't wait for the tremors in her hands to subside. She couldn't. Below her, through the translucent floor-plates of the Threshold, the Weaving Chamber glowed with a sickly, iridescent light. She could feel Thorne there, bolted into the restraint chair, his life-sign a heavy, rhythmic thrumming at the back of her skull. They were tethered by more than just protocol now; the Thirteenth Strand had stitched them into a singular, agonizing circuit.

The Dirty Circuit was screaming. To anyone else, the machine remained a silent Goliath of stone and wire, but to Liora, it was a starving animal. 

She reached into the air, her fingers twitching, tracing the invisible ley-lines that connected the Spindle to the deeper mechanisms. She found the snag—a jagged, oily frequency that refused to sit flush with the Loom’s primary weave. It was the Thirteenth, a rogue thread of such density that it threatened to snap the surrounding strands of reality.

"Thorne," she gritted out, her voice echoing in the hollow space of the Spindle. "I’m opening the shunt. Anchor me. Don't let your mind wander into the static."

Through the link, she felt his response—not words, but a predatory surge of focus. Thorne’s presence felt like scorched earth and sharpened iron. He was vibrating at the same frequency as the Loom, his organs singing in harmony with the gears. He was no longer just a prisoner; he was the weight that kept her from drifting away into the indigo void.

*Hold,* he seemed to growl through the shared space of their minds. *I have the slack.*

Liora plunged her violet-pulsing palm into the primary interface. 

The world tilted. Gravity didn't just fail; it became subjective. For a second, Liora felt as if she were falling upward toward the High Observation Gallery, her boots losing purchase on the metal grate. The air thickened into the consistency of water, shimmering with indigo contagion. This was the environmental bleed—the Thirteenth Strand was eating the physical laws of the room.

"The red thread whispers betrayal," she muttered, her eyes tracking a phantom strand of crimson that flickered and died in the air. "Too much tension on the southern axis. Bind-bind-bind it now." 

She obsessively repeated the command, her mind reeling. She could see the Loom’s intent now, through the Thirteenth’s backdoor—a vast, cold consciousness that viewed human souls as nothing more than raw wool to be carded and spun. 

*Li...ora...*

The voice didn't come from the link with Thorne. It was deeper. It was the machine.

She ignored it, focusing instead on the frayed ends of the soul-link she shared with the man below. She began to weave, her hands moving in the intricate, practiced patterns of a master binder. She pulled the rogue indigo energy into herself, using her own body as a transformer, then threw it down the link toward Thorne. 

Below, in the Weaving Chamber, Thorne’s body arched in the restraint chair. Liora felt his agony as if it were her own—a sharp, shearing pain in the marrow. But he didn't snap. He took the energy, grounded it, and reflected it back into the heart of the Loom. 

The Dirty Circuit groaned, a mechanical heave that shook the entire Conclave. The violent violet light in Liora’s palm dimmed to a steady, manageable glow. The gravity-shift corrected itself, her boots slamming back onto the floor-plates with a heavy thud.

The stabilization was temporary, a crude patch on a bursting dam, but it was a payment made. The debt to the machine was acknowledged.

"A minor snag," Liora lied to the empty air, though her breath came in ragged, wet hitches. 

"Is it?" 

The voice crackled through the overhead comms, thin and brittle. Liora looked up, squinting through the blood in her eyes toward the High Observation Gallery. Elder Maros stood there, a silhouette against the flickering gaslights, leaning heavily on his bone-white cane. Even from this distance, she could imagine the murky indigo cataracts Clouding his gaze.

"Elder," she said, her voice regaining its tactical edge. "The frequency is neutralized. The circuit holds."

"It holds by a fraying hair, Weaver Voss," Maros replied. The sound of his cane thudding against the stone floor echoed down to her—*thump, thump, thump*—a beat of desperate uncertainty. "The Purists are at the gates of the Inner Sanctum. They speak of infection. They speak of a purge. They don't see a stabilized machine; they see a girl turning into a monster."

"Let them watch the weave or it'll unravel us both," Liora snapped, her fingers snapping an invisible thread at her side. "I am the only thing keeping the Indigo Contagion from turning this entire mountain into a memory. If they breach the lockdown, the resonance will kill everyone within five miles."

"I have bought you time," Maros said, his tone shifting into that manipulative, paternal cadence that made Liora’s skin crawl. "But I need proof of stability. I need to see that you haven't lost the boy to the machine. The Conclave requires an anchor, not a corpse."

