Kael didn't move.
Spandrex—if it was still him—sat motionless in the center of the chamber, black smoke rising from his shoulders like steam from cracked stone. The glyph over his heart pulsed visibly beneath his shirt, faint red light beating in rhythm like a second heart. The book still hovered midair above the altar, its pages turning as if blown by wind that didn't exist.
"Spandrex?" Kael's voice cracked.
No response.
Instead, Spandrex stood—slowly, mechanically—as if his bones had forgotten how to bend. The moment his feet touched the ground, the shadows on the walls twitched.
Not flickered. Twitched.
Kael gritted his teeth and took a step back, hand drifting toward his jacket pocket where he'd hidden the fragment of nullstone Professor Relas had given him just in case.
"I know you're still in there," Kael said carefully.
Spandrex tilted his head. His face remained blank—but something in his jaw, in the way his neck moved, was no longer his.
"I… I saw you fight this," Kael continued, trying to keep his voice even. "You didn't give in, not even when the Archive twisted your mind. Don't let it win now."
For a moment, the pulsing glyph dimmed.
Spandrex blinked.
His hand trembled at his side.
Kael stepped forward, gently now. "Come on. You know me. You remember me. The night you summoned the shadow wards outside the dorms? The time you nearly burned the back of my coat off in shadowcraft class? That awful soup you tried making last month?"
A flicker. A twitch in Spandrex's brow.
And then—
The room screamed.
Not Spandrex. Not Kael. The room.
The walls quivered like lungs exhaling, and every glyph that had ever been etched into the stone of Umbran's lower sanctums lit up in sequence—red, then black, then void.
The air shattered.
From the book above the altar, a tendril of smoke exploded outward—grabbing Spandrex by the throat and yanking him upward. His body arched, arms wide, suspended midair as the glyph over his chest surged in brightness.
Kael ran forward, raising the nullstone fragment, but it cracked in his grip before he could even call its name.
"Spandrex!"
The glyph on Spandrex's chest burst—blinding for an instant—and then he dropped.
Hard.
But the silence that followed was unnatural.
The book shut itself.
The room calmed.
Kael slowly crept forward. Spandrex lay still, face-down, chest rising in shallow breaths.
"Hey… Hey, you with me?" Kael asked, kneeling beside him.
Spandrex groaned.
But when he turned his face, Kael froze.
His eyes were back—no longer just black shadow. But one eye was still wrong.
It glowed. Dimly. Like a candle under a sea.
And then Spandrex whispered:
"I saw it."
Kael leaned in. "Saw what?"
Spandrex's hand shot up, clutching Kael's collar. Not in aggression—but desperation.
"The Vehrash isn't just real… it's me. Or... it's using me. My parents knew. They made me. I wasn't… born like others. I was built."
Kael's throat tightened. "What are you saying?"
Spandrex released him, eyes distant.
"I'm the door. I was the lock. But now the key's turned."
Behind them, the book crumbled to ash.