The Spiral did not have stairs anymore.
Kier noticed the change when his boots landed on something soft and untextured. He looked down—there was no stone. No moss. Just a dull stretch of skin-colored matter, veined faintly, pulsing once every few seconds like the slow breath of a dying animal. And still, it led downward.
He didn't ask questions anymore. He stepped forward.
Behind him, the arch of the Forgotten Stair had vanished. He glanced back once and saw only a wall, the texture of smoothed wax, where steps once coiled. He reached for the Obsidian Tooth in his pocket, ran a thumb over its jagged edge, and whispered, "You're still with me, aren't you?"
The Tooth didn't answer. It never did unless it tasted something warm. But it pulsed in response—once. That was enough.
Kier moved on.
The Spiral's new hallway had no clear turns, but it bent slightly with every few dozen paces, like it was coiling around itself. The air was still, but the silence had changed. It was heavier here. It stuck to his skin, crawled behind his ears. It made his own thoughts echo louder than before, like they no longer belonged entirely to him.
"Memory is the first betrayal," someone had once told him.
"When it lingers too long, it starts to rot. And rot becomes truth."
He couldn't remember who. Maybe they were dead. Maybe it had been him.
After what could've been hours—or minutes, time warped strangely here—he saw the first break in the tunnel.
It wasn't a door. It was a tear.
A vertical split in the wall, three meters tall, the edges still twitching like healing skin. From inside the slit, glyph-light shimmered faintly. Not blue, not red. A shifting white, like candlelight behind old bone.
He approached, and the tear opened wider as if reacting to his intent.
Inside was a room shaped like an egg. Or perhaps a lung. Everything about it pulsed in slow rhythm. Symbols lined the inner walls—not etched or carved, but raised like scar tissue. Kier stepped in, and the light behind the glyphs flared. One symbol—the largest—began to shift.
Not glowing. Not reacting.
It was watching.
He felt it in his bones first. Then in his teeth. The glyph wasn't passive like the ones above. This one was recursive—repeating itself, folding in on its own shape, as if trying to remember what it had once meant. And in that moment, it remembered him.
Words formed in Kier's mind like bruises surfacing:
"Third Spiral Principle:
The more of yourself you give,
The more the Spiral lets you forget."
His breath caught.
Forget?
He reached toward the glyph—and it struck.
Not with pain, not with pressure. But with silence.
It took something.
He staggered. The air around him folded. The room warped inward, like inhaling his presence. He dropped to one knee, clutching his ribs.
He couldn't remember—
Wait.
Who taught him to harvest regret?
Where had he found the Tooth?
Why did he know how to read Spiral glyphs?
There were holes in him. Carefully carved. Nothing essential—yet. But the glyph had fed. And in return, something settled inside his chest. Like warmth. Like permission.
He stood.
Something had been unlocked.
Kier turned his gaze back to the scarred walls. All the glyphs in this room had stilled now. But the largest—the watching one—glimmered faintly, as if satisfied.
A new line of thought stitched itself into his mind:
"Spiral-bound glyphs require offering.
The deeper the glyph, the costlier the memory.
Full access requires self-fragmentation."
He touched the Tooth in his coat.
"Is this what you did to its last wielder?"
"Or is that how I found you?"
He didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to.
Behind him, the tear in the wall began to close. The room was done with him. Or he was done with it. He turned and left without protest, stepping back into the skin-colored hallway, the light dimming behind him.
But now, something was different.
The silence no longer followed him.
It walked with him.
By the time the tunnel ended, he stood before a spiral gate—huge, ribbed, and marked with glyphs shaped like bones tied in knots. No keyhole. No lock. Just expectation.
He raised a hand to touch it.
The gate opened before he did.