Part VII – The Threads Remember

As told by Lirian Ever-Weaver

The shrine did not change when the Sidhe vanished.
But Calla did.

The embers had dimmed. The vision faded. The loom still stood—broken, blackened, silent.

But not dead.

She knelt beside it again, this time not to mourn, but to listen.

Her hand brushed the moss, and beneath it, wood responded. Familiar. Not just in shape—but in song. A song sung in lullabies and laughter, in the rhythm of a loom’s steady clack, in the creak of her father’s carving stool late into dusk.

And then she saw it—beneath the moss, a mark she hadn’t noticed before.
A carving at the base of the loom, nearly worn smooth.

Cearnach’s mark.

The same that he’d carved into her cradle. The same etched on the doorframe of their roundhouse.

This was not just a loom.

It was her mother’s.
Saved. Buried. Returned to her.

She pressed her forehead to the wood, and the fire in her chest did not burn—it ached.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know I had carried you with me.”

The runes in the walls pulsed faintly—acknowledging, perhaps, or simply remembering.

Calla stood.

The loom groaned softly beneath her hand. Not in protest. In readiness.

She gathered what threads she could find—tufts of old wool, moss-slick cords, strands of something finer left in the shrine’s hollows. They were ragged, mismatched, half-forgotten.

Like her.

She threaded the loom.

And began to weave.

At first, her hands trembled. The fire flickered at her fingertips—still too wild, still too proud. The thread caught, the warp snarled.

She cursed.

Then—her mother’s voice.

Not from the shrine. Not from the woods.
From memory.

“Loosen your grip, mo chroí. Let the thread breathe. Let it find the shape before you force it.”

Calla closed her eyes.

Her father’s voice joined, steady as oak:

“The loom does not ask for speed. Only truth.”

She exhaled.

Tried again.

Thread by thread, the tapestry began to form—not symmetrical, not perfect, but alive. Shapes emerged. Light wove itself into shadow. Fire into frost. Grief into something like grace.

She was weaving her story—what she remembered, and what she had never dared to.

Then—she paused.

A thread had appeared she did not place.

Black as pitch. Cold as the void between flames.

It slithered through the pattern. Not sewn by her hand—but present nonetheless.

It coiled through the golden threads, unmaking part of the form she had built. Not destroying—twisting.

She reached to pull it free—

But the tapestry shuddered.

The fire in her chest flared—not in rage, but in warning.

Her hand froze.

“You were not alone,” said the memory of a voice. Was it the Sidhe? Her mother? Something older?

“The fire came through you—but not all of it came from you.”

The black thread pulsed once. Then stilled.

Calla did not remove it.

She wove around it.

She did not hide it. Did not deny it.
She acknowledged it—and bound it into the shape of the flamebird rising at the heart of the tapestry.

And when the final thread was laid—

The loom sighed.

As if relieved.

And the shrine brightened—not in fire, but in morning.

Calla stepped back.

The tapestry hung across the loom—rough, luminous, imperfect, true.

She had not woven gold.
She had not banished the black thread.
She had remembered.

And that was enough.

Some flames teach you how to burn.
Others teach you how to endure.

But the rarest flames—the ones bound to loom and memory alike—
They teach you how to build something that endures after the fire.

The black thread pulsed once more.
Not in warning. Not in fear.
But in recognition.
And far beyond the Wraithwood—beyond mist, beyond memory—
another thread tightened.
Unseen. Unnamed.
But waiting.

Lirian Ever-Weaver notes:
Should this fragment stir your soul, you may seek the fuller song in ink and spine.

The Fianna Chronicles: Awakening
A forgotten legend. A fire rekindled. A warrior’s name remembered.

Find the tale here.