Page 144 of The Threads Between

It had worked. The restoration had worked.

I grabbed the book from the floor, desperate now, scanning the pages for more. Dawn light was seeping through the curtains, turning the room grey and gold. If Elowen had lived then surely August would be mentioned. Surely there would be something.

I turned page after page.

Nothing.

I reached for another book. Then another. The indexes blurred as I ran my finger down column after column, searching for his name, any mention of him at all.

Ysella appeared in every volume. Elowen's testimony was cited again and again. Even Elias had chapters devoted to his crimes, his campaign, his fall.

But August was nowhere.

Not in the histories. Not in the footnotes. Not in the personal accounts or the founding documents or the carefully preserved records of who had survived and what they had built.

The man who had severed his own father from corruption. The man who had cut me free and pushed me forward through time. The man who had stood at the center of everything.

Gone. A stone dropped into deep water without leaving a ripple.

My own name appeared more than once, "the Restoration Weaver" in some accounts, "Lily" in others, though the details blurred into myth more than history. They wrote about what I had done as though it were impossible. As though I were a story rather than a person.

I did not linger on those pages.

I did not care what history remembered of me.

I cared about finding him.

The last book fell from my hands.

I sat in the growing light, surrounded by pages that held everyone but him, and something inside me cracked clean through.

He had given everything. Had saved the Weavers, saved me, saved a future he would never see. And history had not even bothered to remember his name.

"No." The word came out hoarse, broken. "No. You don't get to disappear."

Outside, the dawn had fully broken. Pale gold light spilled across the floor, catching the dust motes drifting through the air. Traffic murmured in the distance. Someone laughed on the street below, a bright, unguarded sound that would have been unthinkable in the world we had left behind.

This was what survival looked like. Not triumph. Not glory.

Continuance.

Ysella had lived. Elowen had lived. The Weavers had lived. My family had lived.

And August had vanished into the silence between lines.

My chest tightened around a grief too large to move, too sharp to dull. He had given everything to create this world, and the world had not even given him a footnote in return.

"I remember," I said quietly into the empty room. "I won't let you disappear."

The promise hung in the morning air, small against the weight of what he had done. But it was mine to keep. The only thing I had left to give him.

Somewhere in this new world, in an archive, a museum, a family collection, there would be proof. A photograph. A letter. Something he had touched, something that still held the shape of his hands. History might have forgotten him, but someone had to remember. Someone had to have kept a piece of him alive.

I would find it.

I leaned back against the wall, exhaustion settling into my bones until they felt too heavy to lift. Every muscle ached. My head throbbed. My body was hollowed out, scraped raw by too much magic and too little sleep and a grief that had no edges, no end, no bottom I could reach.

Just as my eyelids began to fall, a sharp ring split the silence.