The Anchor's resonance still pressed behind Cael's eyes. Every step rattled the inside of his skull, as if his bones remembered something his mind refused to keep.
The Vein wasn't a place you found on any Citadel schematic. It was older—built when the Corps still thought fragment breaches could be sealed by simply burying them. A wrongness hung in the air like fine dust. Script-lamps had long since gone cold, replaced by phosphor lichen that pulsed faintly along the walls, mapping the curve of the corridor in ghostlight.
They moved in silence.
Nara's bare feet made no sound against the bone-etched floor. She kept glancing at the walls, her gaze flicking to glyph marks half-swallowed by decay, her fingers twitching in faint shapes Cael didn't recognize.
The System pulsed:
[PATH INTEGRITY: UNKNOWN]
[THREAD DRIFT: 51%]
[ANCHOR RESONANCE: ACTIVE]
Cael blinked—and for half a heartbeat, the corridor became a riverbank. Moonlight glinted off water. His own hands, younger, dirt under his nails, holding something heavy and wet.
The moment fractured.
He stumbled.
Nara's hand shot out, steadying him. She didn't let go right away.
She knows I'm slipping, Cael thought. And she's still here.
They reached a downward spiral stairwell, its steps slick with some kind of crystallized condensation. Every sound here carried too far; the smallest shuffle of movement echoed like a footfall right beside them.
Cael froze.
Nara had already stopped, head tilting, eyes locked on the shadows between the stairwell's arches. Her Fragment shimmered faintly—a soft projection that flickered in and out, like memory struggling to stay solid.
The shadows moved.
At first, Cael thought it was another hallucination. Then it stepped forward.
The figure was human in shape but caught mid-motion—like its limbs couldn't agree on what order to move in. Its head twitched in micro-jerks. Uniform scraps clung to it, Citadel issue, marked with the seal of an Initiate long since erased from the rolls. Its mouth moved, spilling glyphs that hung in the air for half a breath before fading.
The System tagged it instantly:
[THREADBROKEN INITIATE]
[RECURSIVE STATE: UNRESOLVED]
[CONTAGION RISK: HIGH]
The thing lurched—but it wasn't running toward them in a straight line. It came in jolts, skipping frames, one moment five steps away, the next right on Cael's flank.
He barely parried in time.
The clash was wrong. The Threadbroken's blows didn't follow cause and effect—sometimes the strike landed before the swing began. Cael's Spiral Dislocation bucked in response, twisting his own reactions into the wrong moments. His sword met air more often than flesh.
Nara moved.
Her projection glyph bloomed midair—briefly freezing the Threadbroken's last state. For a second, its limbs locked into the position they'd been in two motions ago. It snarled—not like an animal, but like a person whose voice had been cut out of sequence.
Cael drove his blade forward, but the strike hit nothing. The body skipped again, reappearing behind him.
Pain flared down his spine as claws raked his shoulder.
He twisted—Spiral Dislocation pulling him sideways through the next moment—and his blade caught the thing across the ribs. It didn't bleed. It just dissolved into drifting motes of pale memory-ash, each whispering something too fast to catch.
One word did land.
His name.
Spoken backward.
The motes sank into the stairwell floor.
System prompt:
[UNSTABLE MEMORY FORM PURGED]
[RECURSIVE SIGNATURE: MATCHED TO SUBJECT'S THREAD]
[WARNING: RESONANCE INFECTION POSSIBLE]
Cael's pulse hammered.
Nara's gaze was still fixed on the fading motes. Her hand moved in a single sharp sign.
Danger. Ahead.
The ash should have stayed on the floor.
It didn't.
Cael wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and came away gray. Not much—just a smear. The taste was metal and cold rain. The kind of taste you remember from a place you swear you've never been.
[RESIDUAL SIGNATURE: INTERNALIZED][RECURSION MATCH: SUBJECT/CAEL][WARNING: RESONANCE INFECTION POSSIBLE]
"Possible," he echoed, breath thin. "You always choose the smallest word."
The stairwell shivered—no quiver of stone, just a slip of sequence. The landing below them repeated the same drip of water three times. Nara stepped sideways to test the loop; her shadow didn't follow. She frowned, then tapped the wall twice—remember—and the shadow snapped back into place like a scolded dog.
Cael flexed his sword hand. The bones felt distant, as if they were listening to someone else. His Spiral Dislocation fluttered against his ribs—eager, hungry, almost relieved.
"Don't," he told it under his breath. "You don't choose."
It chose anyway.
A chill ran up his spine, and with it came a vision that wasn't a vision: the Threadbroken's last five steps from the inside, the panic of a mind stuck on the wrong frame, the certainty that if you could just reach the next moment you'd be fine—then never reaching it.
He rocked once, heel to toe.