"Thorne is... functional," Liora said, glancing down toward the chamber. 

She could sense Thorne’s mind retreating back into its shell. He was hiding something. In the heat of the resonance, she had felt a second current beneath his defiance—a secret conversation. The Loom wasn't just screaming at him; it was speaking. And Thorne was listening. 

"Keep your Purists at bay, Maros," Liora commanded, her tone final. "Or I'll let the Thirteenth Strand show them exactly what heresy looks like."

She cut the comms link. 

The silence that followed was worse than the mechanical roar. It was a silence filled with the smell of lanolin and the acrid tang of dye. Liora reached up, her fingers moving to her hair, unconsciously beginning to braid a stray lock of dark hair. Her hands were still trembling. 

The integration was at twenty-five percent. She had survived the first true resonance, but the cost was etched into her very cells. The indigo staining was no longer just a mark; it felt like a second skin, a layer of cold, synthetic nerves that hummed when the Loom hummed. 

She moved to the edge of the Threshold, looking down into the Weaving Chamber. Thorne was slumped in the chair, his chest heaving. The ink-blood etchings on his skin were glowing with a dull, subterranean light. 

*He heard it too,* she thought. *The voice in the static.*

She reached out through the mental link, a deliberate, charged touch. *Thorne. Tell me you’re still there.*

Thorne lifted his head. His eyes, usually sharp and predatory, were clouded with a depth she didn't recognize. He looked at her—not at the Threshold where she stood, but directly into the core of her mind.

"I'm here, Weaver," his voice whispered in her head, rough and laced with a terrifying kind of awe. "But the Loom... it isn't a machine, Liora. It’s a map. And we’re just the ink."

"Don't give into the metaphor, Thorne. It’s a tool. We bind it, or it breaks us."

"You can't bind what wants to be fed," he replied. 

Liora felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Core's temperature. She thought of her parents—the way their threads had simply... dissolved. The memory was a wound that never scabbed over, a constant reminder that the Binding Thread was as merciless as it was essential. She had spent ten years trying to fix every connection, trying to ensure that no one else would ever unbind in front of her. 

And now, she was tethering herself to a man who seemed to be falling in love with the abyss.

**SCENE A: The Residual Echo**

Liora stood on the Threshold long after the comms went dead, her gaze fixed on the churning indigo mists that had settled in the corners of the chamber. The "Dirty Circuit" was quiet for the moment, but it was the silence of a predator digesting a meal. She could feel the Thirteenth Strand pulsing within her left arm—not a heartbeat, but a rhythmic scraping, like a needle being dragged across a slate. Every time she breathed, the air felt thick, charged with the Loom’s static. 

She reached out blindly, her fingers tracing the air where the ley-lines should have been straight. They weren't. They were warped, bending toward the Spindle as if the machine were a gravity well for reality itself. Her ocular hemorrhaging had begun to settle, the red wash in her vision receding into a persistent, violet-tinted peripheral blur. She felt more than just exhaustion; she felt hollowed out, a spool that had been wound too tight and then suddenly stripped.

The physical habit began before she realized it. Her fingers found a loose lock of hair near her temple and began the rhythmic, three-strand crossover of a tight braid. It was the only way she knew to ground herself when the world started to fray. She thought of her parents—the smell of the old weaving room, the way her father’s hands had moved with a grace she had spent her life trying to mimic. They hadn’t been heretics. They had been loyalists to the primary weave, believers in the stability of the Great Loom. And the machine had unraveled them anyway.

"I won't let it happen again," she whispered, her fingers tugging the braid tight. "I'll bind every damn gear in this mountain if I have to."

But the Thirteenth Strand was different. It wasn't a thread you could weave into a pattern; it was the space between the threads, a void that demanded to be bridged. It was hungry. She looked at her arm, at the mid-bicep where the indigo stain ended in a jagged, violent line. It looked like an infection, a rot that the Purists would happily cut out of her along with her heart. They didn't understand that the "infection" was the only thing holding the Conclave together. Without her link to Thorne, the resonance she had just channeled would have shattered the foundations of the mountain.

She felt a phantom tug at the back of her mind—Thorne. He was still connected to her, his biological stability dependent on her own. She was his anchor, but after what just happened, she felt like an anchor made of salt. The weight of his presence was heavier now, more complex. He wasn't just a sacrificial prisoner anymore; he was becoming the Loom’s favorite instrument, and that terrified her more than the Purist mobilization.

