The days after the Binding Oath passed in a silence unlike any the world had ever known. It was not the absence of sound, but the hush that follows a great storm—the stillness that lets wounds begin to breathe.
Kael awoke beneath a blackroot tree, the earth beneath him warm, humming faintly with the Spiral's new rhythm. Nyra sat nearby, her Hollow Tongue closed for now, fingers weaving glyphs into a thin scroll of translucent bark. They did not speak for a long while. They didn't need to.
But peace, even one earned, is never permanent.
The Lexicon of Shards had changed. It now pulsed like a living heart, and its pages turned of their own accord, revealing warnings in the margins—ink bleeding across runes that had never been there before.
One message glowed in Kael's dreams each night:
"The Spiral bleeds still. The Wound lies deeper than the Maw."
When the sky fractured on the sixth day, they understood. A ribbon of red light split the clouds above the Eastern Reaches, visible even from the Valley. It pulsed with pain—an unnatural, rhythmic agony that echoed in the bones of those attuned to the Spiral.
It was not over.
With Nyra and Ayel, Kael set out toward the fracture. They crossed the River of Names, where the waters whispered the identities of the lost. They traversed the Desert of Lanterns, where every grain of sand was said to be the memory of a forgotten star.
They passed through Hollowmere, where an entire city had vanished into its own reflection. Ghosts roamed there—kind, lost, harmless—and Nyra offered them songs in exchange for safe passage. Even the dead, it seemed, feared what stirred in the East.
The Spiral's Wound awaited them in the Shattered Crescent—a once-sacred mountain range torn open by an ancient war between the first oath-bearers and the Maw's predecessors. The terrain was jagged, surreal, as if the world itself had been crumpled like paper.
In the heart of the Crescent, they found it: a wound not in land or sky, but in reality itself. A tear of infinite depth, where stars bled backwards and time refused to hold shape. From it poured not darkness, but light too bright to understand. Light that screamed.
Guarding the wound was a figure—a woman made of silver strings, her face hidden behind a mask carved from starlight.
"I am the Weaver," she said. "And you must not seal this wound. You must choose to understand it."
Kael approached her, the Lexicon open, glowing.
"Explain," he demanded.
She did.
The Maw had been a symptom, not a source. The true affliction was the Spiral itself. Its endless turning had consumed too much, pulled too tightly. The fabric of being had frayed under the weight of memory, of repetition, of unfinished stories that looped endlessly.
"This is not a curse," the Weaver said. "It is fatigue. The Spiral is tired of turning."
The Lexicon agreed.
The solution was not in war or fire or binding. It was in story.
"You must rewrite the Spiral," the Weaver whispered. "You must be its next page."
Kael did not sleep that night. He watched Nyra sing into the stars, watched Ayel study ancient maps, watched the wound pulse like a second sun.
And he decided.
He would descend into the wound.
He would rewrite the world from its center.
And if he failed, there would be no Kael, no Nyra, no Spiral—only silence.
The journey inward was not one of steps, but of shedding.
Kael left behind his flame first—burning it into the saltstone ground until only embers remained. Then he surrendered his name, sealing it into a page torn from the Lexicon, which Nyra folded and tucked beneath her tongue. Finally, he unmade his reflection, allowing it to return to the Tower that Weeps.
The Weaver watched, nodding once. "You may now enter."
The wound accepted him.
Kael fell. Or perhaps rose. Or perhaps spun in every direction at once. The laws of time and gravity collapsed into a single note—a song with no beginning or end, echoing across the bones of creation.
He saw things—visions that pierced his soul.
He saw himself born not as fire, but as void. He saw a version of Nyra who never escaped the Hollow Choir, who drowned in her own echoes. He saw a Spiral that ended long ago, crumbling into ash.
And he saw hope.
Hope in the form of threads—each a story, woven into a tapestry so massive it wrapped around the cosmos. But the tapestry was torn, fraying at a thousand seams. The Spiral was unraveling not from evil, but from neglect.
At its center, Kael saw a loom.
And he took it.
He wove with memory, with choice, with sacrifice. He stitched in every lesson he had learned, every bond he had forged. He did not seek to control the Spiral, but to offer it rest.
He sang a lullaby with Nyra's voice. He burned truth into thread using his own fire. He drew guidance from Ayel's maps, etching new paths into existence.
And as he wove, the wound began to close—not healed, but transformed. It did not disappear. It became a window.
A glimpse into a new Spiral—one reborn, not rewritten.
When Kael emerged, his body was changed. He glowed faintly with a light not his own. His voice shimmered with harmonies. He could no longer lie.
Nyra ran to him. Ayel bowed. The Weaver wept.
The Spiral turned again.
But this time, it danced.