There was no light in the place they kept him. Only the hum of restraints. Glyphs like threads of static carved across every wall.
Cael's eyes opened.
He couldn't tell if he was lying flat or suspended. He felt stretched—not across space, but across a question.
Something had unthreaded him.
His limbs responded with delay. His breath fed a lung that wasn't sure it had ever belonged to him. One thought tried to crawl up his throat: Where's Riven? But it didn't make it all the way out.
[THREAD STABILITY: ERROR]
[RECALIBRATING CORE COHERENCE...]
He shifted—barely—and found his wrists were bound, not by shackles, but by tether glyphs, writhing like ink pulled through water. They curled and uncurled with every skipped heartbeat.
He wasn't alone.
Beyond a semi-translucent veil of obsidian script, voices murmured. Calm. Cold.
"He's still alive?" "You saw what the Sanctum did. He should've collapsed with the recursion." "Fragments like his aren't survivable without... edits. Which means something interfered." "Or someone."
Cael tried to move again, but a spike of nausea cracked through his core. His mouth tasted like copper filament. Somewhere in the back of his skull, a memory rotated—but never aligned.
He blinked.
Behind the veil, a silhouette stepped forward. Broad-shouldered. Masked. The smooth, eyeless face of Vaeth Ocran, the Black Script.
"Two threads passed through the fracture," Vaeth said, as if recounting history. "But only one returned."
Another voice—clipped, precise—joined the discourse. Corra Venn.
"Returned, perhaps. But not intact."
There was a pause. Cael's skin began to itch—beneath the skin, like the glyphs had started swimming inside him.
"We should nullify him," said one voice. "Containment failed the last three Reverse passers," said another. "He's already a variable." "He's a hazard," said Corra. "And he doesn't remember the laws he broke." "Exactly," Vaeth whispered, each word delicate and final. "That makes him useful."
A silence followed.
Cael exhaled—slow, disjointed. Every breath came with a different memory.
His lips parted. He didn't mean to speak. But he did.
"…Riven…"
The veil shimmered like a struck bell. Vaeth tilted his head, listening to nothing. Corra's form grew still.
"He remembers the name," she said. "That shouldn't be possible."
[SEQUENCE STABILITY: COMPROMISED]
[PERMISSION FLAG: NULL—SPEECH UNLOCKED]
Vaeth approached the veil.
His voice—like wind carving names into stone—folded inward.
"Let him take shape. Then decide what must be trimmed."
He raised one hand, and the tethers binding Cael began to thrum.
One by one, they tightened.
The veil receded.
Cold flooded the room. Cael felt it press against his temples—not the chill of air, but clarity. The kind that strips away excuses. That demands proof of reality.
Footsteps approached. Not heavy. Not hasty. Deliberate.
Corra Venn entered alone.
She wore the robes of a full Overseer—threadbare black traced with silver-lined script—but no mask. Her face was expressionless, her skin pale as if bleached by moonlight. Eyes like empty verdicts.
No emotion. No fear. Only method.
She didn't speak at first. She circled Cael's slab like a scribe preparing to cut parchment. Her gaze drifted over the tether glyphs, the readout pulsing above him.
[THREAD DRIFT: 74%]
[TEMPORAL LOGIC FUNCTIONALITY: DEGRADED]
[NARRATIVE COHESION: INTERMITTENT]
Her voice, when it came, was smoother than ice:
"What's the last thing you remember?"
Cael blinked.
A flicker—Riven's eyes through spiraling light. Her fingers stretched toward him, but twisted the wrong way, as if time had rewritten her reach.
He tried to answer, but what came out was:
"It wasn't the Gate."
"Wasn't?"
"It bent... it wasn't supposed to, but it bent. The space turned back on itself. It didn't open outward—it… it opened in."
Corra didn't flinch. Her fingers rested against a floating slate.
"You speak like someone who remembers a map that no longer exists."
"She was there," he whispered. "And then she wasn't."
"You're referring to the other initiate—"
"Riven."
Corra paused. Something clicked softly in her throat. Not surprise. Calculation.
"Her name is not in the logs."
"You erased her?"
"The Sanctum took her. That was her Severance. You only carried it forward."
[RESPONSE TIMING ERROR: ±6 seconds]
[ANCHOR CHECKSUM: FAILED]
The glyph-lights above Cael's head dimmed—then flared.
One surged to red.
[MEMORY LOOP DETECTED]
[SEVERANCE FRICTION: 12% ABOVE TOLERANCE]
Corra looked at the spiral beginning to form beneath the slab.
"Your thread is unraveling."
She stepped closer, eyeing him like a volatile sigil.
"You shouldn't be alive."
"Neither should she," he said, voice flat. "But I saw her."
Another glyph surged—a shriek of color behind his eyes. His breath caught. For a split second, he was somewhere else—beneath water, beneath stone. A basin of ink. And two mirror-perfect eyes looking back.
When he returned, Corra was watching him, but she had taken a step back.
"They'll want to cut it out of you," she said softly. "Whatever it is that's leaking."
"Will they?"
"They always do."
She turned without another word and exited through the glyph-wall, which sealed shut behind her.
The room fell silent again. But now, Cael wasn't alone.
A glyph flickered once across the wall opposite him. Just a shimmer of heat—And then a single phrase, echoing in his skull:
"You carried it forward."
Cael lay still on the slab.
But the room had started to move.
Not in the physical sense—nothing shifted, nothing fell—but the rules began to breathe differently.
The ceiling above him blinked. Once. Not the light—the surface. As if space had eyelids.
Then it began to fracture.
At first it looked like a hairline crack. Then it spiraled. A perfect glyph-spiral, etched by no hand, trailing smoke like thought made visible.
A warning tone pulsed in the walls.
[GLYPH STABILITY: COMPROMISED]
[UNAUTHORIZED FRACTAL EMERGENCE DETECTED]
[SOURCE: SUBJECT THREAD-78-CAEL]
A medic entered, young—barely older than Cael. His name was etched faintly into his collar: Verin. He carried a diagnostic rod and a data slate.
He didn't make it five steps in.
The moment he crossed the tether line, he gagged. Blood trickled from one nostril. Then both ears.
His mouth opened to speak—but no sound came out. His jaw moved out of sequence with time. The words came before he thought them.
He dropped the slate and ran.
The rod shattered as it hit the floor, releasing a static scream that flickered the lights. The spiral on the ceiling widened.
The walls hissed.
More Overseers arrived. Four. Then six. Two masked. One held a memory containment shroud. Another activated a perimeter glyph—which bent backward, inverting into itself like a Möbius twist.
The leader cursed. "He's leaking recursion."
Then, the voice that settled them all:
Vaeth Ocran.
"Let it run."
The others hesitated.
"The more thread he unravels, the more clearly we'll see the pattern," Vaeth said.
He stepped to the slab and looked down at Cael—not through the mask, but into him, as if that void of a face wasn't a covering, but a gateway.
"Let the glyphs write him as he is. Then we'll know what must be severed."
A moment passed. Then another.
The spiral above pulsed once, dimmed… and receded.
The static stopped.
Cael, half-aware, could barely move. But he understood.
They weren't fixing him.
They were watching.
Waiting to see what broke next.