The Spiral Gate closed without a sound.
No flare, no echo, no last wash of heat—only a ripple folding in on itself like a coin slipping through deep water, and then the kind of silence that belongs to old tombs.
Torian stood on a ridge veined with light, stone under his boots shimmering as if glass had learned to breathe. Beside him, Skarn dropped from a single beat of his wings and landed heavy, claws biting into earth that looked like soil but reflected like obsidian. The beast's breath steamed in the cold and hung there, unmoving.
There was no wind to carry it away.
No birdsong. No insects. No shifting cloud.
The sky was cracked from horizon to horizon—hairline fractures of pale violet running like shattered crystal across a lens. The sun hung high and wrong, blurred as though seen through a lake's skin, and it did not move.
Torian said nothing.
The world answered in the same language.
—
He stepped forward.
The ground didn't sink or sway; it changed. Clay gave way to stone, stone to half-buried timbers, timbers to frost-brittle soil—in single, careless stitches. As if a child had tried to quilt a planet from scraps of yesterday.
This wasn't land anymore.
It was a scar.
Skarn padded at his side, head low, tail still. His ears didn't flick toward sounds—there were none. His nostrils flared to catch scent—and found emptiness. Even the air felt counterfeit, a draft with shape but no life.
"This is our world," Torian said, a verdict more than a thought. "But not in time."
He didn't explain.
He didn't need to.
This wasn't past or present. It was their world unspooled—threads pulled from a broken loom and left in a pile—and he was the knife that cut them loose.
It was his fault.
He didn't feel guilt. Not yet.
Only weight.
The Spiral lived inside him now. It didn't roar unless he called it, but it was always coiled—patient, aware, listening through the stone. Once the Spiral had been everywhere, anchoring motion, pinning cause to effect. Now it hummed beneath his skin and nowhere else.
They went east across a field that sloped in the wrong direction. Grass grew in little loops, curled upon itself like stubborn memory. Above them, dawn hugged one half of the sky while dusk stained the other. Far off, in bright day, a lace of stars showed through like punctures in a curtain.
None of it changed.
It just was—as if every hour were pressed flat into one.
—
They crested a rise.
The village waited below.
His village. Only not.
No ruin, no smoke, no ash—just the exactness of a memory held too tight.
A woman stood at the well, hand lifted in a mid-wave that would never finish. A boy chased a wooden ring, mouth open in a laugh that would never arrive, one foot forever an inch above the ground. A horse in front of the smithy chewed a mouthful of hay that would never be swallowed. Smoke from chimneys rose in flawless, sculpted curls that would never loosen.
A full heartbeat of life—stretched so thin it never beat.
Torian entered the square.
His footsteps rang too loud, like contraband. Doorways yawned and did not creak. The fountain's basin wore a skin of water smoother than glass, unrippled and absolute. Shadows lay under eaves like ink poured and forgotten.
"It's not frozen," he said, voice low in the museum hush. "It's broken. Disconnected."
He raised his eyes to the unmoving sun. "I didn't just step out of time," he whispered. "I took it with me."
The Spiral in his chest flickered—not power, recognition. The world wasn't reacting to him; it was folding around him. He had become the center; everything else had lost its axis.
He looked again at the people arrested in their moments. An elder stood near the corner. Two tracks of tears glimmered on his face, each drop suspended on its descent.
Nothing living moved.
But the place remembered living.
Torian's jaw set.
That was when he heard it.
—
Glass stretched to a wire.
A thin, low note. Sharp enough to cut.
At the far edge of the square, a crack opened—not a door or a mouth, just a sliver of space trying to spiral, like time itself had snagged and was peeling back. Light warped around it. Stone bent toward it. Reality forgot how to hold shape.
It began to drift toward them.
Torian didn't hesitate.
He opened his hand.
The Spiral answered—no roar, no heat. Focus.
Purple flame—more plasma than fire—curled into the air above his palm, a tight helix of liquid light that hovered a finger's breadth from skin. It did not consume; it obeyed. The current slid along his forearm, humming with layered geometry the old Spiral had never held. Denser. Cleaner. Meaner.
He didn't posture. Didn't aim.
He stepped into the shot and struck.
The bolt left him in a dead-straight line: no blossom, no splash, just a surgical lance of spiral light.
