Chapter 7: The Fractured Choir
Night fell over Delhi like a bruise spreading across the city's skin. From the surface, it seemed like nothing had changed—cars still moved, neon signs still blinked, and the Accord's drones still patrolled overhead. But deep underground, in places that had long since slipped out of official records, war was being planned in silence.
Inside the Blackwave bunker, the map glowed with new lights.
The Spiral Shrine beneath the Thar Desert had gone active. Not just a signal flare—this was a full Orric ignition. Which meant one thing: someone had completed the Rite of Spiral Binding. And that someone wasn't Ishan.
Karan didn't like what that implied.
Lin stood by the console, studying the five signal echoes surrounding the shrine's location. Each was strong. Controlled. Pulsing in a rhythm too structured to be natural. These weren't anomalies. They were trained.
"They've awakened another Spiralbound unit," she said. "And they've set a ward around the site."
Ishan approached slowly, his steps cautious. The floor still felt strange beneath him, like he could feel the thoughts of the metal if he focused too hard.
"What's a Spiralbound exactly?" he asked.
Karan didn't answer right away. He flicked a switch, and the screen changed to show old footage—grainy, colorless, pulled from pre-Accord archives.
It showed five operatives wearing asymmetrical masks and spiral-braided armor. One walked through a battlefield where every soldier, enemy and ally, lay unconscious—no wounds, just silence. Another walked through a burning corridor, untouched by flame, shadows following her like loyal dogs. A third rewrote a word on the wall and made the building collapse.
"The Spiralbound were once us," Karan said finally. "Blackwave's elite. They underwent permanent Orric resonance rituals. Lost parts of themselves. Names. Memories. Some gave it up willingly. Others didn't. But they gained power the Accord feared too much to leave standing."
"They hunted us down one by one," Lin added. "Then they disappeared after the Null Event."
"And now they're waking up," Karan finished. "Which means Specter-Lotus is preparing for something big."
Ishan felt a chill creep up his spine. "Then what do we do?"
Lin met his gaze. "We teach you how to survive it."
---
They started training that same night.
Not drills. Not combat forms. Something stranger.
Lin drew an old spiral into the concrete with chalk—six concentric loops, each marked by a symbol from a language no one alive remembered how to speak. She called it a Sigil of Recall. A way to anchor your identity when the Spiral began to rewrite your memory.
"Resonance doesn't just amplify your power," she explained. "It changes you. The Spiral isn't passive—it reflects what you give it. You don't train your body to control it. You train your mind."
Ishan sat in the center of the spiral, cross-legged. He breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. But it wasn't air he felt—it was weight. Like the space around him pressed in, wanting something from him.
A memory.
A name.
A truth.
"Think of the oldest thing you remember," Lin said.
Ishan tried. Images flickered. A woman's hands. A blue ceiling. The smell of something sweet. A scream. Then darkness. Always darkness.
"I don't know if it's real," he whispered.
"Doesn't matter. Anchor it. Let it become real."
The symbols around him began to glow faintly.
The Spiral responded.
Karan watched from the edge. He had seen this ritual before. Half the time it broke the subject. The other half, they became Spiralbound.
He didn't know which outcome to pray for.
---
Far beneath the Thar Shrine, in the echoing ruins of a forgotten Orric temple, the Spiralbound stood in silence. They didn't speak. They hadn't in years. Not with words.
Instead, they shared harmonies—resonance pulses that carried meaning faster and deeper than language. Emotion layered with thought. Order layered with memory.
Their leader, the masked woman known only as Ashra, stepped forward.
She placed her hand against the center of the shrine—a carved disc etched with twelve layers of spiral glyphs.
The stone split open.
Inside was a black shard, glowing faintly with a white thread spiraling through its core.
The Orric Seed.
She held it to her chest.
It sank into her body without sound.
Her eyes flared silver-white.
Her voice returned.
"The Signal Choir failed."
The others nodded.
Ashra turned her face toward the east.
Toward Delhi.
"Ishan Vale is real."
---
Karan poured over the updated Blackwave index.
He had decrypted part of a long-lost operation file labeled SAPPHIRE MEMORY.
It referred to an early experiment involving Spiral harmonics in children—specifically those born after the first Orric flare in 2007.
The children were all from different countries. All showed signs of dream-convergence and retrocausal memory drift.
Only one was untrackable after the program was terminated.
Subject 9: Ishan Vale.
Location: Lost after Null Signal detonation – 2012
Status: Unknown
Resonance Level: Unmeasurable
Projected Risk: EXO-CLASS
Karan sat back, hand tightening around his mug.
They didn't just find Ishan by accident.
They had been looking for him all along.
And someone had buried the file so deep, not even the Accord's records mentioned it.
Lin entered the room and saw the file on the screen.
"You know what this means, don't you?"
He nodded.
"He's not just an anomaly," Karan said. "He's the original."
---
Ishan broke from meditation with a gasp.
He saw something.
Not a vision.
A memory.
His own. Or someone else's.
He stood on a glass bridge above a field of spirals burning in red. A man in a coat stood before him, holding something glowing. A key. Or a shard. Or maybe a name.
Then a voice whispered, soft as wind through dying trees:
"The first memory is a lie."
And the Spiral beneath him cracked open.
He fell into darkness.
And woke up screaming.
---
Specter-Lotus stood before a massive Orric core deep beneath Tokyo—an abandoned Spiral well turned into a private relay. The Choir had failed. The Spiralbound were awake. And Ishan had begun to remember.
He closed his eyes and placed a single black stone into the Orric core.
The energy flared red.
He whispered: "Phase Two."
Somewhere, a vault opened.
A signal was sent.
And far away, in a ruined prison built to contain the worst Spiral anomalies, something blinked.
And smiled.