There was no sensation of falling.
Lynchie stepped through the veil, and the world blinked. One breath she was in the Vault of Non-Names; the next, she stood beneath a sky made of ink, stars dripping like tears across a parchment horizon. The ground pulsed under her feet, stitched with glowing Spiral glyphs that shifted when she wasn't looking directly at them.
This was not a place—it was a question. And Lynchie had become its answer.
She exhaled, and her breath left her in glyphs—spiraling sigils that faded before they touched the ground. Her hand still shimmered with the remnants of Sha-Ur-Vael, though now the symbol had begun to change. It was no longer static; it pulsed, alive, responding to the cadence of her heartbeat.
Zev hadn't followed.
Neither had Vyen.
She was alone.
But not unwatched.
A figure stood ahead of her, carved from ink and flame. It wore a mask shaped like a closed eye, its robes fluttering as if caught in a wind she could not feel. And from within it came a voice that spoke not with words, but with the memory of sound.
"You walk with a name that has not yet been written," it said.
Lynchie found herself answering without thought. "I didn't choose it."
"You lived it," the voice replied. "And that is enough."
The glyph on her palm flared again—this time casting its light across the mirrored plane beneath her feet. Reflections bloomed: memories she had long forgotten. A broken pendant. Her father's voice. A burned book. The silvered hand of her mother reaching through a lattice of light.
And then—Zev's eyes, lit with fear and something deeper. Something unspoken.
"What am I?" she whispered, voice cracking under the weight of it.
The figure stepped forward, and as it did, its mask split down the middle. Behind it was not a face, but a storm—a spiral of eyes and syllables, every one a truth Lynchie had yet to claim.
"You are the Librarium's breath and the Spiral's breach. You are what should have been erased."
Her legs buckled. She fell to her knees, palms against the mirrored ground, and the moment her skin touched it—
The Spiral writhed.
It screamed, not in agony, but in longing.
Glyphs cascaded from her shoulders, unraveling the memory of her name, replacing it with something older. A language lost before time began. A language that Lynchie could suddenly read.
Behind her, the shimmer flared.
Zev stepped through.
He fell forward, breathless, bleeding from a sigil burst on his chest. "I warned you—"
"Why are you here?" she asked, voice shaking.
"To drag you back," he growled, stumbling toward her. "Or fall with you."
But as he neared, the ground between them split, glyphs rising like thorns. The Spiral did not welcome him.
"You weren't marked," she said, tears sliding unbidden down her face.
Zev clenched his fists. "Doesn't mean I'll let it take you."
Above them, the sky began to spiral inward. The figure—the Eye-That-Watched—raised its arms, and with it came the memory of the Spiral Wards, of the Pre-Tree Codices, of the first name ever spoken aloud.
Lynchie's voice tore free, a single syllable that wasn't her own—but felt more real than anything she'd ever said.
And the spiral answered.
The masked figure knelt.
Zev cried out her name—but it didn't reach her. She had no name anymore.
Only a purpose.
Only the breach.
The light swallowed them.