Part 34 : Beneath the Threaded Veil

The moment Lyn stepped into the memory stream, time folded inward.

Not like a door opening — more like a breath being held by the universe itself.

She felt her body dissolve into strands of light, her thoughts splayed out across aeons, until only the anchor of her will kept her whole. Around her, forgotten timelines stirred like dust in sunbeams — fractured realities, cast aside like failed drafts of fate. These weren’t erased moments; they were unacknowledged. Rejected memories that had refused to fade.

And in each of them, something watched her.

The Forgotten One’s presence wasn’t immediate. It was subtle — a flicker at the corner of perception, a heartbeat that didn’t belong to her own chest. Lyn descended deeper, following the tug of the Memory Beat still humming softly in her palms. The orb she had fused with at the tower’s core pulsed faintly, acting as a guide through this liminal world.

Then she saw it — the first hidden thread.

It was a timeline where the Tower had never been built. A version of the world that had tried to manage time through pure will and brute force. Lyn watched herself — a commander in a fractured world of steel and silence — ordering the destruction of a rebel camp. Her eyes were hollow. The sky was always dusk. Time, in this place, moved forward but felt like it never did.

She passed through the memory like a ghost. The Lyn of this world couldn’t see her — but something else could.

A child stood alone in the ruins, watching her with silver eyes.

He spoke, but not with words. Just one feeling flooded Lyn’s mind: grief wrapped in hunger.

The Forgotten One was here.

Not in the form of a monster — but as a moment. A crack in the heart. A place where memory had no witness. A place left unloved.

Lyn backed away — but the thread clung to her. The grief tried to seep in, to rewrite her thoughts, to convince her that this was the true reality. That hope was a fiction. That timelines should remain shattered because they were honest.

She called on the Beat.

A pulse. Light returned. The child vanished.

And she fell — again — into another thread.

This one was slower. Dreamlike. A world where time had never started. Everything was frozen in a golden hour. People moved like they were made of wax. Trees swayed without wind. In the center, Lyn saw herself again — older, serene, unmoving. A guardian of nothing. A shell of potential never activated.

And once more, that feeling crept up behind her.

This time, it whispered: “Why change what is peaceful? Why wake a world that does not suffer?”

It was tempting.

But Lyn understood now: the Forgotten One wasn’t just a creature. It was a principle. The embodiment of all those parts of memory that resisted growth. The desire to stay still. The comfort of denial.

She turned her back on the frozen self and reached deeper.

At last, she found the true source.

A spiraling black thread. Rotating backward.

This was where the Forgotten One lived — not as a being, but as a wound in time.

Lyn stepped into it.

And suddenly she was nowhere — a realm with no direction, no meaning, just echoes of every path never walked. Her thoughts began to fracture. She saw herself as a betrayer. A villain. A ghost no one remembered. Every failure, real or imagined, came alive here.

But she held on to one truth: She was a witness.

She had chosen to remember. To feel. To grow.

And in doing so, she became something the Forgotten One feared:

A constant.

In the center of this realm, a figure began to take shape — shifting faces, always wrong, always half-finished. It reached out, trying to pull her into its silence.

But Lyn raised the Beat.

“I remember,” she said.

“I mourn. I change. And I move forward.”

The Beat exploded — a wave of light carving truth through shadow.

The false timelines burned away.

And from their ashes, one golden thread extended before her, leading back home — and toward the final confrontation.

But the Forgotten One did not scream.

It smiled.

Because now it knew where she was.

And it would not come as a shadow next time.

It would come as a choice.