The Web shimmered gently today.
Soft and slow, like a sigh through the soul. There were no gods waiting. No voices echoing from the deep. Just space, light, and the weaving quiet.
> "Let's try again," Hector said, pulling a thread of memory into his hands.
It shimmered faintly—a residue from an echo once left behind. He closed his form around it and breathed—not air, but will. That strange, silent force that formed everything here.
> "Emotion isn't a destination," he muttered, echoing the Spiral's whisper. "It's a direction."
He focused.
The thread bloomed. A flash of grief, then awe, then love—somewhere between the notes of a forgotten song and the aftertaste of tears. He could see the colors swirl—warm gold chasing cool violet.
It was someone's joy, long gone. He could feel how it lingered, how it shaped the space around it.
> "You're getting better," Vicky called.
She hovered nearby, wrapped in her grief-shell—sleek and pulsing like obsidian mist. She had shaped it more clearly today. Where before it was loose and shifting, now it looked like a second skin. Still inconstant, but purposeful.
> "Want to spar?" she teased, her shell splitting into mirrored plates.
> "I thought this wasn't combat training," Hector said, amused.
> "It's not," she said, and lunged.
Hector dropped the memory thread and flicked his own echo outward. The air rang with emotion—a ripple of remembered fear, not his, but found—and it knocked her shell sideways just enough for him to shift position.
She laughed. The sound echoed wrong, a little too loud. She liked that.
> "You're learning how to project resonance," she said. "Before you were just… feeling it."
> "I'm trying," Hector admitted, floating backward. "The Spiral didn't exactly leave an instruction manual."
> "Neither did Vemathi," Vicky said. "But grief speaks louder than words."
She extended a hand—and her shell cracked, just slightly, to reveal a pale light beneath. It pulsed once and then sent a wave of distortion through the Web.
> "Transformation hurts, Hector. That's the price."
He nodded. Then focused again.
His form bent low, absorbing the echo of the space between them. He found shame, subtle and lingering—a past echo of someone who had failed here.
He reshaped it. Not cruelly. But with intention.
He reached into the echo and broke it.
Ozoz's words rang in him again:
> "What burns away was never truly yours."
The shame scattered like embers. In its place, he shaped resolve—the feeling of standing after falling.
He cast it toward Vicky, and she caught it without deflecting.
The grief-shell shimmered. For a moment, it wasn't just protection—it became clothing, a cloak, a face.
She changed.
He stared. "You used my magic."
"No," she said softly. "I adapted it. You gave me the resonance. I chose what to become."
Hector let out a long hum—their hum.
It resonated between them, the melody no one had ever sung to them, the code to remember each other. The shape of it was impossible to put into words, but it felt like belonging. Like a moment just before waking from a good dream.
> "Vicky," he said suddenly, "do you feel like we're getting closer to something?"
She looked down at her shell-hand. It shimmered with a thousand possible selves.
> "I don't know. I just know I'm more me now than I've ever been."
They drifted in silence.
The Web around them responded with a low pulse of warmth. The more they trained, the more the place began to respond—not like a tool, but like a dance partner. It bent with them. It learned, too.
> "We should explore the outer knots again," Vicky suggested. "See if there are more hollows… more like the one we helped."
> "You think we're supposed to heal them?"
> "I don't know what we're 'supposed' to do," she said. "But helping feels like... the right kind of magic."
They floated, light-bound and wordless for a while.
And then, something deep in the Web shifted—barely perceptible.
Not danger.
But attention.
Like the Web had just turned its gaze toward them.
Neither of them spoke of it. Not yet.
They were training.
They still had time.
Even if they didn't know what time meant.