They didn't return through the same tunnels.
The man who called him Proxy led through an older passage, narrower than the last, its ceiling braced with cracked slate instead of steel. The walls were dry here. Bone-dry. It hadn't rained in weeks, but this dryness felt different—like the air had been forgotten. Light came from nowhere. There were no lamps. Still, the path ahead remained faintly lit, as if the walls themselves remembered the way.
The boy didn't speak. The man didn't look back. They moved steadily, quietly, until the tunnel opened into a chamber shaped like a broken sphere. It wasn't a room in the ordinary sense. More like a hollow pocket within the cliff itself, held together by thick ribs of rusted support beams.
At the center, there was a seat. Not a throne or a bench, but something between. Carved from rough stone. The Proxy—the boy—felt a chill run down his arms. The spiral beneath his skin warmed in response, a dull pulse barely stronger than a breath.
"You'll return here often," the man said, stepping to the edge of the platform. "Each time you do, the path will change. The cliff remembers different things on different days."
The boy glanced at the walls. "What is this place?"
"An old threshold," the man replied. "Built when the Hole still had rules. Before the first Truth was buried."
The word pressed against the air like a weight. Truth.
"Why me?" the boy asked. His voice was hoarse. Not from fear, but from something else—something like recognition without memory.
The man tilted his head slightly, considering him. "Because you were called. No one chooses to be a Proxy. The Hole does."
The boy rubbed at the spiral beneath his wrist. It hadn't faded. If anything, it had settled in deeper, as if inked into the root of him. "What does it want?"
"To remember," the man said.
That answer didn't make sense. But the boy didn't press.
The man continued, voice slower now. "You carry a wound the world forgot. The first of ten. They are not pieces to collect. Not curses to lift. They are scars. Buried truths that once bled into everything, then were sealed away to keep the world from collapsing."
He stepped closer, gesturing toward the seat. "Sit."
The boy obeyed. The stone was colder than the water basin. Not just in temperature, but in presence. It felt wrong. Like he was sitting inside a question no one had ever dared ask aloud.
The man reached into a leather pouch and removed a thin blade. It was not ceremonial. It had no ornament, no strange shape or glow. Just iron, worn to near-transparency near the edge. The boy's eyes widened, but he didn't move.
The man didn't ask for permission. He reached down and turned the boy's wrist upward. "The first Truth has already begun to wake. You heard your name. You felt the spiral. But to carry the Truth, you must bear it."
He drew the blade down, not across the wrist, but just beside the spiral.
It was shallow. A cut barely deep enough to bleed. But the moment the skin opened, the boy gasped. Not from pain—but from what came out.
Not blood.
Light.
A faint shimmer, silver-white, curled upward from the cut like mist catching morning sun. It hovered there for a moment before fading into the air. The wound closed almost immediately, leaving behind a mark that mirrored the spiral beside it—only twisted, slightly broken at one edge.
The boy cradled his wrist. His heart beat too fast. His vision blurred for a moment, and in the blur he saw something impossible.
A memory.
A woman. Her face unclear. Leaning close. Whispering something he couldn't quite hear.
It was gone before he could blink.
"What was that?" he asked.
"The scar," the man said. "A seal and a key. The first of ten."
"I saw someone—"
"You'll see more," the man interrupted. "Pieces of what was lost. Truths don't return cleanly. They cut their way through you. Some will come as memories. Others as voices. Some may arrive as things that wear your face."
The boy swallowed hard.
"You said there are ten," he whispered.
The man nodded. "Ten Truths. Each buried for a reason. Each capable of remaking the world. Or unmaking you."
The boy stood, shaky on his feet. "What now?"
The man turned toward the wall. A section of stone shifted, revealing a staircase leading up—this one made of iron and lit with glass orbs filled with slow-burning oil.
"You return to the world above," he said. "The others won't know. Not yet. You'll look the same. But you won't be."
The boy hesitated. "What do I do?"
The man gave him a final look. "You listen. You remember. And when the second Truth stirs, you find your way back."
The boy nodded once, then began to climb.
Behind him, the spiral beneath his skin pulsed again, and for just a moment, he thought he heard something whisper his name—not the one they gave him in the dorms, but the one the Hole had spoken.
He didn't know what it meant.
But he remembered how it felt.