The floor trembled, but not from motion. It was as if the city itself exhaled, and beneath the glassy surface of the academy square, something began to unfurl. A design hidden under layers of sigils and stone ignited with faint iridescence, forming a spiral glyph that pulsed with memory.
Lynchie blinked once, then again. The pain from the vow still lingered faintly across her ribs, but her eyes were locked on the shifting pattern below. "This wasn't here before," she whispered.
"It's the Resonant Spiral," came a voice beside her. It was Head Curator Maelren, his usual impassivity softened by reverent awe. "It awakens only for those bound by tri-sigil convergence..."
She barely registered his words. Her senses filled with an inexplicable vertigo, as though the glyph were not flat, but a stair—a winding descent folding in upon itself, leading downward beyond the reach of sight.
"Am I supposed to follow it?" she asked, unsure if she even meant to speak aloud.
Maelren's brows furrowed. "You should not be able to see it yet. Not unless..."
But Lynchie had already stepped forward.
The moment her foot touched the edge of the spiral, she was no longer on the ground.
Sound vanished.
Color melted into grays.
The city above blurred into a shimmer of memory, as if she stood at the threshold between thought and dream. One more step, and the weight of every gaze vanished, replaced by an intimate silence. A hush like the one between heartbeats.
Descending, or perhaps just falling through the spiral's curve, Lynchie found herself in a space that did not feel like space at all. The light there was soft and slow, drifting like breath underwater. There was no floor, no ceiling. Only a long suspended stair, made of memory-stone and wordless oaths.
And lining the stair, like broken mirrors catching a light not of this world, were shards.
Reflections.
Each fragment held the echo of a face. Her brother's. But not the one she knew. Some were older, others younger. Some bore crowns, others scars. In one shard, he knelt in a field of stars. In another, he roared as a storm-born giant. And in one, quiet and terrible, he wept before an altar of chains.
"These are the lives he never lived," she breathed.
The air responded with a murmur—not words, but syllables—fragments of a language she did not yet know.
Her hand drifted toward the closest shard. Before she touched it, a flicker leapt to her fingertips.
Memory?
Or warning?
Then from above—or below, it was impossible to say—came a soft chime. A bell with no origin.
And a whisper, in a voice impossibly layered, not her own:
"You who descend the Stair of Echoes, beware—this is the path to the Spiral Codex. And once remembered, it cannot be unremembered."
Lynchie froze.
The stairs continued below, endless.
But now she knew:
She was not alone on them.