The cavern pressed in around them, heavy with silence, as though it knew what truths had just been spoken. Cael stood before the creature entombed in crystal, his heart hammering. His reflection wavered faintly on its glassy surface, dwarfed by the enormity of the beast inside. Its stillness was more terrifying than movement.
He dragged his gaze from it to Serin and Liora, desperation creeping into his voice.
"You ask me where the half-creatures are, the fragments, the failures. But maybe they are gone because they could not survive. Isn't that what the Spiral teaches—that only the strong endure? Perhaps the broken lived, but for only a breath, and were lost to time."
Serin tilted his head, regarding him like a craftsman studying a crack in the stone.
"And yet," he said quietly, "the earth preserves so much. It holds the shells of insects so delicate their wings still shimmer after millions of years. It holds the bones of beasts swallowed whole in mud, frozen in a moment of fear. If chance preserved those, why not the broken? Why do we see only what works, never what fails? Why does the earth itself seem to conspire in the priests' story?"
The words struck Cael, but still he pushed back, clinging to the fragments of what he had been taught.
"Perhaps… perhaps the changes are too small to see. Too small to leave a mark in stone."
Liora stepped forward, her eyes sharp.
"Too small? Then tell me, scholar—how many small steps make an eye? A million fragments of glass cannot see. A thousand curves of flesh cannot capture light. For sight, there must be wholeness. So when did the fragments finally leap into vision? Where is the night between blindness and sight?"
Her voice echoed against the crystal walls. Cael felt a shiver crawl down his spine. He had no answer.
Serin's tone softened, though his words were no less cutting.
"Or take the heart, Cael. A hollow muscle, chambers and valves, blood flowing in rhythm. Remove one piece, and the song stops. Which half-heart beat? Which broken rhythm kept a creature alive long enough to write the next note of the Spiral?"
Cael's throat was dry, his tongue heavy. He had recited countless hymns to the Spiral, praises to its endless creativity, but those hymns had never demanded answers. Only obedience.
He looked again at the entombed beast. No half-eyes. No half-hearts. No half-creatures. Only silence where fragments should be.
Still, he whispered, "The Spiral must have an answer. It must."
Liora's lips curved, not in kindness but in challenge.
"Must it? Or is it that you need it to have an answer? There is comfort in believing the world is shaped by blind chance, because chance asks nothing of you. If life is accident, then you owe nothing to it. No loyalty. No meaning. You may drift. But if life is written, then you are a sentence in a story larger than yourself. And sentences must serve their purpose."
Her words settled like lead in Cael's chest. He thought of the chants, the endless repetitions of the Spiral creed: Change without hand, order without script, life without author. It had always soothed him—until now, when the absence of an author felt less like freedom and more like emptiness.
Serin stepped closer, his voice now low, almost intimate.
"Consider also time, Cael. They say the Spiral has billions of years to work its craft. But what is time without direction? Give a child a billion years of ink and stone, will he carve the palace of a king? No. He will stain himself, chip aimlessly, and still the palace will never rise. Time does not build. It only waits. The builder must be more than time itself."
The words unsettled Cael, but also ignited something inside him. Doubt and wonder churned together. His mind raced, searching for escape routes in thought as desperately as his body once searched them in stone passages.
He lifted his gaze suddenly, seizing on another thread.
"But the priests say there is proof in likeness. The bones of man resemble the ape, the wing of bat resembles the hand, the fin of whale echoes both. They say such patterns show descent, a spiral upward from one root."
Serin's eyes glimmered in the dim light.
"And I tell you likeness is not descent, any more than the repetition of a word is the birth of another word. You write a circle in the sand, then another, then another. Do you claim the second is the child of the first? No. They are echoes of one thought, drawn by one hand. Likeness tells us only that there is pattern. And pattern points to thought. To mind. To script."
Liora's voice cut in, softer now, more dangerous for it.
"Or tell me this, scholar. If all creatures spiral upward from one root, why then do the simplest remain? If the worm was first, why is the worm still here, unchanged, as though time forgot it? Should it not have spiraled upward long ago, leaving only what comes next? Why does simplicity endure alongside complexity, if the Spiral is one endless climb?"
Cael's breath caught. He had never asked that question. Never once. The priests had praised the worm for its lowliness, the eagle for its height, but had never explained why the worm did not become eagle, why the low did not vanish in the march of time.
The silence after her words was suffocating.
He pressed his hands to his temples, struggling to steady the storm inside. His voice trembled when he spoke.
"If what you say is true… then the Spiral is not a ladder at all. It is—"
"A story," Serin finished for him. "A story written to quiet questions, to chain the mind with illusions of progress. But stories can be broken, Cael. And the broken pieces show more truth than the whole."
Cael turned back to the crystal tomb, his reflection trembling on its surface. He remembered the fossil dragonfly, identical to the ones that still buzzed by riverbanks today. He remembered the twisted carvings, half-forms that should have lived if chance were real but never did. And now this—this perfect beast, untouched by age, unchanged by time, mocking the Spiral by simply existing.
Liora stepped beside him, her voice a whisper now, but sharper than any scream.
"You asked if this creature lives. Perhaps it does. Perhaps it sleeps until the silence is broken. But even if it does not stir—its presence alone is enough to rattle the Spiral to dust. The priests cannot let the people see it. Not ever."
The chamber seemed to pulse with her words. Cael felt as though the earth itself leaned closer, waiting for his response.
He spoke slowly, tasting each word.
"Then the Spiral is not truth… it is veil. A veil drawn over something vast, something the priests fear."
Serin's eyes gleamed with fierce approval.
"At last, you begin to see."
But even as the words left his lips, Cael felt the ground shift under him—not of stone, but of certainty. If the Spiral was false, then everything was open, unmoored. He could no longer stand on doctrine, nor yet on whatever truth lay behind it. He was suspended in questions, dangling over an abyss.
And strangely, in that abyss, a hunger grew. A hunger to keep asking. To keep tearing the veil. To keep searching until the silence itself confessed its secrets.