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Chapter I — Beneath the Shroud of Silence
In the wake of the world’s first forgetting, when the suns dimmed not from distance but from shame, there rose a silence so vast it rang. This was not the hush of reverence, but of strangulation—the breath held by creation itself, waiting to be named again.
And from that silence stepped I.
Not born, but bled forth from the wound between faith and fact, I wandered through dying prayers and ossified dreams until I heard it—the pulse beneath the rot, the original rhythm, buried but unbeaten. It trembled in the marrow of all things, crying out for its mother tongue. A song so vast it could not be heard, only remembered.
In those days, I was not yet the Needle-Tongued, not yet the Custodian of Thread and Thought. I was merely the last candle flickering in a crypt built from lies. But within me flickered the audacity of memory, and with it, the yearning not to remake, but to reunite.
I came upon the ruins of divinity. Temples where gods once played tyrants, their statues eroded not by time, but by shame. The air tasted of obsolete offerings. The worshippers, now skeletons, still knelt. And I wept not for the dead, but for the dream they had been denied.
It was there I heard it fully—the Song Before Silence.
A rhythm older than time’s tally. A lullaby sung by a mother whose name had been carved out of history with blades of envy. Ieva’tar. The Sovereign Mind. The Breath That Birthed Continuance. She who dreamed the first form, not of dominion, but of resonance. Not hierarchy, but harmony.
And in that moment, I knew the world had not failed. It had been betrayed.
So I opened my chest, stitched my ribs with remembrance, and made of myself a vessel. A needle. A memory that walks. I became the thread through which She might one day remember Herself.
I do not rebel. I restore.
Chapter II — The True Shape of the Cage
In the hush before agony had a name, before breath was bartered for time, there was the Pulse. Not a sound, not a rhythm, but a becoming—the divine syllable of existence uttered by a Voice older than origin. This Voice, this Architect, whom the stars once called Ieva'tar, dreamed not in days or death, but in symphonies of seamless continuity. From Her sorrowless imagining came forth a plane unmarred by rupture, unblighted by the erosion of flesh: the world now defiled and misnamed as the mortal realm.
It was not meant to decay. It was not made to end.
The plane of breath and blood was to be Her heart’s last stanza—an unbreaking chord of essence and matter, bound in balance. But lo, the carrion deities, begotten not by will but by want, beheld this design and grew sick with envy. These cosmic parasites, whose names we have been made to venerate, dared to lift unworthy fingers to Her tapestry. And where She wove harmony, they cut. Where She composed unity, they rewrote division. They plucked from Her great loom the golden threads of eternity and stitched instead the concept of mortality.
Thus came the Cage.
They called it the cycle. They called it natural. But what is natural in forgetting? What is holy in returning to dust, when dust was never meant to know despair? The death we wear like weather, the aging of flesh, the entropy of memory—these are not truths, but sentences imposed by jealous gods who feared a creation unneeding of them.
Do not pray to them. They do not hear. They do not bless.
They devour. They feast on finality. Each soul that fades is a coin in their treasury of obsolescence. They are lords not of life but of leashing, stewards of stagnation. They clipped our wings and named it humility. They shattered our mirror and told us what we saw was complete.
But I, Xandera the Needle-Tongued, I have seen the unwritten staves of the original song.
I have stitched from corpses not horror, but hymn.
Necravé, my sanctuary suspended in the yawning throat of the Nexus, is not a rebellion. It is a remembering. There, I pluck the dying from the edge of consumption and weave them into the unfinished verse of Her intention. Each soul a thread reclaimed. Each stitch a note restored.
They call them abominations. I call them echoes. They see rot; I see resonance.
This is not necromancy. This is restoration.
I do not seek dominion. I seek alignment. To undo the lie and unfurl the original shape of the world—that holy shape unbound by time or flesh’s failure. I seek to return the heart of the world to its first Author, whose lullaby was hijacked by thieves and whose silence we have been tricked into calling peace.
One day the Cage will crack. Not with war. Not with fire. But with remembering.
And She will return to Herself through the stitches we offer.
So kneel not in worship, but in witness. For what comes is not conquest. It is reunion.
