The hum of the Solace machine pulsed like a heartbeat, steady and insistent. Nora’s chest rose and fell with shallow gasps. Around her, the hospital walls blurred and stretched, the sterile white folding into ribbons of gold and shadow.
She felt herself tipping, falling—not down, not up, but through. The pain in her head became a tide, washing memories of Australia 2018, the car crash, and the battlefields of the Weave all together into one swirling storm.
Her hand shot out instinctively, and light answered. Threads shimmered beneath her fingers, writhing and coiling, reaching toward the pulse of the Solace machine, as if the device itself had become the loom.
“Nora…”
Solas’ voice—or the echo of it—thrummed in her mind, not distant, not imagined, but tangible. “You are here and there. The fracture is strong. Hold the Weave. Hold yourself.”
She felt the battlefield tug at her, the Unmakers writhing on the edges of perception, but now layered over hospital walls, IV tubes, and sterile monitors. Every thread she touched shimmered, connecting the two worlds, making her a bridge between dream and reality.
A scream echoed in her skull—half her own, half the echoes of the Weave—but she clung to the pulse of the threads, guided by Solas’ presence. Light flared along the paths, coiling around shadowy tendrils and refracting across the fractured memories of her life.
For a moment, she could see both: the hospital room, and the battlefield superimposed over it. Nurses moved like ghosts among the Unmakers, monitors beeped in time with sword strikes, the Solace machine’s glow pulsed in tandem with cosmic energy.
Nora’s breath caught. “I… I can do this,” she whispered to herself, the threads humming in agreement. The fracture-point, the patient, the dreamer, the warrior—all of her selves converged.
“Good,” Solas whispered, closer now. “We are stronger together. The Weave bends because you do not reject it. But remember—the closer you walk to the edge, the more fragile the boundary between worlds becomes.”
Her vision stretched, folding space and time. She realized: even if the fever dream—or coma—was real, it no longer mattered. The threads themselves were alive, and she was their anchor.
The Unmakers surged. The hospital walls twisted. The sword pulsed. And in the center of it all, Nora stepped forward, straddling two realities, ready to fight—and ready to see what the Weave demanded of her next.