The warning glyph cracked first—not in sound, but in shape.
A spiral symbol engraved above the corridor's threshold warped, as if twisting against its own design. Then came the hum, sharp and pulsing, followed by a flickering strobe of mnemonic light that made thought itself itch. Every initiate in the lower Thread Halls turned at once… then again… and again.
The siren looped.
Cael didn't remember getting to his feet. One second he was seated at a diagnostic terminal in the Thread Hall's intake bay, and the next, he was stumbling backward through half-solid light.
The Red Spiral Alert. Glyph distortion plus time loop. A breach. Internal.
Inside? That wasn't supposed to happen. Citadel Vaults were ringed with layered scriptures—seals drawn from Order, Memory, and Silence. Spiral-class anomalies weren't supposed to slip past three glyph barriers.
They did now.
Cael clutched at the wall, but it buckled in his grip—no, that was his own hand, sliding two seconds out of sync. Spiral Dislocation had begun to surge again, pulses fluttering from the back of his skull to his fingertips.
A scream cut through the air, high and thin and folding in on itself.
Then—he collided with someone.
He nearly fell.
The pressure of a hand steadied him.
Riven.
Her hair was damp with sweat, her mouth a flat line. There were dark glyph-burns on her sleeves from a prior exercise, and one was still glowing. She had a curved blade sheathed along her back, not standard Corps issue. Her breathing was slow, controlled.
"You're bleeding from your eye," she said, without a trace of concern.
Cael blinked. A thin trickle of blood was, in fact, sliding down his cheek from his left eye. He hadn't noticed.
He started to speak, but Riven cut in, voice low and tight: "A Spiral breach? This deep? That means memory's fraying again…"
"What does that mean?"
"They shouldn't be able to pass the fractal gates unless someone inside's already started looping."
She checked the hallway's edge. The sigil strobes behind them intensified—warping in and out of geometries.
"If it's a Jester," she muttered, almost too quietly, "don't say your name aloud. Don't even think it clearly."
That stopped him cold. Cael's voice dropped to a whisper. "How do you know that?"
Riven looked at him for just a second too long. Her lips parted—then closed. A shrug. Too casual.
"Because I forgot someone once," she said, "and they stayed forgotten."
And just like that, she turned and sprinted toward the collapse zone, drawing her blade as she ran.
Cael hesitated.
But the glyph behind him pulsed again. His name flickered at the back of his skull—fuzzy, uncertain. And forward, beyond the bend, something was laughing.
The corridor was already losing shape.
Not crumbling—shifting, like someone had changed the rules behind the bricks. Angles twisted into spirals. Light jittered. The wall glyphs bled sigil static that tasted like copper and sleep.
And in the center, humming to itself with twelve mouths and no eyes, danced the Spiral Jester.
It pirouetted through the warping hall, limbs corkscrewed in opposite directions. Its flesh undulated like a question mark that never resolved. It bled laughter—not sound, but rhythm, slipping into Cael's thoughts like a childhood memory he couldn't place.
A sing-song voice bubbled up:
"I caught your name on a broken string—Now you forget, and I will sing."
Cael nearly gagged. He didn't remember stepping this close.
His Spiral Dislocation pulsed—unstable. Gravity buckled. His legs lagged behind his torso by a beat. His vision fractaled for 0.2 seconds—two Riven's standing next to each other before snapping back into one.
Riven crouched at the left wall's edge, pale and focused. Her blade stayed low, finger already glowing with Fragment charge. She whispered:
"Don't speak. Don't even think your name."
[System Warning: Thread Drift at 62%]
[Temporal Misfire: 0.4s Lag | Peripheral Cause-Effect Decoupled]
Too late.
The Jester's mouth-spool jerked sideways, and a new voice poured from its chest—Cael's own, fractured and hollow:
"You're already forgetting how to block."
It lunged. Not toward either of them—but through the air.
Time bent.
Cael tried to dodge. Moved early.
The backward-swinging arm clipped him across the ribs. Something cracked. His balance twisted wrong—he fell upward, caught by a stair that wasn't there.
[Skeletal Desync: 12% | Hip Alignment Collapse]
[Instinctive Reaction Memory: Fragmented]
A second blow came—not physical, but conceptual.
Cael felt his name stutter in his mind. Then vanish.
He looked at Riven. Couldn't recall who she was. A blur. A shape. His own hands looked wrong.
The Jester laughed, spinning between walls like a child playing tag with ghosts.
