Chapter 10: The Oracle Coil

The path westward felt like stepping through someone else's memory.

The air thickened with each mile, not from heat or moisture, but density—like walking through time made solid. The landscape bent subtly, unnaturally, as though it had been rewound and played again and again until reality had worn thin. Trees were duplicated beside themselves. Stones repeated in spirals. Shadows moved even when nothing else did.

Kaelen noticed it all.

And said nothing.

The girl, who still had not given him a name, walked beside him in perfect silence. Her presence had become familiar, but not comfortable. There was something about her that resisted attachment—like she was never fully here.

They did not speak as they entered the Vale of Coiling Echoes.

The Oracle Coil was no ruin.

It was alive.

A spiral of impossibly tall spires, each threading through the other like glass threads in a loom. They hovered above the valley floor, suspended by unseen forces. Energy crackled between the spires—lines of lightning that sang like violin strings struck too hard.

Kaelen stared up at it, eyes narrowed.

"I've seen this in a dream."

The girl nodded. "Everyone who comes here does. It calls to fragments."

He stepped forward.

The ground beneath his feet hummed.

The thread on his wrist tightened, almost pulling him forward.

The Oracle did not ask for permission. It demanded entry.

As they passed beneath the first spire, Kaelen's vision blurred.

He staggered, but the girl caught his arm and steadied him. Her touch grounded him, barely.

"What's happening?"

"You're being remembered," she said.

The Coil's interior was not made of matter. Not entirely.

It was memory constructed into form.

As they moved deeper, the walls shifted between smooth glass, ancient script, and flowing ink. Doors opened and closed without hinges. Rooms appeared where there were none before.

They passed through a chamber of mirrored floors, and Kaelen saw dozens of versions of himself walking beside him—some limping, others scarred, a few twisted beyond recognition.

"Which one is real?" he asked.

"None," she answered. "And all."

They climbed.

There were no stairs.

Just direction, and will.

At the center of the Coil, they found the Oracle.

It was not a being.

It was a knot of threads—millions of them—suspended in the air. Each thread shimmered with memory. They twisted and convulsed like a heart pulsing with thought.

Kaelen stepped forward. The thread on his wrist extended, reaching out.

But before it could connect, a wall of force struck him back.

He crashed into the spiraled floor.

The girl didn't move to help.

The Oracle spoke.

But not aloud.

**"You are not aligned."

"You have diverged."

"Fragmented."

"You must be made whole."**

Kaelen rose slowly. "Then do it."

Silence.

Then the threads lashed out.

Pain. Blinding.

But not physical.

His mind was being unraveled. Strands of thought pulled apart, examined, rethreaded. He saw moments he had forgotten: a child clinging to his arm, a woman's voice begging him to remember, a mirror with no reflection.

The Oracle was stitching him together—and in doing so, tearing him open.

He screamed without sound.

The girl watched, unreadable.

Then, suddenly, it ended.

Kaelen collapsed.

He lay still, trembling, breath shallow.

The Oracle's threads withdrew.

And the voice came again.

"You are still unfinished. But now you are known."

The thread around his wrist had changed. It was no longer black, but deep violet, and pulsing like a living thing.

The Oracle whispered one final word:

"North."

They left the Coil in silence.

Night had fallen. Or perhaps it had never risen. The sky here didn't follow rules.

Kaelen walked like a man who had died and been reconstructed from memory alone.

"I saw them," he said finally. "Faces. Names. Fragments. They knew me."

"They still do," the girl said. "That's what makes you dangerous."

"To who?"

She turned. Her expression, for the first time, was solemn.

"To the ones who forgot themselves to rule. And to the ones you left behind."

They camped near a ring of stone monoliths, where the air shimmered like heat but offered no warmth. Kaelen sat by a fire that did not burn, watching the violet thread around his wrist shift.

He didn't speak again that night.

But as sleep took him, he dreamt of the North.

A frozen ruin buried beneath stars that blinked with memory.

A tower that spiraled down instead of up.

And a voice—familiar—whispering:

"Come home."