The Coil was gone.
Smoke. Rubble.
Silence where once there had been fire.
Aarav stood at the edge of the ruin with Maya beside him, the wind thick with ash and memory.
There were no bodies.
The Order had cleaned that up.
But the scorch marks, the fractured stone, the melted steel — those they left behind, as a warning.
"We found your flame. We extinguished it."
But they hadn't found the spark.
Not all of it.
Before Kabir vanished into the fire, he had sent them one final message.
A coordinates string. A location deeper than any Helix map.
"Follow the fractures," it said.
"Down where the spiral stops spinning."
Maya traced the route by hand, building a path from broken maintenance tunnels and forbidden architectural diagrams.
And together, they descended.
The entrance lay behind a sealed archive wall — marked as condemned, unsound.
It was neither.
Aarav pressed his palm to the wall.
His cut hand — the one from the blood oath.
The spiral lit beneath the surface, glowing faintly.
The wall shifted.
Opened.
And the smell of ancient air poured out.
Dust. Stone. Something sweeter.
Like rusted blood.
They lit a flare and stepped inside.
The descent was silent.
A staircase made of obsidian teeth, curling downward like the inside of a black seashell.
Every step hummed beneath their boots.
The spiral wasn't carved.
It was grown.
After what felt like an hour — or a lifetime — they reached it:
A vast underground chamber.
Circular. Perfect. Terrifying.
The walls pulsed with soft light — veins of living energy moving like thought through the stone.
At the center: a pedestal.
Floating above it — suspended in nothing — was a sphere.
Not metal.
Not stone.
Something else.
It spun slowly, endlessly.
Carved on its surface: the Helix. The serpent.
But this one was unfinished.
Maya whispered, "What is this place?"
Aarav stepped forward.
The sphere pulsed.
He felt it in his chest, in his blood.
Not words. Not commands.
Understanding.
The spiral wasn't just a symbol.
It was a message.
A system.
A machine built into the world.
And the Order…
They hadn't created it.
They had found it.
"We're not at the center," Aarav murmured.
"We're at the start."
Maya knelt, brushing her hand across the stone.
Beneath the dust, etched in a language they had never seen before — but somehow understood:
"The Axis must awaken the loop,
or the loop will consume itself."
"The fracture is not the end."
"It is the door."
They stood in silence.
And somewhere far above, the spiral shuddered.