Nara was already there, palm flat to his sternum, not pushing—anchoring. Her containment mark flickered; a hairline crack ran through one glyph-stroke and spread like a spiderweb. She didn't look at it. She met his eyes and held them, the way you hold someone's name when they're about to misplace it.
The System dimmed, then returned, smaller:
[DRIFT SPIKE: +3%]
[ANCHOR RESONANCE: 18%]
[SPREAD PATTERN: LINKED TO RECENT PURGE]
"It jumped," Cael said. "When he came apart."
He meant it moved from him into me. Saying it in the simple way kept his thoughts from splitting.
The corridor ahead narrowed into a crawl of bone-etched braces and rusted conduit. Phosphor lichen pulsed along the seam like a slow heartbeat. Beneath that—deeper than sound—a hum answered the Spiral under Cael's ribs from below, like the basin was breathing under the floor.
Nara pointed down. Then traced a small spiral over her palm, not Corps form, the older, meaner one that had burned itself into Cael's robe upstairs. Her brows knit: it's the same.
"Anchor's pulling," Cael said. "And I'm… easier to pull now."
They moved.
The Vein tried to be clever. Twice the same turn offered itself from different directions. A door they hadn't opened stood open; when Cael glanced back, it was closed. He forced himself into the simplest rules—hand on the right wall, count steps, say each tenth number aloud. When his voice slipped backward on thirty, Nara squeezed his wrist and mouthed it for him without sound, thir—ty, dragging the syllable forward like a rope.
The smell changed first. Ash and iron gave way to wet clay, then the dry-sour tang of old parchment. Cael's stomach tightened. The taste in his mouth shifted to ink—not flavor, memory. He had licked a finger to turn a page. He had never done that.
[IDENTITY FEED: CROSS-TALK]
[SOURCE: UNRESOLVED]
[COUNTERMEASURE: NONE]
The corridor ended in a cradle of ribs and floor-plates sagging around a circular void. Not a pit—an absence. In its center stood a bent frame of machinery, its belly open to show a shallow dish: another basin, this one lined with glass shards and the fossil shine of old glyph-bone. The ash here was lighter, the gray of cooled smoke. It sloped toward the middle as if the room had been breathing out for years.
Nara knelt at the rim. She trailed two fingers through the dust, then lifted them. The ash tried to cling to her skin and couldn't. She pressed her palm down flat—testing—and the dust stilled. No breeze. No draft. Just her Fragment holding the moment in place.
A single mote escaped anyway and drifted toward Cael like it had remembered his name.
He held out his hand.
It landed on his palm and sank. No sting. No heat. Just taken in. His Spiral Dislocation thumped once in satisfaction.
Something below the basin answered.
A low note, like a voice trapped under a floor, asking politely to be dug up.
[ANCHOR BURIAL PROTOCOL: AVAILABLE]
[REQUIREMENT: HOST THREAD OFFERING]
[RETURN COST: UNDISCLOSED]
[ACCEPT / REFUSE]
He stared at the text until the letters blurred.
"Burying it… is part of walking it," he said. Saying it made the weight settle. "I thought it meant putting the Anchor down. It means putting me down with it."
Nara's hand closed around his wrist hard enough to hurt. She shook her head no once, sharp. Then she signed fast, efficient shapes: part of you / not all / choose the piece.
Choose the piece. As if there were a good one to give.
He looked into the basin. The lighter ash held shallow patterns—someone had scraped lines there once with a stick or a finger, a child's loops and a few careful letters. The letters were wrong-side, mirror-born, but he could read the shape if he let his eyes unfocus.
Three strokes that made a name he had said at a window that didn't belong to him.
"Iri," he said, quietly. The word sat heavy on his tongue and refused to leave.
The basin hummed. The floor-plates under their feet clicked into a new alignment, a quiet sound like teeth finding the right notch.
Irreversible, he thought. That was the word we promised ourselves. Every scene a gear that turns and doesn't turn back.
He rolled his sleeves past his forearms and set his palms into the ash. It was cold and fine and eager. It sank under his hands like breath. His skin prickled where it touched, as if it recognized a pattern and was grateful.
Nara did not stop him.
But she did not let go of his wrist until the last possible second.
The System dimmed to a narrow band.
[ANCHOR RESONANCE: 22%]
[THREAD OFFERING: UNSET]
[ADVISEMENT: CHOOSE WHAT YOU WILL NOT NEED AGAIN]
Cael let out a breath he didn't remember taking in and felt the shape of a thing he could give move forward from the back of his mind like a volunteer.
Not a face. Not a person. A feeling attached to rainy glass and a hand that had never been his.
He could put that down.
He swallowed.
"Stay with me," he said again, because he needed the sound to exist in time.
Nara's fingers, still dusted with ash, tapped twice on his forearm. With.
The hum below grew louder.
The Anchor waited. The Vein stilled. And Cael pressed his hands deeper, ready to decide which part of himself would not be coming back.