Lynchie had not remembered when she stood. Her hand trembled faintly, fingers curled around the glowing feathered quill as if it had chosen her, not the other way around. Around her, the Circle remained unmoving, the reverent silence broken only by the flickering light of the lanterns—seven of them, each suspended on transparent hooks along the far wall, each shaped like an eye.
Evanthe's voice returned, gentle and formal, the kind used when one recited truths older than language. "The Circle of Quiet Masks does not demand your oath. It only listens. And when it listens, it remembers."
Zev shifted behind her, his boots scraping quietly. His silence was no longer protective—it was contemplative, like he had seen something within her even she hadn't yet uncovered. Lynchie hated that. Hated how he could always seem to know the shape of a secret before she understood its weight.
"Why now?" she asked, voice low. "Why this?"
The hooded figure nearest her, the one draped in teal and stitched with constellation threads, turned just enough to reveal a jaw of amber scales. Not a human at all. Not fully.
"Because the Spiral Wards have stirred," the figure said. "And your dream-bond sang through the glyphwork before the Academy's heartstone."
Lynchie narrowed her eyes. "What did it sing?"
None answered.
Instead, Evanthe motioned toward the seventh lantern—the one in the center. It burned with a light not quite gold, not quite white, but something older, something with edges.
"Touch the Convergence Lantern. See if it opens for you."
The moment Lynchie stepped closer, the glyphs etched around the lantern's pedestal shimmered. Not visible ones—not to normal eyes—but to her, in that instant, they bloomed. Syllables without vowels. Spirals without centers.
She brushed the lantern.
A rush of pressure slammed through her chest.
Her ears rang.
Images bloomed.
A city beneath a mirror-sea, cracking open. A dragon spiraling around a dying sun. Feathers, inked with memory, falling into a basin that bore her name.
And at the center of it all—a boy who was not a boy, whose smile carried too many echoes, whose silhouette bent light as if the world struggled to remember what he looked like.
The lantern flared.
Zev caught her as she collapsed.
She did not faint, not quite.
But in the breathless moment between standing and falling, she heard a voice not of this world.
It spoke from within the quill she still clutched:
"One spiral has turned. The others await. You are the ink yet unwritten."
Then darkness surged, fragrant with old parchment and fresh rain.
And the quill began to bleed.