The sky above the Librarium had changed.
What once shimmered with the distant hues of starlight was now laced with violet fractures—like cracks in glass across the dome of the world. A wind moved through the corridors, though no doors had opened. Books whispered not with pages but with voices too old to be recorded. The Spiral was no longer waiting.
It was listening.
Lynchie sat alone in the upper terrace of the Archivum's Sanctum. Her fingers trembled around a glass of infused tincture she hadn't touched. Zev was below, tracing the faultlines that had formed along the outermost Spiral Wards. He hadn't said anything since she emerged with the glyph burning beneath her skin, but she felt him watching her when she turned away.
She hadn't told him yet.
About the second name.
Mor'iel.
It still curled inside her chest like a seed not yet ready to sprout.
When she closed her eyes, she could see the glyph—four spirals interlocking like breathing lungs, surrounding an inverted eye. It pulsed when she thought of her mother. It ached when she remembered the last words spoken in anger, the door left unopened, the letter never written.
Her twin had warned her: to speak the glyph before she was ready would fracture her. But wasn't she already fractured? How many selves had she buried just to survive the years between?
She did not hear Archivist Vyen approach. But suddenly he was there, cloaked not in the ceremonial crimson but in the obsidian folds of the Forbidden Custodianship. His face was drawn, the skin around his eyes etched with sleep he hadn't taken.
"I thought I'd have longer," he said.
Lynchie looked up slowly. "Before what?"
"Before you remembered who you were."
There was no need for pretense anymore. Not between them.
Vyen moved to the center of the chamber and held up a sealed scroll wrapped in gold thread. It pulsed once—like a heartbeat—before stilling.
"I transcribed this twenty-three years ago," he said. "The same night your mother came to the Librarium for the final time. She asked me to hide it from the Spiral. I obeyed, though I did not understand why."
Lynchie reached out, hands trembling. The scroll was warm, like sun-soaked parchment. The thread came undone as if it had been waiting for her.
Inside: a single name, written in the script of the Old Choir.
Mor'iel.
The glyph shimmered into being above the page. Lynchie gasped as the air thickened, vibrating with a melody not heard by ears but bones. A spiral of memory tore through her mind:
Her mother's voice, singing lullabies shaped like ancient seals.
Her mother's eyes, wet with unshed truth.
Her mother's hands, pushing her away, saying, "You must forget me to survive this."
Then—
Pain.
The glyph ignited.
She screamed.
Zev was at her side in seconds, catching her as she collapsed. But Vyen did not move. He watched the glyph, and his eyes filled with something darker than dread.
"No," he breathed. "It's too soon."
Lynchie's lips parted, and in a voice not hers, she said:
"Mor'iel, I name you."
The Spiral Wards above them buckled.
Books fell from their shelves in spiraling arcs.
The great observatory dome cracked.
And every Spiral Guardian still tethered to the Archive screamed in unison, their bindings unraveling like threads pulled from the fabric of fate.
Vyen dropped to his knees.
Zev held Lynchie, whose body shimmered with golden fracture-lines, like she was made of stained glass on the edge of breaking.
"She named the second," Vyen whispered. "That means—"
But he stopped.
Because something moved in the darkness behind the glyph.
A shape.
Not a creature.
Not a man.
A concept.
A memory made flesh.
And it smiled with Lynchie's face.
"You were never the only one," it whispered.
Then the dome above shattered.
And the Spiral began to descend.