The descent back up wasn't as hard as it should've been. Not physically. His legs still ached. His breath came sharp and quick, and his back strained every time he climbed the rusted steps toward the upper tier — but none of it meant anything. Not really. Not anymore.
He felt the tension in his muscles, the tight pull across his spine and shoulders, the raw patches on his palms from catching himself during a slip. But none of it hurt. And that was worse.
Because pain was supposed to remind him he was alive.
Now, he had to remind himself.
Kesh walked ahead without speaking. She hadn't said much since the communion platform, but her posture had changed. She didn't glance back to check if he was keeping pace. She didn't slow when his foot caught the edge of a grate or when he stumbled near a blind pipe curve. She trusted he'd keep up now — or didn't care if he didn't.
Maybe both.
The spiral still pulsed under his sleeve, now warm even through cloth. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it wasn't subtle either. It felt like a clock ticking inside his skin, except the hands didn't mark hours. They marked shifts — subtle changes in how the world looked, or sounded, or smelled. Since awakening the First Truth, the shadows stretched differently in his vision. Lights dimmed just a half-second before flickering. Conversations in distant halls carried fragments of sentences that hadn't been spoken yet.
More than anything, he noticed a growing stillness inside his own head.
It wasn't silence.
It was the kind of clarity that came before something sharp — the pause before glass shatters.
They passed through a tunnel wrapped in rusted pipework, the air thick with steam. On the other side, the ceiling curved lower, and they emerged into a new section of the Lower Halves. He hadn't been here before. The walls were smoother. Reinforced. These weren't scavenger lanes or broken liftways — this was a forgotten part of the city's foundation, intact and sealed.
Kesh stopped in front of a steel-banded door.
"Someone wants to meet you."
He blinked. "Who?"
"Not who. What."
She turned the wheel and pulled the door open with a screech of old hinges. A rush of cool air spilled out — unnaturally clean, sterile like a place no one had breathed in for years. The hallway beyond was dim but lit enough to show signs of age: pipes wrapped in black cloth, floors marked with circular diagrams, walls carved with incomplete spirals and half-erased names.
"Old Proxies used to gather here," Kesh said quietly. "Before the Choirs. Before the Wardens enforced silence. When the Hole still whispered to whole families, not just one at a time."
He stepped in behind her, the anchorbone clutched tightly in his coat.
"What happened to them?"
"They listened too long. Started drifting." She gestured at a broken seal on the far wall — a wide circle split through the middle, ink smeared like something had tried to climb out. "Some truths don't wait to be earned. They want out. And if they find a crack…"
Her voice faded.
He took another step, trying to ignore the strange pressure building in his temples. It was like a quiet hum, deep in the base of his skull — not noise, but expectation. As if the room itself recognized the mark on his wrist and had begun responding to it.
Ahead, a single chair sat in the center of the chamber. Around it, nothing — no windows, no books, no signs of life. Just the chair. And beside it, a long mirror, untouched by dust.
He approached slowly.
The chair looked like something from a medical ward: strapped, bolted, shaped to hold someone still.
Kesh didn't stop him.
"Sit if you want to understand what comes next," she said. "You don't have to. But if you don't, you'll never control the Drift."
He glanced at her. "Drift?"
"You've already started to feel it. Temporal slippage. Emotional lag. Dreams that bleed into the waking world. It gets worse if you don't anchor. Worse still if you don't know who you are. The Drift doesn't just move you. It moves reality around you. This chair helps. For some."
He looked at the mirror. His reflection looked back — thinner, pale, shadows under the eyes. But it didn't match him entirely. The spiral mark on his wrist was on the wrong arm. His reflection's mouth didn't quite move in time with his own.
He sat anyway.
The metal was cold.
Kesh placed one hand on the back of the chair and whispered something in a language he didn't understand. The straps tightened. The mirror grew darker.
Then it began.
It didn't feel like falling, not at first. It felt like reversing. A rewinding of things he hadn't consciously recorded. A blur of faces with no names. Rooms without purpose. Emotions with no source. And beneath all of it, one repeating question, whispered in the voice of the Hole:
"What were you, before the spiral?"
He tried to answer.
But no voice came.
And so the mirror showed him instead.
A hallway of memories he couldn't place. Each door marked with a symbol. Some were letters. Some were shapes. One was just his own handprint, burned black. One door opened.
Inside, he saw himself.
Younger.
Happy.
And then that version of him turned — and screamed.
Because something was crawling out of the spiral etched across the floor.
Something that looked like him, but worn thin. Like it had been remembered too many times. Like someone had copied the shape of him without knowing what he really was.
He reached forward.
The chair cracked beneath his fingers.
He was no longer looking at the mirror.
He was inside it.