The first room after the Engine pretended to be empty until the door closed behind them. Then the walls learned manners and showed what they had been hiding: not mirrors, not glass, but pressure panes curved like shields, each holding depth where reflection should have been. There were thirteen, arranged in a loose ellipse, their edges breathing with the faint tremor of held weight. The air hummed on a pitch between toothache and prayer. Lyra's shadow took an extra step and then apologized for it. Skarn's breath arrived as sound and then became breath again, embarrassed at having gone out of order.
Nothing in the panes returned their faces. The panes displayed versions—a boy with ash in his hair and fury in his mouth; a man with a crown of flame too literal to be earned; a soldier whose hands shook only after the killing was done; a figure in dark bands of Spiral, eyes like clean bone. Torian's history and his fictions rotated in an urbane orbit, stopping in front of him one by one as if to be introduced.
Lyra stepped closer because you cannot help yourself. The pane nearest her bloomed a child—her—two years older, jaw set in a way that had not yet been taught to her bones. That Lyra wore a ring of violet motes above her brow. The sight came like a hand to the sternum. Lyra did not reach. She had learned enough about invitations.
The panes did not wait for commentary. They tested.
A ripple passed through the ellipse. Torian felt it as a change in gravity particular to his spine, as if a hand had placed two fingers there to check the pulse of the man and not the flame. The boy with ash in his hair lifted his palm in a movement Torian remembered all the way down to the small error at the thumb—he had learned to correct that when it cost a friend a tooth. The crowned figure tilted his head in a way Torian had never done and would never do; it was not arrogance. It was certainty without sorrow, a geometry he refused.
Lyra's hand found the staff's knurling and held on, not like a drowning person, like a student taking up a pen. The Balance Coil on Torian's hip warmed, not with power, with context. Skarn set one paw on a seam in the floor where basalt met a different stone that had been taught how to lie. He pressed until the lie remembered it had started life as honesty.
"Rules," Torian said, voice quiet, the room permitting it to arrive without delay. "No ignition unless it insists. If a version asks for worship, we starve it. If it asks for hatred, we deny it audience. If it asks for pity, we offer work."
Lyra nodded, eyes on his mouth, because the room had not promised to be generous with sound twice.
The first pane stepped out of itself.
There was no fracture sound, no glass shriek. Depth turned to presence as neatly as a drawn bow turns to music, and the boy with ash in his hair—Torian at thirteen, wrists too thin for the weight of what they held—stood barefoot on the basalt with a blade of cold Spiral trembling in his hand. His eyes were wrong—not the color or the light, the sequence. They were eyes that had been forced to see too much and had never been given the order to blink. He raised the blade awkwardly in a guard that might have held if rage could do a soldier's job.
Lyra inhaled. Torian's palm lifted gently and answered nothing. "Breathe the middle," he murmured to her. "Not the high."
The boy charged with the sick certainty of someone who has never been taught the difference between speed and hope. Torian did not counter. He stepped to where the boy would end if no one touched him, and he met the conclusion, not the arc—one palm to wrist, one to shoulder, correction over collision—the blade skittering in a harmless line along basalt while the boy's weight found itself returned intact to his own bones.
"Not your fault," Torian said, to the pane, to the air, to the part of himself that had bitten a man's hand when he was younger because he had run out of other ideas. Thirteen-year-old Torian tried to hate him for saying it. Hate needs friction; Torian gave him none. The version blinked—learned to blink—and dissolved back into depth. The pane held the afterimage for a heartbeat and then retired it with dignity.
Another ripple. The crowned man stepped forward, flame banded on his forearms like shackles made handsome. The crown above his brow burned sharp, points perfect as weapons. He did not move at once. He smiled first. It was an expression like a knife being wiped on velvet—clean and unnecessary. "They will kneel," he said, and the room didn't bother to carry the sound; meaning arrived without tone. "You were always supposed to end as I have begun."
"No," Torian said, already stepping, because you do not argue with a uniform. You tailor it to fit the body you have. The crowned man flicked a hand; Spiral plasma lanced like a calligrapher's stroke past Torian's ear, clean enough to remove a conscience. Torian let it teach him nothing. He put his open palm into the man's wrist and bent the line a finger's breadth toward wrong, the way the world learns to be right again. The plasma kissed the floor and found itself unimpressed. The crowned version struck again, too tidy to be believed. Torian stepped into the rhythm and then off it, refusing the cadence until his own flame rose of its own accord, not as fire, as geometry. He cut no flesh. He cut the habit that made the version possible. The crown's points softened. The man's smile fell off his face by accident. He blurred to depth, looking surprised to have been told no without being killed for it.
