The world was quiet here.
Not silent.
Silence had weight. It pressed against the ribs, crawled into the ears, clawed at the corners of the mind. Silence was a presence.
But this?
This was absence.
There were no birds. No insects. No wind. No light.
Only stillness.
Elira sat in it like a drop of color on blank parchment. Knees tucked beneath her, hair pooling around her feet, she watched nothing move across nothing.
And yet, she breathed.
She did not know how long she had been here.
Time didn't tick in the void. It curled. Folded. Collapsed into itself like wet paper. At first, she'd tried to keep count—by heartbeats, by dreams, by the shifts in her own breathing. But eventually, even those markers faded.
And that was when she began to see.
Not with her eyes. With something else.
Something deeper.
She saw the threads of others in dreams. Gold and copper, crimson and black. Twisting, choking, blazing. And always tangled.
Always fraying.
She saw her own hands reaching to untangle them.
And found nothing there.
She had no thread.
Not frayed. Not cut. Not dim.
None.
It wasn't loss. It was… rejection.
As if fate itself had looked at her and turned away.
She had screamed once. She remembered that. Screamed into the absence until her throat broke from the effort. And still the world didn't echo.
There was nothing here to echo back.
No god. No law. No thread.
But there was clarity.
Here, she could feel every fracture in herself. Every scar she carried into the void. Every whispered word left unsaid. Every regret she had folded beneath her tongue.
And strangely, here… they didn't hurt.
She saw herself. As she was. As she might have been.
And then she let go.
She lay now in the grassless field, eyes half-closed. There was no sky, but there was light enough to dream.
And then—
A flicker.
Like a line drawn across a canvas.
Thin.
Fraying.
Silver.
Her eyes opened fully. Her breath caught.
Another thread—no, a man. Stepping slowly into the space where threads were not meant to exist.
She could see the shimmer of lines behind his eyes. The way he moved, too still, too aware. The way his shadow didn't stretch the way it should.
He didn't belong here.
And yet…
He did.
She rose without sound. The hem of her dress didn't disturb the dust that wasn't there. Her bare feet made no impression on the not-ground.
And still, she stepped forward.
The man came closer, his gaze locked ahead, unaware.
His thread—silver, wild, fraying—floated behind him like a question.
Her heart stirred.
Not with fear.
With recognition.
He stopped.
Their eyes met across the distance.
His brows twitched slightly. She watched his gaze shift, as if reaching for a thread that should have been bound to her.
And finding none.
She tilted her head. Then offered the only truth she had.
"I have no thread," she said simply.
A pause. His brow furrowed. Then… a dry laugh.
"Mine's fraying at both ends," he replied.
"Almost gone. Like me."
Their eyes locked.
And in that strange place beyond fate, where gods turned their faces and threads feared to stretch—
A threadless girl and a man no longer bound met for the first time.