It met the fracture and corrected it.
Not destruction. Alignment.
The sliver winked out like a bad note muted by a fingertip. For a breath, the village wavered. A chimney's frozen smoke shivered as if remembering what to do—then refused and went still again.
Torian lowered his hand.
The flame cut off instantly.
No afterglow. No radiating warmth.
Just absence.
Control so tight it felt like silence.
Skarn's eyes narrowed, measuring him as if he were a blade whose edge had changed.
"One strike," Torian said, voice flat. "And everything listens."
He turned east.
A pull waited there—thin as a hair, sure as a plumb line.
The place where the fracture began.
He didn't know what waited.
He knew what it would cost if he failed.
Skarn moved with him.
They left the museum of a village behind and walked into the wound.
—
Road was the wrong word. The ground wore the idea of a path—ribbons of stone rising and falling like veins in a broken hand. Grass existed in patches where time had remembered to finish its work. Elsewhere roots hung in the air, reaching for soil that hadn't been made yet.
The sky still refused to change.
The cracks had multiplied, fine threads of glow lacing out into a net. The clouds were caught halfway between thunderheads and fair weather, stuck in the choice. The sun clung to the same high position and refused to name the hour.
They walked for an hour.
Or a minute.
Or longer.
Time was an empty word here.
Torian could feel the absence like a draft through old stone. The Spiral had once held the weave. When he took it into himself, there had been no detonation, no screaming collapse—only this: a world unanchored, a spiral with no center.
He flexed his hand. It obeyed. But shadows didn't. The air didn't yield the way it should. Reality had not broken; it had forgotten how to finish a thought.
—
The ground ahead stopped pretending to be a whole.
A chasm opened without drama, and above it floated slabs of land: platelets of stone and soil, some the size of a door, some the size of houses. They did not drift. They simply were, spaced like stepping-stones laid by a blind titan.
Beyond, a forest flickered between green summer and white winter in jagged, patternless edits.
Torian stepped onto the first slab.
It held.
Skarn leapt after, heavy and silent.
Halfway across, Torian stopped.
Something gleamed to his left.
He turned—and met his own eyes.
Not a mirror. A version.
A boy of thirteen, ash in his hair, old cuts crusted at the forearms, wearing the clothes he'd had on the day the village truly burned. The boy stood on his own floating shard, balanced over the abyss, and stared at Torian with the kind of focus only pain teaches.
He didn't speak.
He raised one arm and pointed past Torian's shoulder, slow and exact.
Torian turned.
Nothing.
He looked back.
The boy was gone.
"What was that," Torian said under his breath—question with no question mark.
Skarn's hackles lifted a fraction. The beast didn't growl. Agreement, not alarm.
No echo came back from the world. No hint. No correction.
They finished the crossing and dropped into a dry riverbed. Strange trees lined the far bank: trunks like hammered silver, leaves cycling color without wind or season—green, gold, red, ash, and back again, indifferent.
Torian brushed a palm to the bark. It felt like wood. It also didn't. Everything here was halfway between memory and matter.
They found ground that didn't shift—not solid, but still. Torian went to a knee and pressed his hand to the earth.
The Spiral didn't flare. It pulsed once—slow, basal, like a breath drawn through bedrock.
This place is dying, the feeling said. Not fast. But it will not stop.
"Not fast," Torian echoed, barely audible. "But steady."
Skarn stepped close until fur pressed his arm. The weight was real. The loyalty, more so.
—
Movement at last—above.
The cracks in the sky brightened, and one widened with zero sound. A ruler-straight ripple cut the clouds and vanished.
Something followed it down: not scent, but the idea of one.
Smoke without smoke. Heat without heat.
The memory of a burned field slid along Torian's tongue.
The Spiral woke under his sternum.
He exhaled and let a coil of purple fire comb over his fingers—contained, glass-bright, silent. Not a weapon in his hand so much as the shape of his will. He let it exist and did not feed it. Light blurred around the edges the way hot air distorts a horizon.
Skarn watched, golden eyes locked.
The sky did nothing else.
But the pull ahead tightened—no longer simple unraveling, but attention. The fracture wanted them closer.
They obliged.
Through the valley without echo.
Past the forests that couldn't choose a season.
