The three of them sat in the stillness of the cavern, their breaths mingling with the faint hum of crystals that lined the walls. The glow from Cael's fossil pulsed as if alive, though no warmth bled from it into his trembling hands. He wondered if it throbbed with his own heartbeat—or with something deeper, older, hidden.
The silence stretched too long. It felt like the earth itself was watching, waiting for him to break it.
Finally, Cael spoke, his voice low and hesitant, but steady enough to make Serin and Liora look at him differently than before.
"You have asked me a hundred questions, and my answers have crumbled. But now, I will ask you one."
He raised his eyes, fire glinting faintly in them.
"If the Spiral is false, if life is written and patterned as you say—why, then, is there death? Why would a perfect script allow its sentences to be erased? Why write so much beauty, only to let it rot?"
Serin tilted his head, almost smiling. He had expected Cael to shrink, to crumble under their words. But instead, the boy had finally struck back, not with denial, but with hunger for truth.
"Good," Serin murmured. "Now you are the one pressing the chisel against the stone."
Liora's face darkened.
"Death is not erasure," she said. "It is punctuation. Without endings, no sentence could mean anything. But your Spiral—your priests—pretend that endings serve no purpose, only randomness. That a life lost is an accident, a chance event. Tell me, Cael—do you accept that? Or does some part of you ache at the thought that your father's death, or your mother's silence, was nothing but a blind roll of dice?"
Cael stiffened. He had never spoken of his parents to them. His father had been a miner, crushed by falling stone. His mother had withered, sick in body and spirit, until she was little more than a shadow in the corner of their home. And yes—he had accepted, because the priests told him, that such things were meaningless. The Spiral moved blindly; he must not ask why.
But the ache Liora spoke of was real. It had always been real.
His voice trembled.
"No… I do not want to believe that their deaths were accidents. But if they were not… then they were meant. And that is worse."
Serin crouched beside him, eyes burning in the cavern's glow.
"Meant is not cruel. Cruel is chance. Cruel is a universe that throws dice and does not care where they fall. Meaning can be bitter, yes, but bitterness is still flavor. Blindness is nothing. Which is more frightening, Cael—that life is written, or that it is not written at all?"
Cael swallowed hard. He had never framed it so starkly in his own thoughts. His tutors had filled his head with diagrams of spiraling lines, chants of chance and change, as though such things were comfort. But now he wondered if the Spiral had been a prison of thought, keeping him from staring too long into the abyss.
Still, he pressed further. He needed to.
"If life is written, as you say—then why does the script contradict itself? Look at the ants that build empires in the soil, unchanged for millions of years. Look at men, building and destroying, rising and falling. One stands still, the other rushes forward. What kind of author writes one story still and the other in constant upheaval?"
Serin's eyes flashed. "Ah. At last you see the true fracture. The Spiral says everything climbs one ladder. Yet the ground shows us another truth: that stories are written differently, side by side. The ant was given perfection enough for its world, so its tale does not need rewriting. Man was given hunger, so his story cannot sit still. It is not one ladder, Cael. It is a tapestry. And every thread runs its own course."
Liora leaned closer, her whisper like the hiss of fire meeting rain.
"And when threads cross, the world changes. That is what the priests fear most—that the people will see that life is not one upward climb from filth to glory, but many threads, woven by a hidden hand. That the order of things was chosen, not stumbled upon."
Cael shivered. He thought of the priests chanting that man was a child of ape, ape a child of worm, worm a child of dust. The great Spiral rising, ever upward. But now, in his mind, he saw not a ladder, but a vast loom, threads of light and dark crisscrossing, some ending quickly, some running strong and long, each carrying its own design.
His throat was dry when he spoke.
"Then the Spiral is not only false—it is shallow. A shadow of something far more… immense."
Serin nodded, pride flickering in his eyes.
"You are beginning to understand."
But Cael wasn't finished. His hunger had grown too sharp to be sated by their answers alone.
He turned on them suddenly, eyes narrowing.
"Then why hide it? Why whisper of it in shadows, instead of tearing the Spiral from the priests' altars and showing the world the truth?"
The cavern echoed with the boldness of his question. For the first time, it was Serin and Liora who looked unsettled.
Liora's lips pressed thin.
"Because truth is a fire, Cael. Hold it too close and it burns. The world clings to its veils, to its chants, because they are safe. If you rip away the veil too quickly, the people will not thank you. They will claw at you, stone you, burn you to keep the veil intact. We do not hide truth for ourselves. We hide it because the world cannot yet bear it."
Cael's fists clenched around the fossil, the spiral pattern etched on it glowing faintly brighter, as if answering his turmoil.
"But who decides what the world can bear?" he demanded. "You? The priests? Or should each man be allowed to look and choose for himself?"
The weight of his words hung heavy. He had spoken them not only for them, but for himself. For the first time, he felt not like a pupil pulled along by wiser hands, but like a man daring to carve his own question into the stone of the world.
Serin's eyes burned with a strange intensity. He smiled, but it was not gentle. It was fierce, dangerous.
"Now, Cael… now you are ready."
At that moment, the cavern trembled faintly. Dust drifted from above. The echo of boots—many boots—reverberated faintly down the tunnels.
The hunters had found them.
Liora's face hardened, her hand going to the hilt of her dagger.
"They come sooner than I thought. It seems the priests fear you more than they fear us, Cael."
Cael's blood ran cold. He was no longer merely a scholar caught in the tide—he was the tide. Something in his questions had already marked him. The Spiral would not forgive him for asking.
And as the shadows thickened at the edges of the cavern, he realized with a shock that the hunters were not the only danger. The fossil in his hands pulsed again, stronger, as though awakening. As though it too waited for him to choose what to believe.