Chapter 29 — The Red Thread’s Descent

The fall was infinite.

Yusuf's belly lurched as if he were plummeting not through air, but through the sheers of memory itself—rolls of parchment, flashes of names, half-remembered faces whizzing by in washes of color. The red thread cinched around his wrist like a rope of flame, pulling him down whether he kicked or not.

The faceless boy was not there. Neither was Rae. For once, it was just him and the Codex, its pages blowing wide open as in a hurricane. Symbols burned across them in wild explosions, too fast for his eyes to follow, as if an unseen language unraveled.

He slammed into ground hard. Dust exploded around him, acrid and heavy. Yusuf coughed, scrambling to stand, ears buzzing. The scarlet thread unraveled and spilled into the ground like poured blood.

He lifted his head.

The sky was a wound.

Red light seeped through the tears in the clouds, and black ash swirled like snow. He stepped where there had been a city, but its bones were twisted—streets fell perpendicularly out of the air, roofs drove into the ground like tombstones, and splintered towers leaned at impossible limits.

A whisper twisted through the air, a thousand voices mixed.

". don't… remember…

Yusuf's breast tightened. The same evil of Elarra's cathedral filled this site, but on an astronomical level. The walls themselves looked alive, breathing in a small pulse like the expansion and contraction of a chest.

He grasped the Codex tightly, mouthing: "Where have you brought me?"

The book shook in his hand. Ink flowed across a fresh page.

The Shard is here.

Yusuf's body tensed. His other hand went to his pocket out of habit. Rae's shard—the one she'd left with him—still pulsed weakly in his hand. He brought it up, and it hummed in rhythm with the Codex's words.

A new line appeared.

But it is not alone.

Yusuf did not have time to ask himself what it meant before the ground heaved. A chasm opened in the earth, and out of it came a figure—not a human, but something formed from fragments.

It had arms budding, but too many, bursting forth from its body like cracked wood. Its chest was quilted with memory-images: a child's scribble, a soldier's face, a mother's hand—flashing on its skin like strips of film before melting into pale gray. Its head was smooth, empty, but when it turned to regard him, Yusuf could feel a thousand eyes regarding him at once.

The Codex page burst into flame with a single word:

Harvester.

The creature opened its different mouths—not mouths, really, but tears in its body. And from each one, a different voice: laughter, weeping, whispering, screams. The voices of consumed memories.

Yusuf backed away, pounding heart.

The Harvester attacked.

Yusuf raised the Codex instinctively, strings spilling out of it, and they wove a net of dates and names. The beast crashed into it—and the net exploded like glass.

"Too powerful—" Yusuf's voice trembled. The Codex had shielded him before, but this was different. This enemy was not a broken shard of memory. It was living off them, giving birth off them.

The shard in his palm exploded, blinding him. The Harvester halted, its patchwork form spasm.

Yusuf's mind disintegrated into understanding. It reacts to the shard. It wants it.

The voices cried out more urgently.

". return it. return it. return it."

Yusuf pushed the shard into the pages of the Codex. The book slammed shut, throbbing like a contained heart.

The Harvester roared. The city around them warped further—streets wrapping in on themselves, buildings dissolving into walls of sludge gray. The world was being eaten whole.

Yusuf ran. He didn't have Rae's sword, didn't have the child's unnatural senses. He had nothing but the Codex, burning into his chest, and his own stubbornness not to lose it all.

And running, a second voice cut through the destruction.

"You shouldn't be here."

Yusuf stopped.

On a rooftop—no, on the ceiling of the world itself, where streets curled overhead like ribs—stood a figure cloaked in black. Their face was hidden, their posture steady, as if untouched by the collapse.

They looked directly at him.

And then they spoke again, calm amidst the madness:

“Archivist. You’re late.”

The Harvester shrieked and turned toward them.

Yusuf’s breath caught. Whoever this was, they weren’t just a fragment. They were real.

And they knew him.