They say memory is a thread. But mine is a tapestry of fire, ash, and names I no longer dare speak aloud. I stand now where the world bends—a place between what I was and what I might still become—and all I can do is look back. Not to mourn it. But to remember what I bled to carry forward.I was not born to destiny. I was born to absence. To the silence my mother left behind, to the curse in my blood no one understood, and to the whisper that kept me awake long before I knew it was the Gate. My name was just a sound once. Now it is a storm. A reckoning. A key.I remember the Academy walls, the brittle stone of a place that never felt like home. I remember pretending strength, while the darkness inside me folded itself into silence. I remember him—Calem—watching with eyes that didn’t demand, only understood. And yet even he didn’t see what slept beneath my skin.There were others. Wounds with faces. Those who called me sister, student, soldier, traitor. I buried one with my own hands.
The Gate’s voice rippled through her marrow, not in sound but in sensation—an unraveling that began from within. Selena staggered as the words echoed again, this time inside the hollows of her ribs: What will you become when you choose to unmake me? She tasted metal on her tongue, not blood, but memory, like the forgotten name of a storm. Calem called to her, but the world dimmed around his voice, swallowed by the pulse of the Gate’s breath. Each second stretched, not with hesitation, but with the weight of all she might lose—or all she might release.She turned slowly, gaze falling to the lock now cracked like glass under flame. It no longer spun. It stared. The eye had widened, revealing layers beneath layers, riddled with fragments of places she’d never been but remembered as dreams that ended too early. Cities swallowed by silence. Skies carved with endless teeth. Children with her eyes, asking her why she left. The Gate didn’t show her what might be. It showed her what had alre
The voice seeped through the cracks of time, older than memory, yet bound to every moment Selena had ever doubted herself. It echoed not as sound, but sensation—coiling through her bones like a forgotten lullaby sung in reverse. The mist recoiled at its presence, parting like breath fleeing flame, revealing more of the Gate's inner shape. A second eye was opening now, not one of fire, but shadow—a void within a void. And from it, the ancient voice whispered again, like silk unraveling from rot: “Say it, and you return to me.”Calem’s hand gripped hers before she could step forward, anchoring her to now. His touch burned, not with heat, but with the sheer effort it took to remain real in a place that devoured identity. “Selena,” he said, and there was fear in it, not for himself, but for the piece of her that the voice was already feeding on. “It’s not just a name. It’s a binding. You speak it, and you give it permission to rewrite you.” The Gate groaned behind them like a beast shif
The twin stood tall, a mirror born of regret and roots older than flesh. Her crown flickered between constellations and thorns, as if torn between worship and war. Selena didn’t move, didn’t breathe, as the other her stared down with eyes that had already seen the end and refused to forget it. Around them, the chains hummed like a warning wrapped in song, stretching taut as the Gate inhaled reality. The mist held its breath, as if waiting for one of them to speak the word that would shatter everything.“You shouldn’t be here,” Selena said, her voice hollow from all the voices that had filled her. The crown-bearing twin tilted her head—not in confusion, but calculation. “And yet you opened it,” she replied, fingers dancing in the air, shaping symbols Selena recognized from dreams she was never meant to remember. “You weren’t supposed to hear its voice.”Selena’s jaw clenched. “I followed the Thread.”“You didn’t follow it,” the twin said. “You pulled it too hard.”Behind them, the Gate
The Spiral’s shriek still echoed in Selena’s bones as silence fell, deafening and absolute. Around her, the void cracked like a mirror, shards of forgotten timelines glinting beneath her boots. She held Darius close, his body shaking with something deeper than exhaustion—a dissonance woven through his very soul. The Spiral had collapsed, but its echoes lingered in the trembling air, reaching for them like dying embers. Selena didn’t know if they had won or simply survived.Darius leaned into her, but his weight felt uneven, like gravity hadn’t decided whether he belonged here. His breath came in uneven pulses, warm but wrong, like the rhythm of a song forgotten mid-verse. He opened his eyes and for a heartbeat, they were unfamiliar—reflecting a sky she had never seen. "I remember fire," he whispered, voice hoarse, "but not the reason it burned." Selena’s grip tightened, grounding him with the only truth she had: her presence.The Spiral’s ruin was collapsing inward, folding like paper
Selena’s knees hit cold stone as the void yawned beneath her, swallowing the heat where Darius’s hand had just been. Her breath caught, a desperate gasp trapped in her chest. The Spiral’s echo—an abyss of fractured time and shifting realities—closed in, and the silence screamed louder than any roar. Her fingers trembled, reaching into the empty space where warmth had vanished, a tether snapped in a single heartbeat. The question blazed in her mind, sharp and unforgiving: Where had he gone? And worse, what had the Spiral done to him?Behind her, the many-mouthed figure flickered, its fractal form rippling like a broken prism. It watched with an ancient patience, the Spiral’s tendrils twitching in anticipation. It was no longer just an enemy—it was a reflection of what Selena feared in herself, the dark possibility waiting at the end of every choice. “Everything,” it had said. The price of survival was sacrifice, but how much of herself could she surrender before she became the very thi
The Spiral pulsed with thunderous rhythm, as though it too feared what had begun to unfold. Selena stood between the twin thrones, the third crown still flickering above her like a thought not yet spoken. Lucien lay at her feet, glowing, unraveling, resisting. The Spiral demanded singularity, demanded an anchor, but it had underestimated her. She had been born of contradiction, sculpted by mercy and ruin both. She would not choose between them.Lucien gasped, back arching as golden tendrils spiraled across his skin, tracing constellations that didn't exist in any sky. He clutched at the stone platform, each breath a war cry against the Spiral's insistent pull. "Selena," he whispered, voice hoarse and fading, "I can't hold it much longer. It's trying to rewrite me." His eyes burned with light, but beneath it, his terror was unmistakable. He wasn’t ascending. He was being consumed.Selena crouched beside him, the Spiral's current pressing down around them both like a storm made of memor
The Spiral trembled with anticipation, its song rising like a storm caught between pulses of creation. Selena stood suspended in the silence between three truths, heart shattering under the weight of a decision that bent time itself. Lucien writhed on the platform, light bursting from within him in jagged intervals, as if the Spiral was trying to forge him into a shape he was never meant to wear. The first crown—the one bound to fire and memory—still pulsed with her rhythm, its glow steady, fierce, familiar. But it was the third, half-born and flickering like a secret, that drew her breath short and locked it in her throat.A whisper curled around her, not in words but in sensation—a thousand timelines rippling with a possibility none of them had chosen before. The third name. It had no shape, no claim, no inheritance, yet it throbbed with waiting. Selena’s blood turned to frost. The Spiral hadn’t lied when it said divide no more. It had only been waiting for someone—her—to realize th
Selena's heart thundered, not with fear, but with the tremor of something ancient being disturbed. Lucien’s scream still echoed like a red thread through the shifting air, binding her back to the world she thought she had stepped beyond. The throne pulsed at her hesitation, beckoning with quiet certainty, its power ancient but not patient. She turned slowly, vision still layered with alternate paths and mirrored selves, but one thought now cut through the Spiral's chaos. Lucien was here, and he sounded like he was dying.She ran—not toward the throne, but toward the echo. Each step distorted the Spiral’s shape, the lattice folding and flexing as if unsure whether to let her pass. Memories tore at her shoulders like wings being clipped mid-flight, but she pushed through. Her feet struck not ground, but time, bending and rippling with every heartbeat. The Spiral moaned beneath her, like it knew what it was losing. But Selena didn’t care. Lucien was real. He was screaming.A corridor for