The dunes shifted beneath Kael's feet like something alive, constantly swallowing and rebuilding itself. The deeper he went into the ashlands, the less the world seemed to follow rules. Sunlight filtered through the sky like it was being poured through stained bone. The wind whispered in patterns, sometimes words, sometimes laughter, and always from the wrong direction.
Kael walked in silence. He didn't speak aloud anymore. There were too many voices already—none external, but all within. They surfaced in fragments when he wasn't paying attention. Words in other tongues. Rhythms of breath he'd never practiced. A name: Mira. A blade stance he'd never learned but now fell into without thinking. When he stepped, it was often to a beat that didn't come from his own pulse.
He was walking someone else's path. Or maybe several.
The brand on his chest had cooled to a dull gray, no longer pulsing, but never quite fading. When he touched it, it didn't burn—it resonated. Like a tuning fork waiting to sing again.
It had been three days since the Pale Nest. Maybe four. Time was elastic here.
He hadn't eaten.
He hadn't needed to.
He couldn't remember the last time he blinked.
In the far distance, black spires rose from the dunes—leaning, half-buried structures made of bone or something worse. Their surfaces were etched with curling spiral glyphs and ringed with scavenged core fragments. They stood like obelisks on a forgotten battlefield, signaling to no one but the wind and whatever old things still listened.
Kael approached the largest of them. His steps slowed as the air thickened—no longer hot, but heavy. Each breath came slower, as though the sand itself was waiting for him to exhale before allowing more in.
Then he saw it.
Nestled between two leaning spires, half-covered in curling black reeds, was a shrine built into the ribcage of something enormous. A creature long dead. A leviathan, maybe. Its bones curved like cathedral arches, the exposed marrow calcified into pale columns. Someone—or something—had turned its corpse into a temple. A temple made for worshipping the broken.
Dominion Core fragments were stacked in crude altars—most of them cracked, burned, or darkened. Spiral glyphs were painted on the ribs in rust-red pigment. Long strips of cloth fluttered in the wind, each one tied with braided cords of hair.
And at the center of it all, kneeling motionless before a pile of smoking embers, was a figure draped in ash-colored robes, wearing a mask made entirely of teeth.
Kael stepped forward, his bone dagger ready but low. He didn't speak. Not yet.
The figure didn't move.
Then it inhaled—sharply.
"You burn different," it said. The voice was high and scratchy, like dry reeds rubbed together. "You breathe where others only echo."
Kael said nothing.
The masked figure tilted its head. "Are you the Second? No… too old. Too slow. You carry too much that is not yours."
Kael stopped three meters from the shrine. The glyphs around the altar hummed faintly. Not power—memory.
"I'm not here to join your Order," Kael said finally.
The masked figure gave a dry chuckle. "Good. We are not an Order. We are the Ash-Touched. The forgotten. The failed."
It stood, bones cracking beneath the robe as it rose to full height. The mask of teeth clicked faintly as it turned its head. "You carry the Spiral. It sings in your blood."
Kael didn't answer.
"Come," the Ash-Touched figure said, gesturing toward the altar. "Look upon what came before you."
Kael stepped into the shrine, the temperature dropping instantly. The glyphs glowed faintly at his presence.
On the altar, stacked beneath strands of burnt cloth and dead hair, were six small fragments of core—each embedded in a sliver of bone.
"They were like you," the figure said softly. "Unbound. Born wrong. Pulled through."
Kael looked closer. The bones were different—some human, some not. One had three fingers and scorched writing across it.
"What happened to them?"
"They remembered too much."
The masked figure sat beside the altar, its voice quieter now. "One tried to eat the sun. One tried to rewrite pain. One simply vanished. Only three ever bore the spiral."
"And I'm the fourth?"
The figure shook its head slowly. "You are the third. The second was erased. You are the last we'll see."
Kael didn't know how to respond to that. Instead, his gaze drifted to a larger core behind the altar—different from the others. Whole. Untouched. But dark.
"What's that?"
"The Witness Core," the figure said. "It remembers… what it's shown. If you offer it blood, it will offer you what it carries."
Kael stepped closer. "And what does it carry?"
The masked figure didn't answer.
Kael drew the bone shard from his belt and cut across his palm—just deep enough. The blood was thicker than it should've been.
He pressed his hand to the core.
It was cold. And then it wasn't.
Everything dropped.
The shrine vanished.
The bones dissolved.
He was falling, spiraling, tumbling through light and thought and fire.
And then he was her.
Mira.
He was her body, her breath, her scream. She ran through fire-choked corridors, dragging someone too small to stand. A child. Chains snapped behind her. The sky outside was not a sky—it was a wall of static.
Her legs burned.
The child slipped.
She turned and something white and hollow rose from the floor with too many hands.
Kael tried to pull away. He couldn't. It wasn't a memory. It was a reliving.
Mira screamed and threw the child forward just as the hands wrapped around her throat. She saw her own death. And then—
She looked up.
She saw Kael.
Not then.
Now.
Staring at her through time.
Her expression changed.
"You," she whispered. "Why do I know your face?"
The memory shattered.
Kael fell backward, gasping. His hand tore free from the core. Blood still dripped from his palm, but now it was glowing faintly. Faint spiral lines, barely visible beneath the skin.
The shrine was silent.
The masked figure sat motionless.
Kael stood slowly, vision swimming.
The voice returned—only this time, it didn't speak in his head.
It echoed from the glyphs around the shrine. The bones. The core.
Sequence Disordered.
Dominion Witness Update: Failed.
Anomaly confirmed. Tag: Third Memory-Bearer. Spiral Variant.
Kael closed his eyes. The wind outside the shrine screamed once like a name trying to claw its way out of a mouth that no longer remembered how to form it.
When he opened them again, the Ash-Touched figure was gone.
Only the mask remained, lying on the altar, teeth stained faintly red.
Kael turned and walked out into the ash.
He didn't know who Mira was.
But she knew him.
And that was worse.