Claire
Claire didn't dream often, but when she did, the dreams bled.
She awoke in a cold sweat, fingers clenching the sheets as if she were still gripping the ceremonial dagger. The air felt thick, as if the house itself remembered her sins.
She sat in silence, staring at her reflection in the cracked mirror across the room. The spiral birthmark on her shoulder—once faint and forgettable—had darkened again. Not ink. Not a scar. Something deeper. Older. It pulsed like a second heartbeat.
She thought of her mother's voice, the one she hadn't heard in years:
"You don't bury the past, Claire. You carry it like a shadow."
Downstairs, she opened the hidden compartment beneath the floorboards and pulled out another book from the Holloway archives—this one bound in worn leather, wrapped in red cloth like it could bleed if torn open.
It contained stories of The First Flame—a Cleaner who had walked into a burning cathedral and emerged untouched, claiming to speak for the Spiral itself. The Flame had rewritten the rites. Had deepened them. Had introduced "The Division of Flesh," a more severe trial in which candidates were forced to consume parts of their own kin, ensuring loyalty not just to the ritual—but to blood.
Claire nearly slammed the book shut.
Was this her legacy?
Or her curse?
Eden
Eden was no longer sleeping.
Sleep required peace, and hers had fled the moment she saw the memory of a girl being branded with the Spiral in a stone room that no longer existed.
The image came uninvited—sharp, invasive, like something clawing behind her eyes.
The Matron had explained it in passing.
"Memory passes through blood," she had said. "You will dream things you never lived. Hurt from wounds that were never yours."
She wandered the underground sanctum that night, barefoot, until she found herself standing before the Spiral Altar again. The stones were slick with condensation. She pressed her hand to the surface, and the cold answered like it knew her name.
A whisper slithered across her thoughts.
"You are of the Hollowed Blood."
Eden stepped back.
No one had called her that before.
Not even her handlers.
She'd been an orphan. A stray. A blank slate.
But the Spiral remembered more than names. It remembered lineage.
Claire
In town, Claire met with an old contact—Father Whitlock, a disgraced priest who once tried to stop the Cleaners during the Holloway Wars. He now lived above a boarded-up chapel, surrounded by books and relics no one else dared touch.
He didn't greet her with kindness. Just a long, hollow stare.
"You're a ghost walking in your mother's skin," he said.
Claire dropped the book on the table.
"Tell me about the rites before the Flame."
He sighed. "You're chasing something with teeth."
"I'm past being afraid."
He nodded, slowly. "Before the Flame, the Cleaners were a death cult. Hunters of corruption, they claimed. But their rituals were simpler. Mark the Spiral. Bleed the heart. Drink the ashes. The brains came later."
Claire flinched. "Why?"
"To see." He tapped his temple. "They believed memory lived in the marrow of the brain. By eating it, they stole knowledge. But it also invited madness. The Spiral doesn't give without taking."
Claire clenched her jaw. "And what does it want from me?"
Father Whitlock looked down at the mark on her arm.
"Everything."
Eden
Back in the sanctum, the Matron gathered the initiates for another lesson—this one deeper, darker.
She spoke of The Nine Chains—the original Cleaners who founded the doctrine after the death of the First Flame. They had each mastered a branch of the Spiral:
Ash for destruction
Blood for inheritance
Bone for structure
Shadow for secrecy
Flesh for transformation
Grief for fuel
Fire for purification
Mind for memory
Silence for the unknown
Each chain created a doctrine, a role, and a rite.
"You, Eden, walk the path of Grief," the Matron whispered in private. "That is why your memories scream."
Eden stared down at her hands, unsure if they were still hers.
"If I don't want this—"
"You were born to it," the Matron interrupted. "Your blood is already calling."
Claire
That night, Claire opened her veins with a ceremonial blade—just shallow enough to bleed, just enough to trace the spiral with her own blood on the floor.
And in the silence of her attic, she whispered the truth she had never told anyone.
"I killed for them once. I wore their mask. I spoke their vows."
Her voice cracked.
"And I never stopped being afraid of what that means."