The Court of Spirals burst forth like a geometrical impossibility from the lost southern rift, its spires turning in impossible forms that even the Old Architects had refused to enumerate. It was a place beyond linear time, where causality bent to the will of those who could perceive through the thin slits of the material world. And here, in the eye of the whirlpool of paradox and concealed truth, the next great upheaval would begin.
Aeltheris was at the Threshold of the Spiral Gate, his void-bone cloak rustling softly in the dead air. Above, the black sky churned with hidden tempests. By his side were his Vanguard—the Mirrorborn twins, the Thought-Titan K'Tharion trapped within his ghost cage of geometric logic, and Velmoria, whose Heart-Furnace still glowed softly from the wounds she had suffered in the last battle.
"You can feel it, can't you?" Velmoria breathed, her tone softer now, as if liquid metal coursed through her lungs. "There is a heartbeat in this building that is not its own. It's. watching."
Aeltheris nodded slowly. "It watches. Because it remembers."
Beyond the Spiral Gate was a sanctum of the First Ones. Beyond that, though, was Spiral-Seer Northwyn, First Betrayer and First to have taken oath once to the Silent Reign's Crownless King, and who did break that oath in the moment that shattered seven realities.
The gate shimmered as Aeltheris raised his hand. The sigil carved on his palm—a lost signature of ancient Void-Kings—burned with silent fury. The gate shrieked open, heard only by the mind.
They entered the Court, into a realm of reflected contradiction. Staircases bent around into space. Waterfalls of suspended time fell upwards. Statues existed only when out of sight. The atmosphere became thick with unspoken bargains and truths keen enough to cut flesh.
The walls whispered themselves.
"He comes. The Heir. The Hollow. The Blade. The End."
K'Tharion's voice shook across the psychic field. *"The Spiral Logic is tainted. Expect illusions twisted by foresight and memory. Trust what bleeds."
They went further. With every step, Aeltheris felt his own past brush against him—moments never experienced, memories of betrayals yet to be. This was Northwyn's blessing and curse: the power to reflect the soul so fully that one could lose oneself in the reflection.
And then the Spiral Hall was opened to them.
The room was vast, circular, its floor a living tapestry of intertwined chronologies. At its center, Northwyn stood.
He had not aged.
His hair was white as silver thread, and his robes shone with all the possible futures. His eyes—empty-black, like Aeltheris's—were filled with endless regret, and endless defiance.
"So," he spread his arms, "the King Who Would Not Crown willingly enters the Spiral. Do you desire justice? Or vengeance?"
Aeltheris stopped ten paces away. "I seek truth. The kind that does not need a mirror to be seen."
Northwyn smiled, a twisted and faraway one. "Then you came to the wrong place."
It began not with swords, but with ideas.
Northwyn attacked first—his intellect ripping into theirs in a wave of impossibilities. Images crashed into Aeltheris: Velmoria incinerating him alive, K'Tharion using his logic against him, the Mirrorborn twins crucified in a garden of black stars. Each possible future that Northwyn could envision, he used as a weapon.
But Aeltheris had looked into the Abyss That Made Itself.
He stood unshaken, void-flames curling from his shoulders. His voice rang out, a command rooted in absolute will: "Break the mirrors. Now!"
The twins stepped. Their forms shimmered—two, four, eight of them at once appearing, each driving reflective pylons into the chamber's corners. Velmoria fell to her knees, driving her fist into the timewoven floor, breaking it with a burst of raw heat.
Reality convulsed.
The mirrors cracked.
Northwyn tripped.
K'Tharion, unencumbered by conceptual distortion, attacked next—his tendrils of reason constraining Northwyn's limbs, compelling probability to freeze. "You will explain," the Thought-Titan warned.
Northwyn laughed in blood. "Explain? To a false god, a broken furnace, and a puppet king? No. But I will show you."
And he opened the Spiral Wound.
The Wound wasn't somewhere. It was a memory so old it had solidified into a thing.
They stood inside it.
The Spiral Court no longer existed, having been replaced by the Throne of Crowns, shattered, in the ruin of the Ecliptic War. Aeltheris, younger, stood there—alive, crowned, victorious. And at his feet, kneeling, bound, was Northwyn.
"You swore."
"And I broke it."
"Why?"
Northwyn's younger self looked up at him, his eyes brimming with tears. *"Because your reign would have destroyed it all. There are things even the Void wouldn't be allowed to have. I saw what you would become. And I couldn't let it be."
The memory shattered.
They went back to the Spiral Hall. Northwyn collapsed onto his knees, bleeding from eyes and ears.
"I loved you, fool," he breathed. "I trusted you more than I trusted destiny. But the Spiral revealed to me. revealed the end. You burning the final star. You reigning over silence. I thought. if I betrayed you first, I could prevent it."
Silence fell.
And then stepped forward Aeltheris and laid his hand upon Northwyn's forehead.
"You were wrong. But so was I. I never gave you any reason to believe I wouldn't become that monster."
He turned to K'Tharion. "Spare him."
Velmoria braced herself. "He almost disassembled the Void-Chain."
"And yet, he was the first to kneel."
Northwyn's eyes had opened, now bitter hope-filled.
"What now?" he rasped.
Aeltheris extended his hand. "Now we rebuild the Spiral. Together."
But as the Spiral was healing around them, a noise came from the exterior.
A laugh.
It fits--high, cold, and layered in infinite harmonics.
From the depths of Spiral Wound emerged a creature shrouded in silver entropy.
"Ah, how touching," it said. "The King forgives. The Betrayer repents. But did any of you wonder who opened the Wound in the first place?"
Aeltheris stood in front of his comrades. "Who are you?" The being smiled. "I am the Last Witness. And your reign, Crownless One, has only just begun." The Spiral shuddered.