Spandrex stumbled back from the mirror.
"I'm already in."
Those words rippled through him, not just as sound—but as a memory. He'd heard them before.
He turned—only to find himself no longer in his childhood room.
Now, he stood inside a vast underground archive. Familiar, but not. The air was thick with dust and wet ink. Shelves rose like walls, books stacked with symbols he hadn't yet learned. A long corridor stretched forward, pulsing with an unseen breath.
He walked.
Shadows danced across the ceiling.
To his left, a table appeared, just as he remembered from when he was a boy—he'd sat on it once while his mother flipped through decaying pages of a forbidden volume. But this time, she was already there, hunched over the book, whispering… not to him—but to something behind her.
His father stood nearby, stone-faced, arms crossed. "He's just a boy."
"We were all just something once," his mother said flatly.
The page turned itself.
Spandrex approached. The table never ended. It stretched on and on, and the books atop it grew stranger. Some had covers made of bark. Others pulsed like flesh. Some bled.
Then he noticed the inkpot.
It was still half full.
He reached toward it—
And saw his own hand, as a child, holding a brush.
Drawing.
No, carving.
On the table was a child's sketch, done in nervous strokes. It was a stick figure surrounded by swirls, a big circle above it—a sun, or maybe a void. Below it, written in jagged glyphs:
Vehrash rises.
He dropped the brush.
"No—I didn't write this. I didn't know what that word meant—!"
But behind him, voices began to rise.
Hundreds of them.
Children laughing, sobbing, begging for light. He turned—and saw a room filled with desks, filled with young Spandrexes. Every version of himself repeated the glyphs over and over again:
"Vehrash rises. Vehrash rises. Vehrash—"
"STOP!"
They all turned to him in unison.
And spoke as one.
"Why do you fear what you already are?"
The lights went out.
Total darkness swallowed the archive. The table vanished. The children faded like smoke. Only the sound of slow, wet footsteps remained—approaching him from behind.
He couldn't turn around.
He didn't want to.
But he had to.
And when he did—he stood face to face with the First Vehrash.
The same shadow he had seen when he opened the book.
But now… it had a face.
His own.
"It's time you stop pretending to be afraid of me," it said calmly.
"And become me."
Spandrex shook his head, trying to back away—but there was no floor anymore, no ground, no weight.
Just falling.
Falling into himself
He didn't hit the ground.
Spandrex drifted through nothing—then through everything.
Scenes blinked past him like shards of broken mirrors: flashes of his mother scrawling frantic notes under candlelight, his father whispering with cloaked strangers in forgotten hallways, entire corridors of their home he never knew existed, filled with shelves stacked with books on glyph-binding, shadow convergence, and soul tethering.
"He's not ready," his father's voice echoed again.
"Then we force readiness," his mother had replied.
These weren't dreams.
They were real.
Memories he wasn't supposed to have access to.
He turned again—his body floating without resistance in the black void—and came face to face with an altar.
It rose like a stone tooth from an unseen floor, and atop it lay a bound book—the same one he had opened in his dome before everything changed.
But now, its surface pulsed like a heartbeat. The glyph on its cover was moving, writhing like it wanted out. The ink bled off its pages, curling through the air like smoke.
And standing behind it—arms folded, eyes unreadable—was the First Vehrash.
Or what remained of it.
It no longer looked like just a shadow.
It looked familiar. Not in face—but in stance. In energy. Like it had known Spandrex for far longer than a few stolen moments.
"Why do you think your parents let you read so freely?" it asked. "Why do you think they filled your room with stories of darkness wrapped as 'research'? You were never their son. You were their conduit."
Spandrex trembled.
"No—no, I—"
"Yes. And now you've opened the final gate."
Lightning cracked across the skyless void.
Veins of darkness split the world. The altar trembled. The book opened of its own will—pages flipping faster than he could read, symbols glowing red, then black, then disappearing altogether.
Spandrex screamed and turned—but everywhere he looked, he saw himself.
In a mirror.
In the altar.
In the pages.
In the Vehrash.
"You are not real," he whispered.
But the Vehrash laughed.
"Then why do you remember things you never lived?"
The void trembled harder. Books floated past, burning silently. His childhood bedroom shattered into fragments. The glyph that had once cracked against his chest now pulsed above his heart even here, even in the false mindscape.
Spandrex clutched his chest.
A burning began.
It wasn't pain—but it wasn't comfortable. It was… transformation.
"You've carried me since the day you were born," the Vehrash said, now behind him. "And you are almost ready to become what they feared."
The ground beneath him reformed—smooth black stone, spiraling like a vortex.
Above him, chains of light crisscrossed an unseen ceiling—old magic, trying to contain the force swelling inside him.
But the chains cracked.
One by one.
And then a voice—not his, but outside, from the real world—rattled across the void:
"His pulse—it's rising!"
"He's… changing—!"
Spandrex blinked.
Light. Real light. Not just imagined.
He was still inside, but he could feel the edge of waking.
The First Vehrash placed a hand on his shoulder.
"When you wake… you won't be alone."
And then it pushed him—through the stone, through the glyph, through his own skin—
He awoke.
Eyes snapping open, breathing hard.
But everything was… wrong.
The air in the room was warped. The book floated mid-air above the table, pages still open, glowing faintly.
Kael was there, kneeling by the wall, eyes wide. "Spandrex…?"
But Spandrex's pupils were gone.
Only shadow remained.