The stairwell narrowed into a hushed corridor—stone pressed close, whispering warmth and memory into Lynchie's shoulders as she descended. Her breath fogged faintly in the stillness, though no air stirred. Every few steps, she passed a carved alcove where moth-winged lamps glowed with a pale, mnemonic fire. They pulsed in cadence with her heartbeat. Or was it the other way around?
Something unseen guided her steps, as if the corridor itself remembered the shape of her soul.
When the corridor finally gave way, it opened not into another chamber but into a hollow of sky—an impossible atrium of constellations, spiraling in slow, dreamlike rotation far overhead. Lynchie stepped forward onto glass-like stone, her boots leaving no echo. The floor was inscribed with lines of spiraling script, etched in gold and black starlight, coiling inward toward a still point.
And at that point floated a pedestal of obsidian root.
Not grown, but petrified.
Upon it rested a single spiral glyph.
It shimmered. Not like light catching glass. But like memory being remembered.
Lynchie stopped at the circle's edge. She dared not cross yet. The glyph was unlike any sigil she'd seen in the Codices, its language twisting between syllables she knew and syllables she almost remembered. Her breath hitched.
"You were always meant to come here," came a voice. Not behind her. Within. A resonance in her sternum, like a note plucked from the strings of her spine.
The spiral flared, and with it came a flickering pulse of visions:
A golden-eyed figure turning away from a mirror that refused to reflect them.
A tree so vast it fractured light, and from its branches dripped syllables like dew.
A thousand voices whispering the same word, each in a different tongue—
Her name. Her brother's name. The name that remembered itself.
She collapsed to her knees. Not from fear. From recognition.
The glyph responded.
One of the etched lines uncoiled and lifted like a serpent of ink, winding around her wrist. It did not burn. It hummed. It knew her.
"The Trial of Spiral Echoes," she whispered. Or perhaps the spiral whispered it through her.
A door opened in the space beneath her mind, and for a moment, the stars above flickered—not dimmed, but shifted.
As if something vast and waiting had noticed.
And had begun to listen.