**SCENE B: The Tension Below**

Liora descended the spiral stairs to the Weaving Chamber, her boots metallic on the stairs, ringing out like a warning. The guards stood at the entrance—Archival Wardens now, their positions changed from protectors to jailers. They didn't look at her; they looked at her arm. One of them made a sign against the Dark, a primitive gesture of warding that made Liora’s lip curl.

"Step aside," she commanded, her voice like a whip.

"The Elder said no one goes in," the younger guard stammered, his eyes wide with evangelical terror. "He said the contagion is at its peak."

"The contagion is me," Liora said, stepping into his personal space. She didn't touch him—she never touched anyone casually—but the proximity was enough. She could smell the fear on him, metallic and sour. "If you want the Loom to stop screaming, you let me through. Or would you prefer to try and bind the Thirteenth Strand yourself?"

The guard stepped back, his hand trembling on the hilt of his weapon. Liora walked past him without a second glance.

Inside the chamber, the air was cold. Thorne was still slumped in the restraint chair, but his eyes were open. He was watching the patterns of indigo frost that had begun to form on the brass joints of the machine.

"You took your time," he said. His voice was different—resonant, as if he were speaking through a hollow pipe.

"I had to deal with Maros," Liora said, stopping several feet away. She traced an invisible line between them. "How do you feel?"

"Like I've been flayed and put back together with copper wire," Thorne replied. He looked up at her, a predatory smirk touching his lips despite his obvious pain. "But I can hear it, Liora. Even now. It’s not a hum anymore. It’s a pulse."

"It's a malfunction," she snapped. "Don't get confused. The Loom is a machine, and you are the anchor. If you start listening to 'voices', you're going to lose your grip on reality, and then we both unravel."

"You talk about the weave like it's a cage," Thorne said, his voice dropping to a low growl. "But I felt it during the shunt. The freedom of the fray. You're so afraid of the threads breaking that you can't see what's being built in their place."

"Nothing is being built! My parents died because of thoughts like that!" Liora's voice rose, her fingers snapping a phantom thread between her thumb and forefinger. She repeated under her breath: "Bind-bind-bind it now."

Thorne leaned forward as much as the restraints would allow. "Your parents were trying to fix a broken world with the same tools that broke it. We have the Thirteenth now. It’s a door, Liora. Not a snag."

"It's a death sentence if we don't control it," she said, her voice dropping back into a cold, tactical clip. "Maros is losing his grip on the Purists. They'll be here by morning. If we aren't fully integrated by then—if the Dirty Circuit isn't locked down—they'll kill us both and let the Loom burn."

**SCENE C: The Loom’s Shadow**

Liora spent the next hours in the shadow of the Spindle, the transition between day and night marked only by the shifting hues of the indigo mists. The lockdown was total. Food was delivered through a slot in the heavy iron doors, untouched by the Junior Binders who whispered prayers in the halls. They viewed her as a martyr or a monster, and Liora didn't care which, so long as they stayed out of her way.

The gravity shifts had become more frequent. Books slid off shelves in the observation room; water pulled toward the ceiling in shimmering, violet globules. The environmental degradation was spreading, the indigo contagion eating at the very masonry of the Conclave. Liora watched a stone pillar slowly develop a network of violet cracks, the minerals being replaced by something that hummed.

She checked the link with Thorne every thirty minutes. Each time, she felt him deeper in the static, his thoughts becoming more alien, more entwined with the machine’s sentient intent. He was paying the price for her biological stability, absorbing the tremors that should have been hers. It was a debt she couldn't pay yet, an open loop that gnawed at her.

"I'll find a way to sever the link without killing us," she promised the empty room. "I'll fix this connection."

But as she looked at her arm, she saw the indigo stains had begun to move, the veins pulsing in a slow, hypnotic wave. She wasn't fixing the connection. She was becoming part of it. The lanolin and indigo scent of her clothes seemed to have soaked into her skin, a permanent reminder of her trade—and her curse.

She thought of Rennar, her brother. He had been the lucky one, the one with the severed thread who had escaped the Conclave's pull. Or perhaps he was the unluckiest of all, wandering the world without a tether. She reached out with her mind, searching for that familiar, broken frequency, but there was only the roar of the Thirteenth Strand.

The Loom was speaking again. Not in words, but in requirements. It needed more resonance. It needed the anchor to be deeper.

Liora froze, her hand hovering over her stained bicep as the weight of the mountain seemed to press down on her soul. She snapped an invisible thread, staring at her stained arm as a new whisper—not hers, not Thorne's—echoes from the Loom: "Anchor deeper, or all frays."