Toward a mountain that flickered at the edges of sight—one moment a mile away, the next a thousand, the next nowhere at all.
It didn't matter how far it looked.
Torian felt it.
The center.
Where the Spiral had been drawn too tight.
Where time had snapped.
—
They halted once more before the climb.
At the field's edge lay a black ring of stone, glassed and melted, the precise twin of the scar beneath the Spiral Gate.
No gate here.
Just the mark.
"Someone tried to open one," Torian said.
The coil in his palm pulsed once like a heartbeat answering. He closed his fist. Darkness. Control.
"Come on," he said. "We keep going."
The slope sharpened. Distance lied. Sometimes the mountain leaned over them, a tower of black rock veiled in spiraling mist. Sometimes it ducked behind a fold in the sky and reappeared at the opposite horizon like a cheating card.
The world wasn't shifting around them.
It was reacting to them.
Skarn flowed ahead, shoulders rolling under fur, claws ticking across surfaces that changed between snow-etched crust, ash-shale, and gravel in breaths. Each step sent a pulse down into something deeper. Spiral echoes, maybe. Bones remembering the body they belonged to.
Torian kept his eyes on the path and his awareness on the weight inside his chest. The Spiral was awake now. Not loud. Watching.
—
They reached a ridge that cut the air like a blade.
From there, the world stretched in a wrong glory. City blocks floated on clouds that phased in and out. Roads tied themselves into knots and untied in midair. Forests flipped between bloom and naked limb without warning. Ruins hung upside down halfway through their own collapses. A lake wore waves that never moved. Two suns threw light in the same direction.
Not chaos.
A pattern trying to remember what pattern is.
Torian stared until his eyes ached.
The center tugged at him from beyond all that—heavy as an oath.
The closer they came, the more everything around them leaned inward. Time drew itself tight. Reality thinned to paper.
"I'm holding it together just by walking," he said, half to the Spiral, half to himself.
Skarn answered with a low grunt that meant I don't need to understand to agree. He stepped forward onto the narrow path that fell to mist on one side and to nothing on the other.
Stone underfoot. No wind. No sound.
The path ended at a ruin so modest it felt defiant: half a wall, a collapsed arch, rubble that ought to have fallen and had chosen not to.
Torian approached. No carvings. No sigils. Just the sense that this used to be real.
The voice came then.
Not a sound you could hear. Not a language you could translate.
A memory pressed through the Spiral in his bones, drawn straight from the land itself:
You burned bright. But light cannot hold time.
He didn't answer. You don't argue with truth that doesn't need your permission.
He stepped through the broken arch.
—
Nothing visible changed.
But the air tightened, not in pressure, in presence. He set his heel to stone and, for the first time since the Gate, the contact echoed.
Skarn froze, ears angled forward.
Torian took another step.
The echo didn't bounce back and fade; it stacked, carrying into the next step and the next, a layering of sound where there had been none, as if the world had begun remembering how to accept consequence.
They walked out into a wide field.
It should have been open.
Instead, the sky bowed inward, a glass dome tilting, trying to close around them. Threads of light spiraled down from no source, fine as silk and slow as snowfall.
At the center of the field sat a single stone of smooth granite.
On it, a mark.
Torian approached.
No spiral. No crest.
A handprint, burned deep.
He set his palm to it.
A perfect fit.
The Spiral inside him knew.
Not with fire or motion—with recognition. The land thrummed through his boots. For a single instant—no longer—the world aligned.
He saw the whole:
The Spiral once a living current braided across stars, every strand an anchor, every anchor a moment, every moment a path. And then his hand—not violent, not hateful—just present. He didn't break it. He became it. By becoming the center, he stole the center, and the braid lost its shape.
He opened his eyes.
Dust drifted where the stone had been.
Skarn stood beside him, silent as an oath.
No speeches left. No doubts worth airing.
The path ahead stood plain—not because it appeared, but because the world stopped trying to hide it. The mountain no longer flickered. It waited, fixed, like a judge who had already made up his mind.
Torian looked at his hand.
Beneath the skin, the Spiral Flame flickered—thin as a vein of light through stone.
"We fix what I broke," he said. "Or everything falls with it."
Skarn rumbled, not warning—consent.
They walked.
Toward the heart of the Spiral.
Into the world without time.