The threads quivered beneath Nora’s consciousness, vibrant and alive, humming with the rhythm of all her selves. Yet amid the glow, a shadow pulsed differently—a slow, hollow, blackened vibration, cold and unyielding.
She saw it clearly: the 1957 child, strapped into the padded chair, eyes wide and screaming silently. The procedure had begun. The lobotomy had severed her delicate strands, fragments of identity that once anchored the child-self into the lattice.
Nora felt the loss as a physical ache, a chill crawling up her spine. Those threads, once vibrant with defiance, now hung black and inert, twisting like smoldering smoke through her cosmic battlefield. Every swing of the sword, every pulse of light, carried the echo of this absence. The Unmakers would feel it too. The lattice was slightly weaker here—but not broken. Not yet.
“I am… still here,” Nora whispered. “Even broken… I persist.”
And then, in the shimmer of threads, a new pulse appeared—a reality not her own, yet vibrating with possibility. A girl in Iraq, 1979, running through smoke and fear, clutching her little brother’s hand.
Nora reached out instinctively, anchoring the thread. “Hold on. Keep moving. You are part of the weave.”
The blackened strand pulsed again, mournful but responsive, intertwining with the new thread—loss meeting hope, damage meeting survival. Solas the kitten nuzzled her hand, grounding her with warmth and presence.
The lattice expanded.
No thread was ever truly lost.