The world returned in broken pieces.
The first thing Cael felt was the cold—the kind that clung to bone like regret. He tried to breathe and felt the air reject him, like it wasn't meant to exist in the same rhythm he did anymore.
He blinked once.
And again.
And again.
Each blink landed him in a slightly different moment.
A pale stone ceiling above, stitched with threadline glyphs. A steel fixture glowing too bright. A nurse's heel turning down a hallway that hadn't existed the blink before.
He exhaled. Slowly. As if his body couldn't remember the full shape of breathing.
Where—
Then came the stuttering flood: pain, compression, heat. Numbness. His left foot was asleep, but his right hand felt too awake. His mouth tasted like chalk and memory ash. His spine itched in time with his heartbeat, though he wasn't sure if it was beating forward.
He was in the Thread Halls. He recognized them now. The Citadel's infirmary ward, deep in the east wing—designed to isolate fragment-warped initiates during post-Severance recovery. No windows. No clocks. No sequence.
Only soft walls etched with glyphs that rearranged when no one was watching.
He'd heard rumors that the rooms here looped. That time was flexible in the Thread Halls. You might wake up healed before your injury, or forget whether it was your first or fifth night.
Cael lifted a hand to his temple. His fingers met crusted blood and a translucent thread stitched directly into his skin—glowing with a dull orange pulse.
The System Thread, keeping his vitals tethered.
[Stabilization: 73%]
[Fragment Thread Cohesion: Volatile]
[Spiral Dislocation Recalibrating...]
[Warning: Thread Drift at 17%]
The warning blinked three times. Then vanished.
He let his arm fall.
On the far side of the chamber, a containment veil hissed—then released a small static pop. Cael turned his head.
Riven.
She stood beyond the ward seal. Expression flat. Her uniform folded at the sleeves like she hadn't left training. One hand clutched the other so tightly it had gone white at the knuckles. She didn't move. Didn't speak.
For a moment, Cael tried to remember if he'd already seen her. Had they spoken? Had she come by yesterday, or was this the first—
The veil hissed again. She was gone.
A flicker of Spiral Dislocation? Or had that moment already passed?
Cael pressed his back against the cot's hard support slab. He stared up at the ceiling until the glyphs rearranged again—this time spelling nothing he could recognize. He counted his breaths. Made it to eight. Then forgot if he'd already done that.
Peripheral time, he reminded himself.
He had severed it.
His sense of immediacy—gone. Gone so deeply that even remembering it felt like lying.
The silence deepened.
And then… he heard them.
Footsteps, soft and measured. Multiple sets. Approaching.
Someone was coming for him.
The path beneath the Vaults was colder than memory.
Cael walked barefoot, flanked by a pair of masked handlers, their grips firm beneath his arms. His legs worked in staggered rhythm—one step behind, one ahead. The corridor pulsed faintly, as if light itself had nerves, and they were twitching in sympathy with the trauma of those who passed.
They passed seven archways.
He remembered only three.
The walls glistened with veins of glyphstone—deep crimson strands wrapped in metallic sutures, pulsing faintly like stitched arteries. At the threshold of the final chamber, the stone turned black.
They entered the Reconciliation Basin.
The room had no corners. It was perfectly round, domed above like an upside-down eye. Thirteen robed Overseers lined the outer ring of the space, seated upon elevated ironwork perches. Their faces were covered in thin bone veils, emotionless and unmoving.
The only illumination came from glyph sconces mounted at intervals, glowing softly with mnemonic flame. The air shimmered with tension—something between incense and static.
At the room's center lay the Basin.
It was shallow, wide, and still—not filled with water, but with a viscous, mirror-black substance: Veritas Resin, made from condensed ash of sealed memories. The surface reflected Cael's face not as it was, but as it had been—moments delayed, expressions he hadn't made yet.
The handlers released him.
"Step forward," one intoned, voice flat as boiled parchment.
Cael obeyed.
His feet sank slightly against the polished obsidian floor. The Basin rippled at his approach.
[Begin Reconciliation Sequence]
[Fragment Thread Detected: Spiral Dislocation]
[Verbal Confession Required]
[Failure to Anchor may result in Recursion or Memory Loop]
He drew a breath.
"I… I gave up…"
The words faltered.
What had he lost?
He knew. He must have known. But even as the thought formed, it unspooled—like thread catching fire. He looked to the Basin. His reflection smiled a second too late.
The glyph sconces flickered. One of the Overseers shifted slightly.
His voice caught.
"I severed… peripheral time."
The Basin stilled.
The flames went out.
For one breathless moment, the room was utterly black.
Then—light returned. Dimmer than before.
