Chapter 3: The Dirty Circuit

Liora slumped against the primary drive-spindle, her sepia-toned vision flickering as obsidian ink leaked from her left palm in sync with Thorne's distant heartbeat. The air of the Loom Floor was thick enough to chew, a heavy soup of ozone and the lanolin oil used to grease the great gears. Every thrum of the machinery vibrated through her spine, but it wasn't the rhythmic, comforting pulse of the Great Loom she’d known since childhood. It was a jagged, arrhythmic rasp. 

The Loom was screaming in a frequency only a Binder could hear. A dead-tone.

Her palm burned. It wasn’t the sharp sting of a needle but the dull, grinding heat of a brand that refused to cool. The ink—her own blood, transmuted by the unsanctified link—meandered in slow, viscous rivulets down her wrist, staining the pristine white of her ritual sleeve. 

*Bind or break,* she whispered, the words a dry husk in her throat. *Bind or break.*

Across the vacuum of the Great Hall, two levels down in the lead-lined Weaving Chamber, she could feel Thorne Quill. He was a tethered weight at the end of a fraying rope. Through the "Dirty Circuit"—that jagged, illicit bridge they had accidentally forged—she didn't just sense him; she occupied him. She felt the bite of the leather restraints against his wrists, the cold sweat pooling at the small of his back, and the predatory stillness of his mind. He wasn't struggling. He was waiting, his consciousness a dark needle probing at the edges of her own.

"Mistress Voss?"

The voice was thin, vibrating with a terror that grated on Liora’s nerves. She didn't look up. She didn't need to. In her sepia-washed world, she saw the Junior Binders as clusters of jittering, pale threads. They stood at the edge of the Drive-Spindle’s platform, their bronze shears half-drawn, eyes wide as they stared at the black ichor weeping from her hand.

"The resonance is... it's wrong," the boy, Kael, stammered. "The indigo is turning. You’re a Stainer, Liora. We saw the thread jump. We saw it turn black."

Liora’s fingers traced an invisible line in the air, a habit born of a thousand hours at the warp-beam. To the Juniors, she was a contagion. To the Loom, she was currently the only thing keeping the Great Drive from shearing its own axle. 

"A minor snag, Kael," she said, her voice clipped, professional, masking the way her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. "The Loom is sensing a structural shift. It requires a deeper anchor. If you wish to help, check the tension on the secondary weft. If not, stay back and keep your shears sheathed. You don't want to see what happens to a thread that's cut while under this much torque."

She turned her gaze back to the spindle. The "rot" was there, hidden behind the brass casings—the structural decay of the Conclave’s eternal machine. The threads of reality it wove were thinning, snapping before they ever reached the world beyond. 

Thorne’s presence surged in her mind, a sudden, violent influx of sensory data. He was tasting her exhaustion, a metallic tang on the back of his tongue. He was watching her through the link, seeing the Loom Floor through her flickering eyes.

*You’re lying to them,* his voice drifted through the mental static, smooth as silk and twice as dangerous. *The machine is dying, Liora. Why try to patch a shroud?*

*Bind-bind-bind,* she thought, shutting him out, focusing on the raw power thrumming through her marrow. 

She reached out and pressed her stained palm directly onto the drive-spindle. 

The contact was an explosion. The obsidian ink acted as a conduit, a bypass for the safety dampeners the Conclave had spent centuries perfecting. Raw, unfiltered energy from the Loom’s core surged through her, using her body as a grounding rod before leaping across the "Dirty Circuit" to Thorne. 

Liora’s back arched. The indigo contagion—the branding mark from their forced Union—crept visibly up her forearm, a jagged vine of violet light. Her vision didn’t just flicker; it fractured. She saw her own memories bleeding away, pouring into the link. She saw her parents, their souls unbinding in that horrific, long-ago ritual, their threads unraveling into grey mist while she watched, helpless. 

"Bind or break!" she shrieked, the words echoing off the vaulted ceiling. 

She channeled the power. She didn't weave it; she forced it, shoving the raw energy into the spindle to stabilize the dead-tone. The low-frequency vibration that had been rattling the floorboards smoothed out, replaced by a high, singing hum that made the Juniors drop to their knees, clutching their ears. 

"Look at her arm!" one of them cried. "The rot is in her!"

"Hold!"

The command thundered from the High Observation Gallery. Elder Maros leaned over the railing, his bone-white cane striking the stone floor with a rhythmic *thud-thud-thud*. His indigo eyes, milky with age but sharp with calculation, locked onto Liora. 