"Two for two," Lyra breathed. She wasn't counting coup. She was paying attention.
The panes approved of their politeness. Approval in this room meant escalation.
Four versions came at once, not as bodies—as premises. One wore black Spiral that had learned a taste for itself; one was a father with clean hands; one was a hero carved for statues who had never had to live in a body that tires; one was an empty suit of flame that moved when the pane chose to think. They tried to own the floor with their theses. Skarn shifted one paw, then another, staking four seams at compass points and holding the room in a muscular argument about borders. The basalt under him reconsidered its preferences. The panes faltered in their eagerness to occupy.
"They multiply if you strike at the face," Torian said, more to himself than to Lyra. He touched the coil, drew out the barest thread of cold Spiral, and wrote on the air between the four premises a small bent line—crooked enough to be honest, placed where their tactics would demand symmetry. The line refused them unity. The four stalled, made a sound like disappointment, and slid back a hand's breadth. Lyra stepped into the space they yielded and set the staff down hard enough to claim it. Tap. Tap-tap. The counter-cadence she'd used between the echoing spires returned to her hands as if it had been waiting for an excuse.
The room changed temperature without changing heat. Lyra's arms prickled. Torian's palm itched in the scar that ran from thumb to lifeline. Skarn raised his head a finger's width and bared a tooth out of polite warning.
The next pane did not step out. It arrived as if it had always been in the room and they had failed to see it—Torian in bands of black Spiral that drank light, his eyes gleaming like polished bone, a white seam running from crown to sternum where someone had opened him and put the wrong thing inside. His hands were steady; his breath was quiet; his smile was not there. He did not smell of fire. He smelled of remedy turned weapon, of rituals meant to heal performed with the mouth closed on doubt.
Lyra's fingers choked the staff until the bones in her knuckles made small protests. Skarn's ears flattened to country-of-war. Torian's shoulders remembered a weight he had never had to carry and refused to mourn a life he had not lived.
"You cured yourself," Torian said, because assuming you know a man is the fastest way to lose to him. "At cost."
"I removed the burden," the other answered. His voice had been scraped clean of ash and humor. "The Spiral is a disease. I burned its fever with medicine. My planet lives."
Lyra flinched. The pane showed it—his planet. A world of glass under a sky sick with beauty, forests set in purple stone, seas moving like oil that had learned to forgive. No beasts. No children. One life. One man. One mind with the volume turned up until dissent sounded like wind.
"Your planet burns," Torian said, not raising his voice. "It simply agreed with you first."
The other moved easier than the crowned version had moved, not with pride—with conviction. His flame did not open; it condensed, a needle of black-white Spiral drawn out of nothing and meant to be inserted directly into the moment of a man's breath. Torian had no time for elegance. He put his palm out and met the needle with the only dishonesty the room would allow—delay. He mis-timed by half a beat, gave the needle a mouthful of later, and when it tried to drink now, it choked. He turned his hand, caught the attack in a pane of Spiral glass grown out of air, tilted it past his hip, and gave it back to the floor in a neat compliment. The floor forgot to be flattered. The needle wavered, considered the architecture, and became harmless.
The other Torian's eyes did not change. He stepped in with no sound at all and reached for Torian's throat with the calm of someone about to correct a misfiled document. Torian did not meet him. He stepped through him—open palm to shoulder, heel to ankle, geometry to geometry—and wrote a new conclusion on the attack. It ended next to him with the other man's balance returned intact to the other man's feet.
"Why won't you finish me?" the version asked, not petulant. Sincere.
"Because you're a sentence in a book I didn't write," Torian said. "I annotate. I don't tear out pages."
The other blinked once, as if for the first time in years. He thinned—not dissolved; thinned—and went back into the pane without judgment. The glass kept his shadow a fraction longer than it had kept the others, as if reluctant to let go of a lesson it had worked hard to learn.
