Chapter 8: The Wrong Stitch

The trouble began with confidence.

Not the bold, brazen sort that shouts its presence, but the subtler kind—the one that creeps in quietly after a string of victories and murmurs: You’ve done this before. You don’t need the instructions. Trust yourself.

Lina had just completed her third commission in a single week—a pair of echo-mittens that allowed two estranged sisters to share their thoughts across miles. The work left her cloak humming with pride, its threads vibrating with the smug satisfaction of a job well done.

She was starting to believe it, too. Starting to feel like a real tailor.

So when the wovenwing moth drifted in through her window, shimmering like a fragment of starlight, Lina didn’t pause. She didn’t reach for the guidebook, or the old notes tucked between its pages.

She simply smiled, lifted her needle, and trusted her hands.

That was her first mistake.

🧵

It fluttered through the open window just after breakfast, its wings as thin and glimmering as frost on glass. A wovenwing moth—messenger of the fences—alighted on the edge of Lina’s worktable, a tiny scroll bound to its leg with spider-silk thread.

She eased the knot free, careful not to tear the delicate parchment, and unrolled the message. The handwriting looped with urgency, the ink blotched where the quill must have trembled:

“URGENT. Patch needed. Warp spell coming undone. Magic slipping. Threads bleeding into dreamspace.”—Penny Fletch, Seamwarden of the Outer Fence

Beneath the signature was a hurried scrawl:P.S. Bring needles. Sharp ones.

Lina’s stomach gave a nervous twist. The Outer Fence. That was no simple glove or mitten, no sentimental patch for lost sisters. It was a barrier—an edge-stitch holding back things that had no business slipping into the waking world.

Her cloak hummed with pride, eager. Her needle hand itched.

And though a wiser tailor might have hesitated, Lina only tightened her grip on the note and whispered to herself, almost smiling:

“I can handle this.”

🪡

By the time Lina and Thimblewick reached the Outer Fence—a rickety boundary where Tetherwood’s reality frayed into dream—they could see the damage.

Colors leaked where they didn’t belong. Leaves glowed too brightly, their veins pulsing like lanterns. One tree rotated slowly, upside-down, whistling a tune no one remembered teaching it.

A large crow in a buttoned vest flapped down from a leaning post and waved them over.

“You’re Lina?” she croaked. “The new Stitch-Minder?”

“Tailor,” Lina corrected, though she smiled as she said it. “I’ll do what I can.”

Penny Fletch wasted no words. Her feathers were preened sharp as pins, her eyes glinted like threadcutters. She gestured with her beak to a ragged tear in the Fence—a place where the fabric of the world itself was unraveling into the pale, seething sky beyond.

“The patch must be fastened at the anchor points. Dream-thread and boundary-weave. Can you manage it?”

Lina nodded briskly and unrolled her toolkit. She didn’t ask what had caused the rupture. She didn’t check the diagrams in the Handbook. The moth’s note had asked for sharp needles, and she had them.

Choosing one that sparkled proudly in the light, she set to work.

At first, the stitches pulled true. The rent drew together neatly, edges knitting as though eager to be whole again. Penny gave a tight nod, feathers settling.

But then—

Lina reached the center.

And paused.

The thread writhed under her needle, resisting. Not breaking—just shifting, as if whispering no.

Her hands hesitated. Just for a breath.

But confidence pressed her forward. The cloak at her shoulders hummed encouragement. Almost finished, almost perfect.

She pushed the needle through—

—and made the wrong stitch.

🌌

There was no explosion.

Just… silence.

Then a shiver.

Then—

The air folded.

Lina’s breath caught as the world turned itself inside out. In a blink, she was no longer standing by the Fence at all. She was inside it—inside the dreamspace. Her hands flickered in and out of place, needle vanishing and reappearing like a skipping record. The cloak drifted loose around her, its threads trailing like jellyfish tendrils in deep water.

Shapes moved where they had no business moving. Shadows bent against their light. A staircase wound upward, only to dissolve into smoke. The sky tangled itself into knots of thread, pulsing faintly, as though someone had tried to weave a heartbeat and gotten it wrong.

“Oh no,” Lina whispered. “Oh no, no, no—”

Her mistake had folded the rupture inward, sealing her between the seams. She could feel the stitch tugging tight around her, every loop pulling reality closer, tighter—locking her inside.