The Archival Guards, who had been leveling their pulse-staves at Liora’s head, hesitated. 

"She is stabilizing the weave," Maros declared, his voice a dry rasp that carried across the chamber. "The Stainer is a tool, and a tool is not heresy until it breaks. Stand down."

Liora’s breathing was ragged. Her lungs felt as though they were filled with glass shards. She could feel Thorne’s amusement through the link—a cold, dark shimmer. He had seen the memory of her parents. He had tasted her deepest wound, the moment she realized that the Binding Thread wasn't just a gift, but a noose.

"Is that what you are, Liora?" Thorne’s voice was a whisper in the back of her brain, intimate and mocking. "A tool for an old man to hold against the dark? You think you can fix this? You’re just adding more knots to a tangled mess."

She ignored him, her fingers twitching as she traced the invisible ley-lines of the Loom’s current state. The dead-tone was gone, but the structural rot remained, a cancer at the heart of the world’s Great Engine. She had hidden it from the Juniors, but she knew Maros saw it. He had decided her "stain" was more useful than her execution. For now.

She reached up, her hand trembling, and began to braid a loose lock of her hair, her fingers moving with frantic, mechanical precision. Her hair was dry, smelling of the indigo dye she’d been steeped in since her novitiate years. 

"The tension is holding," she called out,her voice steadier than she felt. "Kael, check the third-quadrant bobbin. There’s a... a minor snag in the flow. Clear it."

The boy scrambled to obey, though he kept a wide berth around her. The air was still charged, the indigo contagion on her arm pulsing with a rhythmic light that matched the beat of a heart she knew wasn't her own. 

Thorne was quiet for a moment, his presence receding like a tide, only to return with a sharp, probing intensity. She felt him testing the boundaries of the link, pushing against the walls of her mind. He wasn't trying to escape the restraints in the physical world; he was trying to find the seam in her soul.

*You want to fix it,* he murmured. *It’s your flaw, isn't it? The little weaver who can't stand a loose end. But some things are meant to be unmade.*

"Never," she whispered under her breath. "Nothing is unmade. Only repurposed."

*Fate will decide,* he teased, mocking her philosophy. 

"Fate decides nothing," Liora snapped aloud, causing a nearby Junior to jump. "We bind, or we break. There is no middle ground."

Her sepia vision dimmed. The exhaustion was a physical weight now, a leaden cloak settling over her shoulders. She felt Thorne’s body through the link—he was leaning back in the restraint chair, his muscles relaxing even as her own grew taut with strain. He was feeding on the stabilization, using the circuit to draw strength from the Loom itself, with her as the bridge.

The resonance deepened. In the flickering darkness of her closed eyes, she saw the Loom not as a machine of brass and iron, but as a living creature of light, its heart riddled with black, weeping sores. The rot was deeper than she’d feared. It wasn’t just a localized failure; the very foundation of the Binding Thread was precarious.

SCENE A

The silence following Maros's decree was more oppressive than the dead-tone had ever been. Liora kept her hand pressed against the vibrating brass of the drive-spindle until the heat began to blister her palm, a physical grounding for a mind that was currently drifting in two places at once. Her internal landscape was a chaotic mess of sepia shadows and obsidian ink. She could still feel the phantom pressure of Thorne’s restraints—the way the cold metal bit into his skin—overlapping with the tactile reality of the Loom’s grease-slicked casing at her own fingertips. 

*Bind-bind-bind,* her thoughts chanted, a rhythmic obsession intended to wall off the encroaching darkness. She couldn't let the Juniors see the flicker of doubt. To them, she had to remain the Weaver-in-Command, even if her very blood was turning into a catalyst for heresy. She watched Kael out of the corner of her eye. The boy was shaking as he adjusted the bobbin, his fingers fumbling with the fine gossamer threads that were the Loom's lifeblood. He looked at Liora not with the awe of a student, but with the revulsion one reserved for a predatory spider.

She understood. A "Stainer" was a myth used to frighten apprentices—one who had curdled their own thread so thoroughly it began to infect the weave itself. And yet, she felt no curdling. Only a terrifying expansion. The Dirty Circuit wasn't a clog; it was a floodgate. Through it, the "Thirteenth Strand" that was Thorne Quill hummed with an agonizing clarity. He was a variable, a knot that refused to be tucked into the pattern, and Liora found herself obsessively tracing the mental edges of that knot.