It whispered in a dozen stolen tones:
"I killed the boy you used to be—His name forgot, and fed to me."
Riven didn't hesitate. She flicked a reverse-glyph into the ground—a destabilizer rune—and kicked it toward the creature. It flared beneath the Jester's spinning legs.
A short glitch. The Jester's movement froze for 0.3 seconds.
Riven moved.
She jumped from wall to wall—not elegant, but fast. Her body shimmered. She wasn't even using speed. She was disregarding path. She brought the blade down across the Jester's spine-thing.
It screamed—and not in pain.
The scream twisted the air. A name—not hers, his—flickered back into Cael's mind. He caught it. Cael. He was Cael. He stood. Activated Spiral Dislocation—
Immediate pain. His femur warped. His shoulder dislocated cleanly as he moved.
[Thread Drift: 78% | Fragment Instability: CRITICAL]
But he arrived behind the Jester mid-spin.
Slashed.
The creature's back tore—but it turned anyway. Laughed in his mother's voice.
"You're doing it wrong, Cael. You're leaving too much of yourself behind."
He staggered.
The Jester coiled again—and then split open, revealing a chorus of dozens of half-formed mouths, all mumbling broken memories.
It wasn't trying to kill him. It was trying to write itself into him.
Riven saw it too.
"Strike the floor," she barked.
He did.
His blade hit a partial glyph—her earlier destabilizer. The echo surged backward.
The Jester flailed—caught between three non-simultaneous time points.
Cael screamed. Activated Spiral Dislocation one final time.
[Fragment Warning: THREAD RUPTURE RISK: 89%]
[System Advisory: Initiating False Memory Bleed Protection]
He didn't care.
He leapt. Slashed from above while Riven cut from below.
The Jester's form fractured—not broken, just disagreed with itself.
And in a burst of static—it erased itself.
Gone.
Silence returned to the corridor, bent and laced with soft after-echoes.
Cael collapsed to one knee.
His name seemed real again. His skin itched like a memory. He looked at Riven, who stared forward, blade still drawn.
Then… she turned to him.
"You're bleeding from places that don't bleed," she said.
He almost laughed.
The glyph corridor hissed behind them.
Cael leaned against the wall, breath uneven, vision still slipping at the edges. His bones pulsed out of sync. Some part of his shoulder hadn't returned to normal yet—he could feel it ticking like a metronome out of phase.
Riven stood several paces away, silent. Her blade remained unsheathed—not because she expected more, but because she didn't trust the quiet.
Then… from the far end of the warped corridor—where the walls spiraled into each other like kneaded stone—a sound. Faint. Low. It wasn't a voice.
It was a hum.
Not song. Not melody.
A tone that resonated with the bones.
Cael stepped forward.
His fingers brushed the sigil-burned wall at the spiral's heart.
The wall felt soft. Not pliable—perceptual. Like thought pretending to be stone.
And then it shimmered.
He wasn't standing anymore.
He was watching himself—from the other side.
From behind the wall.From a corridor that didn't exist.
Except it did. Inverted. Mirrored. Reversed.
His other self walked backward through the spiral glyph. His mouth moved.No sound came.
Then his voice filled the space
No—not his.
The System's tone overrode his thoughts: metallic, neutral, final.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: REVERSE SANCTUM ECHO DETECTED]
[CLASSIFICATION: Conceptual Rupture]
[DESCRIPTION:]— A psychic event where Severed aspects attempt to rebind with host consciousness.
[LOCATION TYPE:]— Non-physical.— Constructs formed from residual mnemonic mass, often mistaken for space.
[EFFECTS:]▪ Conceptual Bleed▪ Identity Recursion▪ Timeline Instability▪ Self-Overwriting Events
[CAUTION:]— Entry is irreversible.— Observation is contagious.
[THREAD SECURITY COMPROMISED.]
He staggered back from the wall—blood in his nose, memory skipping like a scratched record.
A cold pressure settled behind his eyes. He could still feel it—the System wasn't finished.
[ADDITIONAL PROMPT: One of you has already been here.]
Cael flinched. The vision shattered.
He was back.
Collapsed on one knee. Head aching.Riven staring at him now—expression unreadable.
"What did you see?" she asked.
Cael opened his mouth. Closed it."I think… I think we're already inside something."
Riven glanced down the corridor again, toward where the Jester had vanished.
"Maybe we never left," she said.
They didn't speak after that.