The wind howled like a choir of ghosts across the upper spires, rattling the glass-paneled latticework that enclosed the Grand Bell Tower—a soaring relic of the First Founders whose bell had not tolled in a thousand years.
Lynchie leaned against the iron-spiraled railing of the observation deck, chest heaving. Her hand trembled as she traced the faint spiral etched onto her forearm—still warm, still humming like a barely struck chord. She had run until her legs refused to obey, until the whispers of glyphs and the echo of fragmented voices thinned into silence.
She wasn't alone.
Not in this tower.
And not in her mind.
A presence stirred behind her. Not heavy-footed like a student or even measured like a teacher—this was a breeze, a blink, a ripple in the pressure of the room. She turned sharply, eyes flashing silver from residual resonance.
He stood there.
The boy with mismatched eyes.
One amber, one void-black.
He didn't speak, but she knew his name. Somehow. She'd heard it whispered in a thousand wrong tongues behind the glyph gate.
"Quint," she said, and the moment she said it, the spiral on her skin pulsed once like a heartbeat.
His smile was crooked. "Took you long enough."
She stepped back. "You… what are you?"
"Like you," he said. "Only earlier. And fractured."
"What does that mean?" she demanded. "Fractured how?"
Quint's gaze darkened as the bell behind them groaned low in its cradle, a tremor like memory rolling down the spire. "Every time the Spiral awakens, the bell stirs. Every time it tolls—something breaks. A rule. A silence. A secret. The last time it rang…"
He didn't finish.
Lynchie felt it too now—a vibration in her teeth, in her lungs, in the bones of her thoughts. She stepped toward him, but he raised a hand and the air between them grew thick, almost… resistant. Like reality was a curtain being tugged the wrong way.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
He tilted his head. "Not from you. With you."
She didn't move.
"You've opened a door, Lynchie," he said, his voice a strange echo layered over several others. "Do you think the Academy will protect you now? Do you think the factions won't come clawing with masks of friendship?"
"I don't trust them," she said quietly.
"Good." His grin widened. "Then trust this—your glyph is not a key. It's a claim."
The bell moaned again, and this time a sliver of light peeled downward from its rim, bleeding celestial ink like dripping constellations.
"What do you mean, a claim?"
He stepped back, into shadow, and for a moment she saw something behind his human form—a vast, spiraling silhouette, antlered and scaled and crowned with broken stars.
Quint's final words echoed through the spiral-marked air:
"Because the Codex isn't dead, Lynchie. It remembers you."
Then he vanished, and the bell screamed.
The sky split.
And every glyph in the academy—every etched wall, every sigil-marked staff, every hidden rune—flared awake for the first time in centuries.
The Spiral had begun to turn. Again.