Deep in the marrow of her bones, she felt the "frayback" beginning its slow, corrosive work. Her life-thread was being stretched thin to bridge the gap between the Loom and the prisoner. She saw her hand through the sepia haze—it looked skeletal, the skin translucent, the black veins of the contagion pulsing like a second clock. Each pulse echoed with Thorne’s slow, deliberate heartbeat. He was calm. He was drinking her in, sifting through the dregs of her strength to keep himself grounded. She was the anchor, and he was the storm, and for a moment, she couldn't remember which one was supposed to be the master.

SCENE B

"Mistress Voss. A moment."

The voice didn't come from the link, but from the platform stairs. Elder Maros had descended from the Gallery, his cane clicking against the metal grating with a sound like snapping bone. He didn't come close—even he, with his obsession for utility, respected the reach of an active contagion. He stopped ten paces away, his shadows stretching long in the indigo light of the spindle.

Liora didn't turn. She couldn't. If she broke the contact now, the dead-tone might return with enough force to shatter the spindle casing. "The tension is holding, Elder. But the bypass is raw. It needs... it needs a more permanent seat."

"The bypass," Maros repeated, his tone dry as parchment. "An inventive name for a blasphemy, Liora. The Purists are already petitioning the High Weaver for your unbinding. They say the Loom is rejecting you."

"The Loom is failing, Elder," Liora countered, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper so the Juniors wouldn't hear. "The threads are brittle. They're snapping before the shuttle even passes. If I hadn't used the link—if I hadn't used *him*—the core would have sheared ten minutes ago."

Maros leaned on his cane, his eyes narrowed as they traced the violet vine of light creeping toward her elbow. "I saw what the link did. I saw the memory bleed. You gave that prisoner part of yourself, Liora. A piece of the Voss legacy."

Liora’s fingers twitched, tracing a line of obsidian ink. "I gave him nothing. The circuit took it. He’s the Thirteenth Strand, Maros. The machine can’t categorize him, so it’s trying to consume him. I'm just the filter."

"A filter that is turning black," Maros observed. He stepped a fraction closer, his voice sinking. "The Loom's rot is an old secret, one my predecessors died trying to patch. You are the first to find a way to shunt the decay. Do not mistake my protection for mercy, child. You are a grounding rod. If you burn out, I will find another. But for now, you will stay bound. You will stay at this spindle until I say otherwise."

"And the prisoner?" Liora asked, her mind flickering back to the feeling of Thorne’s heart.

"The prisoner will remain in the Weaving Chamber," Maros said, turning to depart. "He is the battery. You are the wire. Ensure the wire does not snap, Voss. Or I will let the Purists have their cleansing."

SCENE C

The hours that followed were a blur of sepia and ozone. The Great Loom Floor eventually emptied of its terrified Juniors, leaving Liora alone in the humming, indigo-lit cavern of the Drive-Platform. The Archival Guards remained at the doors, their pulse-staves glowing with a threatening readiness, but they kept their distance. 

Liora lived in the rhythm of the machine. Occasionally, she would pull a loose strand of her hair and begin to braid it, her fingers moving with a frantic, mechanical precision that bypassed her conscious mind. The smell of lanolin and indigo was so pervasive it felt as though she were inhaling the Loom itself. 

Through the link, she felt Thorne settle into a state of predatory meditation. He had stopped testing the walls of her mind, but she could still feel him there, a cool shadow at the base of her skull. He was watching the "rot" through her eyes, observing the structural decay of the brass and iron as if it were a beautiful, unraveling tapestry. 

*You're still trying to fix the hem,* his voice drifted back into her thoughts as the night deepened. It was softer now, less of a barb and more of an invitation. *But look at the warp, Liora. The very foundation is dust held together by habit. Why bleed for a machine that would grind you into grease the moment you stopped resisting?*

Liora didn't answer. She couldn't say "Fate will decide," because fate was a lie told by the weak. She could only say "Bind or break," and tonight, she was binding with everything she had left. She felt the indigo contagion reach her elbow, a burning crown of light that signified her soul was no longer her own. It belonged to the Loom, and it belonged to the man in the chair below.

As the dead-tone quiets to a deceptive hum, Thorne's voice slithers unbidden into her mind—"The rot isn't in the Loom, Liora. It's in their weave. Cut it free with me."—just as her brand creeps toward her elbow in a violent indigo flare.