Live chapter: https://echoes-of-the-real-20f058.gitlab.io/chapter-4374.html (commit c31c651). Title-locked from main HTML. Streak 259 consecutive clean desks.
Opening (live prose, not invented):
The Weaver who had championed progress, the one who had built towers to obscure the past, did not answer with words.
Instead, they reached out and wove a second thread, not of sorrow, but of a stark, unadorned acknowledgment.
It was a filament of pure, cold logic, a line that traced the terrible calculus of their decision—the ghost’s suffering versus the integrity of the Weave.
The two threads, one of grief and one of grim necessity, wrapped around each other, forming a fragile, complex braid—the beginning of an answer that was honest, if not whole.
Arc beat: pragmatist answers in logic-thread; grief and necessity wrap into a braid — honest if not whole.
Non-WOW; echoes count bumps with this batch. Openings extracted from <div class="prose"> on main.