The world around her pulsed again, hard and uneven. A heartbeat out of rhythm. A rhythm that didn’t belong.

And somewhere in the distance of that not-place, something stirred.

🧶

It was Thimblewick who saved her.

Through the folding air she glimpsed him, his small paw flickering like a strobe against the breach. He had both feet planted on the Fence’s frame, straining, tugging at her cloak’s hem.

“Let it go!” he shouted, his voice splitting through the pulse of wrong-heartbeats. “The stitch doesn’t belong!”

Lina’s hands trembled. The needle buzzed against her fingers, the thread quivering like it knew better than she did. But she saw the truth in Thimblewick’s eyes, frantic and steady all at once.

She reached up—fingers burning as the dream-thread tried to cling—

—and ripped the final stitch free.

The rupture convulsed, then snapped shut like a book slammed too hard. The warped colors bled back into place, the sky exhaled, the ground steadied.

And Lina, gasping, found herself on her knees at the Fence’s edge, cloak sagging limp and heavy around her shoulders.

The world was back.

But Penny Fletch’s sharp eyes did not look relieved. They narrowed instead, calculating. Because though the tear was sealed, Lina knew—she hadn’t closed it the right way.

She had only forced it shut.

🧵

They both collapsed into the grass, breathless.

Penny loomed over them, feathers bristling, her shadow cutting long across the Fence. “You stitched dream-thread across inverse grain. Do you realize what that means? You could’ve torn a hole straight into the Wildroot Fold!”

Lina pushed herself upright, head still ringing. “I didn’t check... I thought I could just—”

“You thought.” Penny’s eyes narrowed to razor slits. “That’s how tailors vanish. One wrong stitch and the world eats you whole.”

Thimblewick puffed up, fur spiked like a stormcloud. He planted himself between them, tail lashing. “She’s learning.”

Penny’s beak clicked once, sharp as scissors. “Then she’d better learn faster.”

Silence stretched. The Fence hummed faintly, mended but restless, as if it remembered the mistake.

Lina lowered her eyes to the grass, shame hot in her chest. The cloak on her shoulders sagged, no longer humming with pride—just heavy, as though disappointed.

And for the first time since she’d begun stitching for others, Lina felt less like a tailor and more like an apprentice who had almost unmade the world.

🌙

That night, Lina didn’t eat dinner.

Didn’t stitch.

She only sat in the loft beneath the treehouse window, cloak crumpled beside her, staring at the needle she’d chosen. Its silver point gleamed faintly in the moonlight, sharp and unbothered, as though it hadn’t nearly unmade her world.

She hadn’t listened.

Not to the threads. Not to the Fence. Not even to herself.

She’d wanted so badly to be good—to prove she was worthy of the humming pride in her cloak, of commissions and titles and trust. Instead, she had nearly broken the boundary between waking and dream.

The cloak stirred, slow and weary, and shifted toward her. Its hem brushed against her wrist—not tugging this time, not urging her forward. Just holding on.

Lina exhaled, voice small and cracked. “Thanks.”

And then she did something she hadn’t allowed herself in a long, long time.

She cried. Quietly at first, then harder, until the needle blurred and the moonlight rippled, and the cloak tightened around her arm as if to keep her from unraveling completely.

Somewhere beyond the Fence, the dreamspace pulsed. But here, in her loft, Lina let the stitches of her heart fray at last.

✨
The next morning, Lina opened the Handbook—its spine still stiff from disuse—and turned to Chapter One: The Tailor’s Promise.

“A magical tailor does not aim for perfection.We listen.We mend what we can, and honor what we cannot.We do not cut corners, only cloth.”


She traced the words with her fingertip, slowly, as if stitching them into memory.

Then she reached for her cloak. Not to add, not to embellish—

—but to unpick.

Carefully, gently, she teased loose the crooked stitch she had forced, letting the fabric breathe again. The patch unraveled in her hands, disintegrating into a shimmer of golden threaddust that drifted away on the morning light.

From somewhere deep in the cloak’s lining came the faintest sigh, soft as a resting heartbeat.

Lina let her shoulders ease. For the first time since the Fence, she felt the weight lift.

Not everything stitched must stay.

Some mistakes are meant to be undone.

And with that truth nestled in her chest, Lina finally began to feel like a tailor again.


🧵End of Chapter 8