Chapter 27 — Threads Without End

Yusuf dove through ash and light. No down, no floor—just flashes of color streaking past, each filament pointing toward another world. People called out to him from them, tiny and desperate, a thousand stories unwritten that yearned to be seen.

The faceless child clutched the Codex to its chest, its vacant head darting from strand to strand as if it tried to read them all at once. "Too many," it gasped. "Too many all at once."

Rae was beside Yusuf, thrashing in the tide, her eyes huge with terror but fixed on him. "Hold on!" She took his hand as the force of another thread snapped open beneath them like a whirlpool.

Yusuf held the shard in his other hand. It throbbed softly, resonating with streams upon it—nearly as though it were home.

Above—whatever "above" was there—cast the shadow he had glimpsed before. Shapeless, immense, watchful. Threads wrapped around it like strands creeping to a trunk.

The child's voice broke, icy with terror: "The Binder sees us."

The shadow shifted, and for a moment, Yusuf could feel its eyes brushing against him. Not malice, not starvation—something heavier.

Ownership.

He shouted out, holding his head as someone else's memories burst behind his eyes—ruin, weddings, fields of battle, children at play—too many to hold. He screamed, and Rae's grip relaxed.

The stream split unkindly. Rae was drawn one way, child another. Yusuf reached out for both, but the shard in his hand flared, drawing him away.

The Codex exploded in the boy's hands, pages whipping as if the book shrieked out. A burst of ink showed on one page as Yusuf was yanked away:

"Separation imminent."

The last he could recall, before now swept him up, was Rae's grasping hand vanishing in the light, her voice in the chaos.

And then Yusuf fell—alone—into a new world of black and vacant ruins.