Until at last, she reached the person at the center of it all.

He wasn’t expecting her. That much was clear. His spirit stood unguarded at the center of a simple basin. The edges of this space—the only real space in the Loom—blurred into gray nothing beyond. The ghosts couldn’t enter here; they clustered and clawed on all sides like faces pressed against glass.

“Father,” Iseult said. “I have come for you.”

Indeed, Corlant crooned, and instantly, his ghost form solidified. When he lurched around, she found—as before—that his one remaining eye was healed here.

He grinned at the sight of her, an expression that had become so familiar in her childhood. One she now understood was filled with centuries of hate and with, tucked deep inside his own secret corner, centuries of fear.

She wondered what his old smile might have looked like. The one before his Paladin memories had awoken. The smile of a man who’d loved a Threadwitch.

“I thought you would be wiser.” He twirled open his hands. “This is my space. I made it.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I guessed you were Portia a long time ago. Though I do wonder why you lied.”

“Because if I had not, the Six would have killed me. I died that day, but not forever like the Exalted Ones. And so I have lived a thousand years, growing stronger with each incarnation. And oh, Iseult.” He clucked his tongue, his forehead trenches sinking deep. “It will hurt you so much more to die here than it would have in the real world.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I’m afraid it will.”

Then, before he could react or guess what she might do, she opened her hands. Unlike before, they were not healed in the Dreaming. Instead her palms were rough with scars—scars she had earned. An eternal reminder of the choices she hadn’t made.

Living, living, she thought, breath and living. She turned toward the ghosts, clustered and desperate outside the basin. Threads that heal, Threads that thrive. Then again, though this time she sang it aloud. “Living, living, breath and living. Threads that heal, Threads that thrive.”

Each soul required its own caress, its own reminder of life. So many Hell-Bards had been dead a hundred years. A thousand. But she gave each soul the magic it had lost, the Threads that had been erased.

And there was nothing Corlant could do. When he sent his Hell-Bards to attack, nothing happened. When he tried to flee the basin, he was swarmed by the lives he had claimed—ghosts now set free and ready to exact their vengeance.

It was slow work. It was exhausting, and the power of the dark-givers that Iseult had taken from the Threadstones now seeped away with each soul Iseult saved. But the dark-givers had wanted freedom, and these Hell-Bards did too.