Lyra swallowed a sound that wanted to be anger and came out as breath. "He killed Skarn," she whispered, though the pane had not said it; the room had let them taste the premise. Skarn did not look at her. He moved his paw a hand's breadth and pressed until the floor remembered its first duty again.
The ellipse drew in. The panes closed ranks, their edges nearly touching now, making a wheel with the three of them as its fixed axle. The hum rose a tone. The pressure leaned forward. A voice that was not a voice tilted its lens and looked down a corridor of choices into a room full of stubborn animals and liked what it saw enough to be careful.
"Owner," Torian said, to the hum, to the lens, to the unkind geometry beyond. He did not say the word the thing had taught itself—Mine—because names are doors, and he was not yet prepared to go through this one twice.
He raised his hand, not to fight, to count. In on two. Out on five. Lyra matched him; her lips moved; no sound left. Skarn matched without being taught, because beasts who live in real weather learn to tally by bone.
The wheel rotated. Eight panes blurred past. The ninth stuck in front of them for a heartbeat and refused to move on cue. It was not Torian. It was Skarn, older by wounds, bare of one eye, white seam along his ribs like chalk on slate. Lyra's hand flew to his living flank before she could stop it. Skarn held her with a glance—not rejection, steadiness—and the pane let go. The tenth showed Torian's village—the fourth rebuild, the frame of a wall held up by men who had not been soldiers when the Spiral started teaching everyone to be. The eleventh offered Torian a family—not faces he knew, but faces he had earned in other versions. The twelfth had nothing but sea and a sky so clean it ached. The last pane held nothing at all and was the most violent of them.
"Do not pick," Torian said, quiet and binding. "Do not pick me."
Lyra's chin trembled once and stopped. The staff's end touched basalt. Tap. Tap-tap. Counter. The panes tried to answer; she owned the pause. Skarn moved to the last pane—the one holding nothing—and pressed his nose almost to its skin. He exhaled—no growl, decision. The pane fogged with his breath like ordinary glass. It had lied about its nature. He had found the seam between lie and duty and breathed on it until it told the truth.
It opened.
Not outward. In. The aperture was not shaped for bodies. It was shaped for choices. It did not care to admit them. Torian put his palm to its edge and bent the opening a finger's breadth toward wrong—tithe paid, once more, to honesty. The aperture sulked and then accepted. Air the temperature of consequence came through. The coil cooled in a rush as if relieved to have its work accounted for.
The room relaxed—not yielding, repositioning. The panes stilled. Depth returned where presence had been. In their place at the ellipse's center lay a shard—not ornament, not weapon. Spiral logic made material, a prismatic sliver no longer than a finger and too heavy for its size by a promise it carried. Torian picked it up. The shard hummed with the exact chord the Engine had learned after it stopped lying to itself. It would open what came next not by keying a lock, but by teaching the lock how to be a door.
Lyra let her grip on the staff ease. Her wrists shook once. She denied the shake any narrative and it passed without interest. Skarn stepped back from the pane that had been nothing and shook his head as if to rid his whiskers of indecision. His tail wrote a curve in dust that meant: I approve of this room less than most rooms and will not remember it kindly. The room, for its part, had the grace not to take offense.
The hum overhead leaned closer. Not threat. Accounting. The lens tipped in the haze beyond the wall and measured them again the way men measure bridges. It took their numbers and liked them. It resolved not to show the preference.
"Forward," Torian said, because the shard in his hand had already found where it belonged and wanted to go there before pride remembered it had opinions.
They crossed the circle. The aperture that Skarn's breath had made honest widened to admit decisions with legs. Torian slid the shard into a seam that was not a seam and the air learned a new chord. Ahead, a choir woke—a sound of held breath turned to doctrine, the exact timbre of the null bells but multiplied and matured, no longer toys in fanatics' hands but organs tuned to freeze time in places where time had thought itself unassailable.
Lyra closed her eyes to hear it better and then opened them again because you do not listen to that song too closely if you intend to keep your weather. Skarn's hackles rose, not fear—recognition. Torian rolled his shoulders once like a man about to lift a weight he had already lifted too many times and would lift again anyway.
Behind them, the panes returned to their polite ellipses, emptier now, a museum tidied after a difficult night. Ahead, the corridor filled with a music that wasn't music and a promise that this next room would insist. The shard pulsed once in Torian's palm, like a pulse in a wrist you love.
"Next," he said.
They went.