We Asked for a Story.

He Gave Us a Reckoning.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I didn’t expect the interview to go well.

Glimlock arrived early, smelled like regret and vinegar, fiddling with a rusted timepiece that ticked in both directions. First Voice never manifested, but I was assured it was present by the way the flickering shadows restructured themselves every time I asked a question.

They had concerns. Valid ones, I’m told.

According to their dossier, I was an untested entity with a dangerous fondness for pencils and an insufficient fear of narrative structure. They feared sentiment. They feared simplicity. They feared I would cradle the story when it was meant to run.

That was the beginning.

The rest is what follows.

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FIRST VOICE speaking. Glimlock keeps leaning in.

We feared the worst.

That he’d write a quiet little fairy tale. One of those soft-lantern fables with predictable paths and noble suffering. A young one with a chosen mark. A wise one with a warning. An end wrapped in lesson paper and twine.

You’ve read them. So had we. We feared he had too.

That’s not what LOOM became.

We watched him circle the Pattern for months, clutching a cheap notebook and a box of pencils as if the truth could be summoned through graphite alone. We argued about what he’d do. Glimlock swore he’d rhyme. I feared he’d explain.

The Weave has suffered worse.

What we never imagined was that he’d listen.

Not to us. To the Thread. To the tension beneath cause and the consequences that hadn’t yet arrived. To the pull of something that refused to stay passive. That refused to be told.

We were braced for a donkey. Hooved. Serviceable. Predictable.

What we got was a racehorse with blood on its breath and velocity in its spine.

We didn’t expect sentences that moved without asking permission. We didn’t expect consequence to have a texture. We didn’t expect silence to carry weight.

And yet here we are, watching you read about the thing we thought couldn’t be written.

The syntax obeys the Pattern. The silence holds weight. The consequence moves first. You’re not reading a description of the Pattern. You’re moving with it, through it.

A fracture in the fabric. A stride through Pattern without a leash. A rupture that reshapes. A plunge that doesn’t ask. A form the Pattern recognized before he did.

You’re already Threaded. Might as well keep going.