The brass gear pulsed again.
Not with light—but weight.
Like it remembered gravity differently than the world around it.
Hold it tight. Don't let go. Not yet.
Lycus clutched it tighter as he moved through the half-collapsed canal walkways beneath the Weaver's Market. Water no longer obeyed here. It rose in sheets, folded sideways across the brick walls, then fell back in place like someone replaying a shattered film.
The Tear's pulse had stopped hours ago—but his didn't.
Thud-thud. Pause. Thud.
He followed the rhythm. Always the rhythm.
Every corner held eyes. Not people—reflections.
Sometimes they blinked.
Watch. Always watch. Nothing moves without a trace.
He found it behind the salt-cracked shrine of the Hollow Loom: a wall that wasn't a wall.
At first glance, it was brick. Crumbling. Harmless.
But his Echo-Sense shrieked at the edge.
Something's wrong. The world's lying.
He closed his eyes, pressed the gear into the air where stone should be.
Click.
No lock turned. No sound replied. But the world breathed—slowly, like lungs inflating behind the stone. The surface rippled. Then melted inward.
A tunnel unfurled—slick with oil-light and thread-flesh.
He hesitated.
Scar itches. Fracture runs deep. Don't stop now.
He stepped inside.
No footsteps echoed. The tunnel swallowed sound.
Golden threads hummed within the walls, alive and whispering. He passed faded murals—figures with gear-heads bowed in worship, a cracked moon burning overhead, a spiral of bleeding symbols.
And there, waiting: a doorless Vault, shaped like an iris.
The center pulsed. A silver thread writhed from the brass gear in his palm, yearning.
He let it go. The thread extended, touched the iris—
—FLASH—
Dark.
He stood in a room made of memory.
Stone walls flickered with scenes from his life—except wrong. Twisted.
There he was, younger, in the orphanage—but his eyes glowed gold.
There he was, running through Caldareth—but the buildings bent backward, screaming.
There he was, at the market—but he was the one casting shadows from above, watching others cower.
Whose life is this? It's not mine.
He clutched his head. The pain returned—not just behind the eyes.
"This isn't mine—these aren't me—"
But the Vault didn't care.
A voice—not heard, but threaded into him:
"Truth fractures. So you may contain more."
A figure emerged—his silhouette. But tall, featureless, wrapped in golden filament.
The Flawborne. A version of him that was perfect—and wrong.
It attacked without sound.
The fight wasn't physical. It was resistance.
Every blow was a memory he'd buried. Every feint, a doubt he couldn't name.
When he refused, it struck. When he surrendered, it split.
He bled threads. Gold. Silver. Black.
Damn this blood. Damn this weight.
Then, in desperation, he reached for the gear—
It flew to him.
On instinct.
A heartbeat.
A promise.
The Vault blinked.
And the Flawborne dissolved.
When Lycus awoke, he was lying at the Vault's threshold, sweat clinging like second skin.
His wounds were sealed—but not healed.
The brass gear rested beside him, now cracked down the center. Yet alive. And something was carved into its teeth, words he'd never seen before:
"THE ARCHITECT APPROVES."
He stared.
Then rose.
Above, the Tear pulsed again.
He wasn't ready.
But he had been seen.