The glyph-child twitched again.
Not in the way a living thing startles, but in the way a line of text blinks when the code beneath it frays.
It was walking beside her one moment—small feet sinking into the moss-woven floor—and then its form split, staggered, replayed itself. A boy, his face lit with some impossible dawn. A beast, jaw too wide for its skull, fur spiraling into script. And then—nothing at all, an absence so clean it hurt to look at.
Each form lasted only the space of a breath. Sometimes less. Sometimes too long.
That night she dreamed of Darius.
But not the Darius she had known.
This Darius walked backwards through a corridor of his own stories, pulling them apart as he passed. His victories unspooled into mistakes, his wounds resealed into virgin skin. The weight he had carried vanished from his shoulders, but in its place came a hollowness, a kind of blank gravity that threatened to swallow the walls of the dream.
