The deeper they went, the less the world resembled anything Joe had ever known.
The descent began at the base of the Tree of Threads. Not beneath it, exactly — through it. The oldest of the Vein-born, a woman called Kelha, had shown them the place where the bark split and formed a staircase made not of wood or stone, but of pulsing memory. Each step shimmered with the shimmer of dreams long forgotten: songs never sung, promises unspoken, names that had once almost been given.
"You are not walking down," Kelha had said, voice dry like paper. "You are walking back."
And now, after what felt like hours in the strange spiraling path of woven roots and vanishing light, Joe began to believe it.
The air thinned.
Not because of lack of oxygen, but because sound itself weakened. The voices of Nara and Aelren behind him came softer, stretched, distorted — like echoes inside a dream that hadn't quite taken shape.
The Truthbrand glowed on his back.
But it did not comfort him.
It warned him.
The spiral passage gave way to an open cavern — massive, domed, its ceiling curved like the inside of a skull. There were carvings here, too, but not like those above. These were rougher, older, untamed. Etched into the rock like claws scratching to be remembered.
Joe approached the nearest one.
It showed a figure standing over a sea of kneeling giants, a radiant spiral behind its head.
Beneath it, one word:
PRIME.
"What is this place?" Nara asked as she caught up.
Aelren answered first. "It's not a monument. It's a… record."
Joe nodded slowly. "This is where the first language grew teeth."
They moved deeper into the cavern.
The walls began to pulse in sync with their footsteps. Aelren flinched once, then again. "Do you feel that?"
Joe frowned. "The rhythm?"
"No. It's… it's asking something."
He pressed his palm against the wall.
And then recoiled violently, staggering back, eyes wide and unblinking.
"Are you okay?" Nara moved toward him, but he raised a hand.
"I saw something. Not from this life."
"You were Seized," Joe said grimly. "A memory fragment."
"I was a king. In a Spiral that never broke. I ruled for a hundred years."
Aelren looked at Joe, voice raw.
"I was you."
They entered the next chamber carefully.
It was lower, flatter, quieter.
At its center sat a cradle — enormous, carved from root and stone, filled not with earth or fire, but light. Inside floated an orb, dull and flickering, like a dying star trapped in a glass womb.
As they approached, the walls around them lit with glyphs.
Nara stared, then fell to her knees.
"I can read it," she whispered. "It's… it's a lullaby."
Joe knelt beside her.
"What does it say?"
Nara's eyes filled with tears.
"To name a thing is to love it.To speak a name is to bind it.But the first name…The first name was a promise:That the world would not forget itself."
Joe looked at the orb.
It pulsed once — and began to crack.
The light surged from the orb, not outward but inward — into them.
Joe stood frozen as images poured through his thoughts.
He saw the world before the First Name — a place where everything moved without memory. Where stars blinked out seconds after forming, where oceans boiled and vanished in hours, where people were born without knowing why they lived and died without knowing they'd existed.
And then the First One came.
He didn't build cities.
He didn't teach.
He just spoke.
One word.
The First Name.
And suddenly the world remembered.
Trees remembered how to grow.
People remembered how to speak.
The world had context.
Meaning.
It was not creation.
It was awakening.
And with that awakening… came pain.
Joe stumbled away from the orb.
"What did it show you?" Nara asked gently.
He looked at her, dazed.
"Why the Spiral had to break."
"Because it forgot?"
"No."
He gritted his teeth.
"Because it started choosing which memories were allowed to matter."
Behind them, Aelren touched the orb again.
This time, it didn't show him memories.
It showed him a gate.
Massive. Black. Bound in silence.
A voice whispered:
"You know it is not over.You know the First One sleeps beyond the Wound.And he dreams… of waking."
Aelren turned to Joe.
"We're not done."
Joe nodded.
"No," he said. "We're only halfway through the wound."
Nara placed her hand over her heart. The flame-thread mark on her chest shimmered.
"I can hear it too," she said.
Joe looked at them both.
Then turned toward the next corridor.
"We keep going."
The next section of the descent was different.
No carvings.
No symbols.
Only names — floating in the air, ghostly and slow, each one blinking out the moment they tried to speak it aloud.
"Unwritten souls," Nara whispered.
Joe's jaw clenched.
"We're walking through the Grave of Possibility."
Aelren frowned. "Then where do these souls go when they die?"
"They don't die," Joe said softly.
"They become Nullborne."
They passed through the names in silence.
Each one brushed against them, tugging at their memories, testing their shape.
Joe felt something press against his spine — not a hand, but a feeling.
The urge to forget.
He gripped the Truthbrand tighter and kept walking.
After a while, the names stopped.
The air grew still.
And they reached the final gate.
It was not carved.
Not glowing.
Not sealed.
Just a smooth black arch.
Joe approached it, heart pounding.
"I've seen this before," he said. "In the vision. In the Spiral. In the Hollow."
"It's the Wound," Aelren said. "Where the First One sleeps."
Joe turned to them.
"This is it."
Nara stepped forward. "Once we go through, we don't get to unknow anything."
Joe nodded.
Aelren looked at his own blade, then at the Truthbrand.
"I was you," he said again, voice distant.
Joe smiled at him.
"You are you now."
They stepped through.
The Wound was not a place.
It was a moment stretched across eternity.
They stood on a surface of nothing, beneath a sky of nothing, surrounded by echoes of everything.
And in the center…
A boy.
Asleep.
Alone.
Glowing with the spiral of the First Name across his chest.
Joe walked to him.
The boy opened his eyes.
And the world forgot how to breathe.
End of Chapter 23: The Descent Beneath Names