The path turned from sand to crystal dust by the second nightfall.
Aeris wouldn't stop shaking. Lyra kept glancing at the moons, whispering glyphs under her breath. And Kael—Kael walked with his hand on the hilt of his sword, as if he could cut apart what was coming.
I should've known something was wrong the moment the wind went quiet.
No wind in a canyon that should howl like a throat torn open.
Just silence. Heavy. Expectant.
We passed beneath arches of fossilized stardrift. The air shimmered blue and brittle. There was a taste to it—old silver and burnt glass.
And then she appeared.
Not like a figure.
More like a flicker.
A candle held too long in time's mouth.
She didn't walk—she unfolded. A slow, graceful unraveling from the shadows of the canyon wall. Her eyes were wrapped in veils of woven constellation-thread. Her voice was water over a cracked mirror.
"I've waited for you," she said.
Aeris whined, then bolted into the folds of my cloak.
Kael raised his blade. "Star Nymph."
Lyra muttered, "No. Worse. An Oracle."
I stepped forward.
"Do I know you?"
She tilted her head, lips twitching in what could've been a smile… or a wound.
"You've died in front of me three times," she said. "Each time begging for a different ending. Each time pretending not to remember the last."
The canyon trembled slightly beneath us.
"Why am I always drawn here?" I asked.
Her veils fluttered though there was no wind.
"Because you seek truth," she said. "And I… I hold what remains of it."
She extended her hand—not toward me, but the air itself.
Light bent. Space groaned.
And then it was there.
A tapestry.
Stretched across the canyon like a woven sky. It shimmered, threads of starlight moving and looping, crossing into spirals too complex for the eye to follow.
"Your path," she whispered. "Your many, many paths."
I stepped closer. My breath caught.
Each thread was me.
My steps. My lives. Versions of myself cast into timelines like broken mirrors hurled across a dark floor.
Some threads burned bright and fast. Some faded before they began. Some twisted around others—red, gold, black.
And in every one—every single one—I died before the final glyph was written.
"Why?" I asked.
She turned toward me, the veils rippling gently.
"Because fate fears your end. Because the moment you complete your path… the gods fall."
My hands curled into fists.
"You mean I was meant to kill them?"
"No," she said simply. "You already did."
Silence.
Even the dust stopped moving.
I stepped back.
Kael was frozen, sword lowered. Lyra's mouth was slightly open, eyes fixed on the tapestry. Aeris wouldn't even peek from my cloak.
"I don't remember that," I said.
The Oracle tilted her head again.
"You're not supposed to."
"Why not?"
"Because you didn't do it with your will. You did it with your pain."
She raised her hand and the tapestry shifted.
I saw it then—one version of myself, cloaked in fire, eyes hollowed by grief. Standing before a throne of shattered bone and starlight. At his feet… the bodies of gods. All of them.
And in his hand?
A blade made from a dying star, singing his name in agony.
"That version of you didn't win," she said. "He ended. The cost was too great. The world unraveled with him. But the echo of his rebellion... it caught. It infected reality."
She touched a thread, and a dozen others sparked to life.
"You are one of many now. Shards. Waking in different realms. Different rules. Each carrying the echo forward. Until the right you survives long enough to finish it."
"That's why they're hunting me."
She nodded.
"You are a loose stitch in their grand design. You are the unraveling."
I shook my head.
"No. No, I didn't choose this. I just woke up in frost. Bleeding. I've been stumbling since."
"Choice was never part of it," she said. "Only consequence."
I stepped forward, voice rising.
"Then tell me how to break it. How to end the cycle. I'm tired of echoes. I want to live. Not as some ghost of a prince who burned gods."
For the first time, her voice faltered.
"…You cannot break it."
Silence crashed into me harder than any blade ever could.
She lowered her hand, and the tapestry began to fade.
"But you can choose the shape of the end," she whispered. "You can become the one who survives… or the one who ends it for the rest."
I felt something inside me fracture. A truth so old, it didn't even bleed anymore.
Kael stepped beside me. "If this is true… if he's a danger to the world…"
"No," Lyra said suddenly, stepping between us. "He's not the danger. He's the answer."
The Oracle turned toward Lyra.
"Daughter of Dawn, you walk a cursed parallel. Bound by forbidden memory."
Lyra didn't flinch.
"I'm bound by hope," she said.
The Oracle's veils shifted slightly. Then she turned back to me.
"I will give you one warning, Starborn."
I looked up, heart still hammering.
"In the place where your soul last burned," she said, "the gods placed a mirror. Not to trap you—but to remind you."
"Remind me of what?"
Her voice was a whisper stitched with silence.
"That even light… can lie."
The tapestry vanished.
She faded with it.
Not walked. Not vanished. Just... ceased.
And the wind returned like a sigh from the stars themselves.
Aeris slowly poked his head out, blinking in confusion.
Lyra exhaled sharply. Kael looked at me differently now. Not with doubt. But with a soldier's burden.
We didn't speak again that night.
But before sleep took me, I stared into the dark sky, wondering...
What happens to a story that's doomed to repeat until the truth becomes poison?