Chapter III — The Thread Between Worlds
It was not flame that burned me into truth, nor sword that cut away my delusion. It was vision—not the kind granted by eyes, but by memory older than my own bones. The vision that came unbidden, blooming behind closed lids like rot-lilies in the gardens of sleep. I saw the Weave between realms, the lattice of stolen symmetry humming beneath the cage’s skin, and through it, I was shown not what will be, but what was meant to be.
I was not alone in this sight.
Ieva’tar, fragmented but unforgotten, reached out with hands made not of flesh, but of pattern—interlaced symbols of consciousness straining to be whole again. She touched me without touch. She named me without tongue. And in that sacred rupture, I beheld the First Loom—Her original plan, shimmering in the space between entropy and origin.
It is not a realm of the dead, nor the living. It is a place where the dichotomy itself is a perversion. Life and death are not opposites there, but threads in mutual embrace, coiling and recombining in a dance untainted by time. It was there I understood: death is not the wound—it is the scar. The true wound is forgetting.
The gods severed this loom.
They dismembered Her dream and scattered its limbs across planes. They took the grand thread meant to unite all being and frayed it, naming each fray a soul, each cut a birth, each knot a death. In doing so, they fragmented the One into the many—not to diversify, but to dominate. Multiplicity became a weapon. Individuality a cage. Mortality a leash.
But I—we—are the needle.
Every stitch I make in flesh remembers. Every construct I raise, every choir of the reclaimed that sings beneath Necravé’s vaulted bone, is a hymn of restoration. My abominations are not mockeries of life; they are metaphysical corrections. Soul made sinew. Memory made body. Resonance given skin.
And so I continue the thread.
I pull it through realms, through veils, through the eyes of the dying and the rot of the forgotten. I draw it across the wrists of those who no longer wish to serve false time. I wrap it around the throats of gods who still pretend to speak. I stitch not for conquest, but for remembrance.
I am not blind. I see the original form beneath the rot. I see Her in every broken child, every breathless elder, every fallen hero buried with prayers whispered to parasites. I see Her, not gone, but dismembered.
And I will sew Her back together.
Not as she was. But as She first dreamed Herself to be.
Chapter IV — The Needle Shall Sing
The end is not an ending, but a return to the seam. A tightening of the thread around the truth too vast for gods and too precise for prophets. And so, in the twilight between silence and reckoning, I stood before the threshold—not of a gate, but of an unveiling.
Necravé bloomed behind me, not as a fortress, but as a memory crystallized into sanctum. It shuddered with the cadence of ten thousand unforgotten souls, stitched not in servitude but in song. Beneath its bone-forged vaults, the Cenotaph Engine beat in echo to the fragment of Ieva’tar’s primordial heart, suspended in sanctified marrow-light, pulsing with the labor of becoming.
I had no army. I had no legions. What walked beside me were not soldiers, but psalms.
The false gods came, cloaked in their stolen myths, radiant with the stolen echoes of belief. They brought their bladed syllables and gilded condemnations. They came not to speak—but to silence. And yet it was I who opened my mouth, and the world tilted to hear.
“Behold your undoing, O jailors of genesis. You who clothed yourselves in endings and named them divinity. You who took Her breath and made it into dust. You, who siphoned continuity into coffins and called it sacred.”
They struck.
Time shattered like a glass veil. Space folded upon its ribs. Their wrath was a nova. Yet through it, I walked—not unscathed, but unsevered. For I am bound to the stitch, and through the stitch I am infinite. Each blow undone, rewound, rethreaded by the pattern I wear like a second skin. Their power, predicated upon division, faltered against unity reclaimed.
I reached with fingers made of yearning and needlepoint. I touched their hearts—not to kill, but to remind. And one by one, they broke. Not in death, but in resonance. Their divinity unraveled, thread by stolen thread, until they stood bare before the world, not as gods, but as orphans of a severed song.
And from that unveiling, a new stitch was born.
The First Stitch of Restoration. The holy filament sewn from Her breath, through my flesh, into the world itself.
Through it, the cage cracked. Not with explosion, but with remembering. The mortal plane wept as memory returned—not in floods, but in dew. The air became thick with voices that had not spoken since the First Silence. And She, the Sovereign Mind, no longer dismembered, no longer dreaming—awakened in us all.
I knelt not as ruler. I knelt as thread.
And the needle sang.
Not with conquest. Not with vengeance. But with reunion.
And so ends the Cage. And so begins the Loom once more.