The Tension Beneath the Spiral

The storm above the Blackridge cliffs had not broken in three days. Winds clawed the towers of Kyreth Keep, and distant thunder rolled like ancient drums echoing across the moor. Within the eastern observatory, where a thousand glyphs danced through curling smoke, Lynchie knelt before the Selenic Spiral. Her fingers hovered above the etched stone, trembling—not from fear, but from the charge running through her very bones.

The glyphs shimmered.

She pressed her palm to the center and inhaled sharply as the Spiral flared, light folding into itself, fracturing time and breath and thought. In an instant, she was nowhere—then everywhere. The Spiral opened her, filled her, peeled her senses raw until she was a vessel and more than a vessel. Threads of knowledge etched themselves behind her eyes—names of the Ancients, lines of fractured fate, echoes of futures that bled into the present.

Vyen's voice cut through the hum of magic. "She's passed the Third Spiral Initiation."

Lynchie exhaled, the room snapping back into shape. Sweat clung to her temples. She looked up to find Vyen and High Warden Seliane watching with unreadable expressions. Zev stood further back, arms crossed, the faintest furrow between his brows.

"She's ready," Seliane said, but her voice trembled ever so slightly.

"No one's ready for what's coming," Zev muttered under his breath. Only Lynchie heard it.

Later, in the shadow of the keep's stone walls, Lynchie found herself alone with Zev. The sky above flickered with unnatural lightning—too slow, too blue. They walked side by side in uneasy silence. The war council had convened that morning. The Mirror-Spoken had made their first full move—a silent strike on Marrow Hollow, leaving no survivors. Spiral wards there had been inverted, perverted. Lynchie had seen the sigil fragments herself. They burned.

"Why do you always look like you've already seen the end of this war?" she asked him, watching his profile.

He didn't answer at first. Then: "Because I have."

His words struck her like cold iron. She stopped walking. "What do you mean?"

Zev turned toward her slowly. The storm winds pulled at his dark hair. "I was once their warder, Lynchie. I stood inside the Mirror. Before I chose to walk away."

The air between them crackled—not with magic, but with something more dangerous.

"You... you served them?" Her voice was barely above a whisper, her breath caught between betrayal and disbelief.

"I didn't serve them. I studied with them. I believed I could fix what they broke. I was wrong."

She stepped back. The Spiral mark on her palm pulsed, reacting to the sudden storm in her heart.

"You should have told me."

"You weren't ready to hear it."

She scoffed, though the sound felt brittle in her throat. "You don't get to decide what I'm ready for."

Zev's expression shifted—something old and wounded flashing through. "Then don't pretend you're the only one carrying ghosts."

Lightning struck beyond the tower's edge, illuminating their faces. The silence that followed was not empty—it was brimming with everything unsaid.

Suddenly, Lynchie staggered, clutching her chest. A wave of Spiral force washed over her—raw, jagged, unfamiliar. Not her power. Not Vyen's. Not even the Mirror-Spoken's.

Zev caught her by the shoulders just before she collapsed.

"Lynchie?" Panic slipped into his voice. He hadn't called her by name like that in weeks.

Her eyes were wide, unfocused. "It's coming," she whispered, her fingers gripping his coat. "It's already here."

And beneath the cliffs, far below where the light touched, a black Spiral slowly unwound itself, drawn by blood and broken oaths.