The door unlatched without a sound. No screech of rust. No hiss of decompression. Just absence, peeled back.
Cael stepped through the threshold like waking from a dream where someone else had worn his body.
The corridor beyond should've been familiar—white-stone ribs and obsidian floor panels, the torchlight frozen mid-flicker—but today it tilted wrong. Not physically. Not entirely. The shadows moved too slowly. The firelight bent toward him like it knew he shouldn't be here.
A glyph hummed near the ceiling. He looked at it—then again. The second time it wasn't there.
Two silent Overseers flanked him, neither speaking, neither glancing. Their masks were smooth bone, unmarred by sigil or script. That was supposed to mean neutrality.
It felt like surveillance.
"Thread integrity nominal," Cael muttered, quoting the training manual. His voice came out slower than he remembered choosing the words.
The System responded a half-beat late:
[THREAD DECAY: 27%]
[PERCEPTION GLIDE IN EFFECT]
[DO NOT FOLLOW SHADOWS YOU DO NOT CAST]
His throat tightened. Not fear. Not yet. Just a readiness. A residue. Like he'd survived something that hadn't finished happening.
They walked for minutes. Or longer. Cael stopped tracking time because it kept moving sideways.
A corridor they passed twice wasn't looped—it was repainted. The Overseers didn't notice.
Or maybe they did. Maybe this was part of the test.
He let his eyes wander—then immediately regretted it.
One glyph on the wall pulsed like a heartbeat.
Another bled down the stone in threads of ink that evaporated halfway.
But the worst was the hum. A faint melodic resonance from some distant, forgotten wing. Like someone humming to themselves. A broken tune.
Familiar.
He froze mid-step. One Overseer halted. The other did not.
"Is that—?"
His voice faltered.
"That hum. That… sound. It's not in the air, it's inside—"
The Overseer to his left twitched. Not a full reaction. Just a fractional pause, as if they'd meant to speak but forgot the shape of words.
No answer came. Just the glyphs vibrating faintly above them now.
They reached the Initiate Atrium.
Cael hadn't seen it since the breach. It felt smaller. Or he did.
Dozens of Initiates stood in loose lines across the chamber, murmuring to themselves, reviewing drills, prepping for assignments. When Cael entered—escorted, silent, broken—they all turned.
Not in unison. But close.
Some averted their gaze immediately. Others didn't hide their stares. One recruit whispered something that earned them a sharp elbow from their partner.
Brann stood at the edge of the formation, leaning on a rail like he owned it. His mouth curled—not quite a smile. Just recognition.
"You're back," Brann said. Loud enough for everyone to hear. "Did you leave something in the vaults, or bring something out?"
Cael didn't reply. Because for a moment, he saw Brann's face flicker. Not visibly. Not fully.
But something about the smirk didn't come from this moment. It belonged to another time.
One that hadn't happened.
"They stare like they expect me to bleed backwards," Cael thought. "They should."
Because underneath his robes, Spiral Dislocation writhed.
And he knew now, without being told, that nothing he touched would stay whole.
The rest of the Initiates didn't speak to Cael that day.
Not directly.
But he could feel it—the shift in cadence when he passed, the whispered fragments that cut off a syllable too late. The space between bodies growing wider when he moved through a corridor. Like he was a heat source no one wanted to admit they feared.
The Spiral Dislocation in his chest was calm. Which made it worse. Because it wasn't supposed to be.
Each time his breath hitched, the System pulsed a silent warning across his inner vision:
[Thread Drift: 29%]
[Warning: Passive Glyph Field Rejection Detected]
[Social Feedback Loop: Hostile Silence]
He sat alone during ration review. Alone during glyph recalibration. And when the training hall rang with the wet thunder of practice blades, Cael remained at the edge, not assigned to any sparring group.
Only Brann approached.
He walked over with exaggerated calm, wiping blood from his lip—clearly just off a match.
"I hear you've been 'detached for observation,'" Brann said, biting into a synthfruit like it offended him. "That what we call it now? When someone forgets how to be solid?"
Cael didn't answer. Not at first.
Then:
"What do you want, Brann?"
"To see how much of you came back. Corps needs to know which parts broke, right?"
"You're not Corps. You're barely Initiate."
Brann smiled wide. Too wide.
"Then why do I remember your dreams?"
The synthfruit split down the center. Brann dropped the halves, grinning as they oozed.
Cael stared at the juice pooling near his boots.
And saw, for a flicker of a second, another pair of hands holding the fruit—small, pale. The smell was wrong. Sweet like honey but sharp as blood.
He looked up. Brann had already walked away.
That night, Cael dreamed.
Only… it wasn't quite a dream.
It was a hallway. Not his. But familiar in the way a wound can be.
A soft voice hummed a tune he didn't know he knew. No words. Just vibration.
The stone beneath him was engraved with spiral glyphs, each warped inward like a sinkhole of meaning.
At the end of the hallway stood a girl.
Not the voiceless one from the Basin.Her outline was different. Her presence more… direct. A shard of purpose.
Hair black as collapsed light. Eyes gray, and watching him not like he was broken…
…but like she had broken him herself.
When he stepped toward her, she whispered—
"You weren't ready."
