The sky fractured.
It began with the moonlight—twinned beams where there should only be one. The second moon, dim and opalescent, hung over the ocean horizon, casting unfamiliar tides. Waves crashed where they shouldn't. Clocks spun wrong. Birds flew backwards at dusk.
And yet, to the naked eye, nothing else changed.
Only the feeling—that something fundamental had been rewired.
"Elara," Cassian murmured beside her as they stood on the launch platform overlooking the Atlantic, "your world is unraveling."
She nodded grimly. "Or being stitched too quickly."
Back in Langford Base, Agent Rowe was losing patience.
"We've got physicists screaming about gravitational drift, and religious groups praying to a second moon they're calling 'the Bride of Heaven.'" He tossed a stack of news reports on the table. "Whatever you two did, it's working—too well."
"It's not us," Elara said. "It's the Loom. The thread is trying to restore equilibrium across the veil—but Earth never had a loom of its own. It can't hold it."
Cassian's arms were crossed. "You think we need to create one?"
"I think we need to anchor it. Somewhere stable. Somewhere old."
Rowe leaned forward. "Define 'old.'"
They traveled to Mesa Verde.
Among sandstone ruins and cliff-hewn chambers, Elara traced ley-line echoes with fingers that still remembered stardust. Here, at the sacred Kiva depths, threads shimmered faintly. Cassian said he could feel the breath of another world through the stone.
"This place remembers," Elara whispered. "It's been watching the stars since before written history. It's... ready."
They performed the binding ritual that night.
Not with spells—but with intent, memory, starlight, and belief.
Cassian stood inside the spiral of carved stone, and Elara wove a golden line through the air, stitching across invisible borders. Each knot was a word:
Home. Truth. Sky. Choice.
And then—the second moon pulsed.
Just once.
And then...
The sky stilled.
In the morning, news anchors declared it a miracle.
The second moon faded to a ghost, then vanished. The tides calmed. Clocks resumed their ticking. People wept, danced, or shrugged it off as a shared hallucination.
But not everyone forgot.
Elara and Cassian returned to Langford for one last debrief. Agent Rowe didn't say thank you, but he handed her a sealed file with a nod. "We're listing you as a Level Five Astral Event Specialist. You'll have clearance to leave. Him too."
She raised an eyebrow. "That's very un-government of you."
Rowe smirked. "Call it gratitude disguised as protocol."
That night, on a borrowed rooftop in Denver, Cassian traced stars with his finger and asked the question she'd been waiting for.
"Do you want to go back?"
Elara looked up.
Earth. Sky. Silence.
"No," she said. "Not yet. Not forever. But maybe... someday."
He smiled. "Then let's go forward instead."
They kissed beneath the real moon.
The only one this world would keep.