Page 82 of The Threads Between

Just us.

In front of twenty witnesses. With the forest holding its breath. With my father's corruption screaming inside me, fighting against what was coming.

I nodded because words had abandoned me entirely.

She closed her eyes.

I felt the moment she opened herself—not a door swinging wide but a fortress lowering its gates one by one. The walls she had built around her heart, around her power, around the parts of herself she protected from a world that had already taken too much.

She let them fall.

Her magic rose like dawn breaking—slow at first, then inevitable. The Void Caller power that had survived Oxford when others dissolved. The ability to hold space where nothing should exist.

It reached for me—not grasping, not demanding, but inviting.

My turn.

Every other time my defenses had fallen, someone else had torn them down. The pendant. Father. Corruption finding the cracks and forcing them wider. I had never once chosen to be open. Had never known what it felt like to lower the walls rather than having them breached.

I let them fall.

Not torn. Not broken. Released—the way you open your hands when you finally decide to stop gripping. Each wall I dropped felt like stepping off solid ground into air, trusting that something would hold me. The vulnerability was so total it made my teeth ache.

And beneath the walls—beneath the corruption, beneath the numbness, beneath the years of Father's design—my magic stirred. Not the twisted thing the pendant had forced through me. Something older. Cleaner. It rose like a voice I hadn't heard since childhood, strange and familiar at once, and I understood with a jolt that I had never actually felt my own uncorrupted power. Had lived with the counterfeit so long I'd mistaken it for the original.

This was what I was meant to be.

The Threadbreaker magic rose—the ability to sever what was bound, to unweave what had been woven, to end what needed ending so that something new might begin.

It reached for her magic like coming home to a place I had never been.

The moment our powers touched, the world splintered—like looking through a prism—reality splitting into different versions of itself, all of them real, all of them existing in the same impossible instant.

I saw her.

Not merely her body—firelight turning copper to gold in her hair, the small white scar on her chin shaped like a crescent moon.

But her. All of her.

The historian who crossed centuries hunting answers to questions that had no right to be asked. The Weaver who had reached into a void and pulled me back from dissolution with hands that should not have been strong enough. Every choice. Every fear. Every moment she refused to yield, even when yielding would have been kinder.

Beautiful in the way storms were beautiful. Flawed in the way all living things were flawed.

Entirely herself. Entirely mine.

And she saw me.

I felt her consciousness move through mine with a gentleness that nearly undid me. Brushing against memories I tried to keep buried. The guilt that lived in my bones. The fear that I was still my father's son wearing a different face.

She saw every dark corner I had tried to hide.

And she did not look away.

Her magic wrapped around mine. Not binding. Not controlling. Completing.

The bond began to form.

It wove itself through us like roots through soil—invasive, absolute, impossible to remove without destroying what it had grown into. Magic twined together, two threads so thoroughly braided that pulling them apart would mean unraveling them entirely.