One of the Overseers raised a gloved hand. Their fingers danced through the air, carving a sigil made of reversed lettering. It hung in the air, trembling—then collapsed inward like a dying eye.
The resin in the Basin stilled once more.
Cael turned to go.
But before he could leave, he heard it—another set of steps.
Barefoot.
Measured.
Soft.
A girl was being led in from the southern arch. She didn't walk so much as arrive, as if her body had been forgotten somewhere and now remembered where it was supposed to be.
Her hair was ink-black, flat, and motionless. Her skin was porcelain, untouched by sun or shame. Silver thread bindings wrapped around her ankles and wrists, etched with dying glyphs that pulsed faintly, like nerves remembering pain.
She didn't speak.
Didn't look at anyone.
She didn't even breathe, from what Cael could tell.
And behind her came the cold.
Corra Venn entered like a blade unsheathed.
Unlike the seated Overseers, she wore no veil. Her eyes were pale and sharp, the color of forgotten light. Her robe was white stitched with mirrored script, and her gloved hands reflected nothing at all—not light, not form, not memory.
She did not sit.
She stood behind the girl and watched Cael.
Not her. Him.
Her gaze wasn't curious. It was measuring.
He felt his breath stall.
She said nothing.
And neither did he.
But he knew. This wasn't a ritual.
The walk back was silent.
No handlers escorted him. No Overseers followed. But the feeling of being watched didn't fade—it just shifted form. Became internal. His own body observing itself, unsure of its own frame.
The corridor twisted in soft geometry, lit by crimson line-glyphs that didn't cast shadows. Cael walked slowly. Not from pain—but because he wanted to believe that if he moved too fast, the path might forget where it led.
He passed three doorways.
He didn't recognize any of them. But the third one opened for him.
The Initiate Dormitory. A sector of the Thread Halls reserved for fresh Severance Corps trainees too unstable to mingle, but not yet broken enough to cage.
There were no nameplates. No personal belongings. Each cell identical to the next: bare cot, recessed basin, glyph-scarred wall, a thread anchor above the headboard pulsing in quiet loops.
There were no photographs. No storage. No proof that anyone had been there longer than a breath.
He didn't know who slept in the room next to him.
He wasn't sure anyone did.
The walls were too thick for voices to travel. The floors had no creaks to betray footsteps. Even the light here didn't hum—it just was, like the idea of illumination rather than the real thing.
Cael stopped outside his door.
He didn't enter immediately.
He looked back down the corridor.
There was no one.
He didn't feel afraid.
Just wrong.
Fragment drift still coiled in his joints. Spiral Dislocation hadn't fully settled since the Basin. He'd catch glimpses of time out of order—a glyph flickering, a step echoing before it was taken, the breath in his throat starting after it had already been exhaled.
Peripheral time.
He remembered what he gave. And what he got.
He didn't dream.
He remembered that clearly—because the absence felt like a lie that kept repeating itself. Like he'd dreamed about not dreaming.
The Thread Halls never truly slept. The walls creaked when you weren't listening. The floor always felt slightly off-center, like gravity wasn't done deciding. And somewhere deeper—beyond the medical wing, past the glyph-forged gates—someone was always whispering.
Cael lay on his cot, motionless.
His breath came slow, but not steady. His body was still recovering, though from what, he couldn't quite piece together. Fragment trauma. Feedback recoil. Peripheral bleed.
He closed his eyes.
The wall to his left breathed.
Not gasped. Not creaked.
Breathed.
He opened his eyes again.
A shadow moved inside the stone.
"You reversed nothing."
The voice was not spoken. It was felt, crawling beneath the skin behind his ears.
"You merely borrowed forgetting."
He sat up.
The air thickened. His Spiral Fragment pulsed once—then again, harder, out of sync with his pulse.
He turned his head toward the glyph wall. There—etched symbols were rearranging on their own, writhing silently. They formed nothing. Then everything. Then nothing again.
Then—
A woman.
Upside-down.
Standing with her feet planted to the ceiling like it was the floor.
Naked eyes stared at him across the gap. Her face wasn't monstrous, but it wasn't right. Her features were just slightly too symmetrical. Her lips moved.
She mouthed his name backward.
Then she was gone.
The glyphs flickered and went still.
He didn't know how long he lay there. Long enough to forget how time passed. Long enough for the silence to settle back into place.
And then he heard it.
A soft sound. At first, he thought it was a wind. But it wasn't.
It was a hum.
Wordless. Low. Simple. The kind of tune a child might sing to themselves when they thought no one was listening.
It came from outside the room.
Cael didn't move. He didn't dare.
He knew he'd never heard it before.
But it still made his bones ache with something he couldn't name.