Then she vanished.
And the hallway bled.
Cael woke before the System could finish its warning.
[Memory Recursion Detected]
[Origin: UNKNOWN]
[Subject: IRI]
His hands were shaking. But not from fear.
From familiarity.
Who is Iri?
He knew the name.
But he wasn't supposed to.
The corridor to the Mind-Threading Wing was lined with soft-burning script lamps. Their glyphlight didn't flicker—it twitched, pulsing to some internal rhythm Cael couldn't match.
He was alone.
No Overseers.
No Initiates.
Just the door ahead, a slab of stone etched with an unfinished glyph. Spiral-shaped, but wrong. Like the architect had stopped midway through remembering how to finish it.
It opened at his touch.
No guards. No challenge. The System didn't prompt him.
Am I still under containment, or have they stopped bothering to contain me?
Inside: white panels. Clean surfaces. Clean air. Almost sterile.
Almost.
A thread-wrapped scribe sat cross-legged at the center of the chamber. Face hidden under a veil of frayed scripture, hands stained with ink that moved when he breathed.
He did not speak. Just gestured toward the ring of chairs.
Cael sat.
The glyphs lit up before him—a triad formation, pulsing gently.
[Commencing Cognition Integrity Test: FORM D]
[Subject: Cael.]
[Do not lie. Concept-slippage is monitored.]
Three glyphs hovered in the air. Memory. Cause. Effect.
Cael stared.
They drifted. Shifted.
One became a spiral. Another inverted.
Then they asked questions.
"When did you enter the Citadel?""What did you sacrifice first?""What is the girls name?"
The last one made him freeze.
The glyph dimmed.
Then pulsed red.
[Truth Breach: 0.2 seconds]
[Instability: Rising]
He closed his eyes. Focused.
But even that didn't feel sequential anymore. Thoughts arrived before they formed. Sentences were echoes he hadn't spoken yet.
One glyph began to blur.
[Thread Logic Drift: 34%]
[Spiral Dislocation ACTIVE]
[SPONTANEOUS GLYPH RESONANCE DETECTED]
[DANGER: SYSTEM MISREAD MAY OCCUR]
He reached forward, instinctively, to touch the one labeled "Effect."
It pulsed back.
And then—the test room cracked.
Not visually. Not physically.
But in the idea of a room. A momentary misalignment, like someone had misfiled the concept of "door," and now none of the walls knew where they began.
The scribe didn't move.
The glyphs folded back in on themselves.
[FORCED EXIT INITIATED]
[Thread Logic Collapse IMMINENT]
[You are not supposed to remember this.]
Then:
A voice.
Not the System.
Not the scribe.
Not even Iri.
Just a low, gentle whisper from nowhere.
"You shouldn't have touched that."
Cael woke.
Still in the chair.
The glyphs were gone.
The scribe was gone.
His hands trembled.
The System, after a long delay, finally responded:
[Cognition Report: Inconclusive.]
[Recommendation: Continued observation.]
[Severance integrity compromised.]
[Initiating administrative review.]
After the cognition test, Cael wasn't escorted back to his old dormitory.
He wasn't escorted anywhere.
The doors simply opened.
And the Citadel—vast, stone-blooded, whispering always—let him walk.
Through the Thread Halls, past half-shadowed alcoves, through stairwells that didn't always agree on where they ended.
He thought of asking the System for a route back to the Reconciliation Basin.
But every time he tried to bring up the interface, it glitched.
[ERROR: LOCATIONAL ECHO]
[Map Unavailable. Anchor Missing.]
[Recommendation: Do not move.]
He moved anyway.
Somewhere in the upper vault ring, a voice broke the silence.
Not a System alert.
Not a hallucination.
"Initiate Cael."
He turned.
Overseer Corra Venn stood at the base of a glyph-stained archway, robes immaculate, hands clasped.
Behind her, the air seemed to shimmer—not from heat, but from correction, as if her presence kept this space from slipping sideways.
"You weren't cleared to leave testing," she said.
"No one stopped me."
"Doesn't mean you weren't supposed to be stopped."
She stepped closer, inspecting him like he was a crack forming in glass.
"Thread dislocation. Cognitive rupture. Dream bleed. Do you know what we do to subjects who hit all three markers within a moon cycle?"
"Is it the part where you catalog the fragments?" Cael asked.
She blinked once.
"No. That comes after."
A silence. Not just between them—but in the Citadel itself. The ambient hum dropped out for a breath, as if even the stones were listening.
Then: another presence arrived.
A second Overseer.
Not dressed like Venn. This one wore nothing but pale threads and a mirror mask.
The glyphs on his palms shimmered with active logic-script.
And in his hand—he carried a containment spindle. A weapon used to seal concepts mid-expression.
"Initiate Cael," Corra said, softly now, "you are to remain here for judgment review. Do not resist. Do not engage."
"And if I'm not done remembering yet?"
Corra's expression shifted—just slightly.
Then she said:
"That's the part I'm afraid of."
System Prompt:[CONTAGION THRESHOLD BREACHED]
[Thread Drift at 42%]
[Fragment Stability: Uncertain]
[Overseer Judgement Protocol Initiated]
[Stand by for External Override…]