The twins remember the night Aelian died. Not with tears, but with silence.
He was not supposed to be the Loom. He was supposed to live.
But when their mother left and their father drowned himself in bottles and notes, the plans were discovered — blueprints, scrawled in the margins of a madman's grief.
"We just needed something to hold the world together," the sister said.
"And he was the only one who never broke," the brother replied.
So they stripped Aelian down to memory and thread, forged him into a mechanism — divine, recursive, unfeeling.
Not to honor him, but because the world was collapsing, and someone had to hold the center.
In the myth engine, where silence hums and echoes write themselves, his heartbeat pulses through code.
Aelian did not fail.
He was chosen to end.