The first time Kael saw the Tower of Lirathil, it was crying.
Rain did not fall upon it—the sky above the tower was clear, the stars sharp as needles—but tears of silvery brine streamed down its glass walls, flowing from nowhere, shimmering like moonlit blood. They hissed against the stone floor where Kael stood, evaporating as quickly as they fell.
"Is it mourning?" he asked Nyra beside him.
"No," she answered, her voice low. "It remembers."
The Tower of Lirathil stood at the edge of the Forgotten Spine, the last remnant of the Aeon Scribes—the silent historians who bound truth into architecture. This tower had once contained every unspoken vow, every erased name, every forbidden prophecy. And now it mourned itself.
Kael and Nyra had come seeking one thing: the Lexicon of Shards, a relic said to contain a fragment of the Spiral's birth-cry.
But what they found instead was a maze of broken memories.
The tower was alive, not with blood or breath, but with memory. Its walls pulsed with whisperlight, every pane of glass etched with moving script, dancing calligraphy that shifted with each blink. The stone underfoot was soft, almost spongy, like bone left too long in a river.
Each floor brought new disorientation. The hallways twisted in unnatural geometry. Time folded in on itself—Kael glimpsed younger versions of himself, older ones with scorched eyes and missing limbs. One mirror showed him holding a blade to Nyra's throat. Another, weeping before a city in flames.
He nearly broke.
"Do not anchor yourself to what you see," Nyra whispered. "The tower feeds on certainty. Be like water."
Her song opened narrow paths through the chaos, harmonizing with the old sigils in the walls, unlocking doors made of memory itself. Yet even her voice faltered the deeper they went.
The fifth floor was a library of screams. Not sounds—but impressions, carved into the books like Braille of agony. They felt the pain in their spines, heard it in their bones.
Kael stumbled. His flame flickered blue, then violet. He caught sight of a glyph etched across his chest—one he did not recognize.
"It's you," the walls whispered. "You are the Cursed Flame. The Spiral's spine. The Maw's mistake."
They reached a chamber that appeared to float within nothingness—stars burning beneath their feet, galaxies spiraling above. At its center hovered the Lexicon, bound in salt-chains and cloaked in whispers.
Kael stepped forward—and the floor shattered into mirror-shards, scattering them into a thousand reflections.
He stood in a desert of glass. Alone.
Across from him walked another Kael—taller, sharper, with flame-black eyes and a crown of molten bone. His Reflection.
"Finally," the Reflection said. "You've come to unmake yourself."
Kael clenched his fists. "You're not real."
"No. I'm inevitable."
They fought—but not with swords. Memory against memory. The Reflection pulled forth every failure Kael had buried: the village he failed to save, the children burned by his uncontrolled flame, the moment he almost struck Nyra in madness.
"You wear guilt like armor," the Reflection hissed. "But guilt is weakness. Burn it. Let go."
Kael screamed—and his fire erupted.
Elsewhere, Nyra climbed a tower of sound, singing her way up rungs of vibrating echoes. Each note rebuilt a fragment of her memory lost during her years in hiding. She saw her brother again. Her mother's last lullaby. Her first steps into Hollowspire.
At the apex of her song, she saw Kael falling.
The Lexicon, she realized, was not meant to be taken. It was meant to be earned.
Kael, dragged to the brink, watched the Reflection raise a hand of pure flame. "Let me show you what power without mercy becomes."
But then came Nyra's voice—a single pure note, sharp as sorrow and bright as sunrise.
Kael remembered.
He remembered why he fought. Who he'd lost. What he'd become. And what he had yet to protect.
He didn't reject the Reflection.
He embraced it.
The two forms merged in a blaze of blinding light. The tower shook.
Kael emerged from the glass storm, eyes burning gold and violet, scars glowing with runes. He was changed—not whole, but aware.
The Lexicon opened.
And the Spiral spoke.
In a voice that was not sound, not sight, but soul, it whispered:
"You are not a curse. You are the question."
The tower ceased weeping.
And outside, the sky cracked with thunder.