The wind changed first.
Not the sound of it, but the weight. Thin, sharp currents that tasted like dust and old metal swept through the narrow causeway as they left the memory-maps behind. The stairwell narrowed, then collapsed entirely into a tunnel carved into stone — uneven, ancient, and breathing a little too slow.
Torch-lanterns lined the path, lit with a color that wasn't quite yellow. More like... dimmed white, if such a thing existed. Kesh didn't speak much as they moved. Her compass-thread twitched only once, then stilled, hanging limp and directionless.
They were close.
The feeling in his chest had changed again. Not the pressure from before. Not dread. This time it was a kind of pulling — like something inside the center of him was stretching forward before his feet had caught up. The spiral on his wrist was warmer now, darker, and no longer throbbed like a pulse. It just waited.
Anchorpoint Zero was not a room.
It was a void pocket, cracked open in the rock like someone had scooped a chunk out of the world and let it fester. The opening was rimmed with copper stakes, each one humming softly in sync with the spiral mark on his skin. The air shimmered where the hole began. Not like heat. More like memory trying to unwrite itself.
Kesh stood at the edge and looked down. Not into the Hole — not yet — but into the mirror-space that formed here, at its threshold. She tossed a handful of gravel forward. The stones vanished without a sound.
"We're at the closest point the city will allow," she said. "Beyond here, it's not Cliffside anymore. It's Driftspace."
He took a step closer.
"What's inside it?"
"Your first mistake," she said. "Your second truth. Your third death, maybe. Depends how far you go."
He didn't answer.
The edge of the void called to him in a way nothing else ever had. Not with words. With familiarity. Like it had shaped itself around a wound he hadn't noticed was bleeding.
"I need you to understand something before we cross," Kesh said. She pulled her coat tighter and sat down at the rim. "You're not a hero. You're not chosen. And if you're lucky, no one will ever remember your name again."
"That's supposed to comfort me?"
"It should."
She reached into her satchel and pulled out a small, dark stone with spirals etched around its curve — a seed sigil, half-formed.
"I found this here years ago. Dropped by another Proxy. She didn't make it back."
He took the stone. It was warm. Too warm.
"Why give it to me?"
"Because I'm not coming with you."
That snapped him out of the trance.
"What?"
"This is your first Spiral descent," Kesh said, not looking at him. "You go in alone. If I followed, I'd shade it. Your truth would come out bent."
She stood and turned away.
"I'll be here when you come back. If you come back."
He stood at the threshold for longer than he realized.
At first, he thought stepping through would feel like a wall, or a punch, or a sudden drop.
Instead, the world simply flickered.
One step forward — and the noise stopped.
Not silence. Absence.
There was no sound in Driftspace.
Only echoes of thoughts that hadn't been thought yet.
He walked through a hall that wasn't there. The walls were not walls. Just suggestions of place, molded by whatever part of him still believed in direction. The anchorbone at his chest pulsed once, then cooled.
He reached a chamber.
It wasn't big. Or small. It didn't have size.
It was.
And at its center sat something waiting: a chair.
The same kind of chair he'd seen in the mirror chamber — high-backed, dark, carved from that same blackstone. The spirals on it weren't etched but grown, curled out of the stone like veins trying to bloom.
He didn't hesitate this time.
He sat.
The moment he did, the world bent inward.
Pain was not what he expected.
It wasn't sharp. It wasn't stabbing. It was... quiet. The absence of pain. Like he'd forgotten how to hurt, but his body still remembered what it meant.
The Spiral opened.
Not literally — but inside him. A bloom, soft and slow, unraveling beneath his ribs. He felt every moment of his life fold outward like pages in a burned book, some too charred to read, others still damp with grief.
The first Truth did not speak in words.
It spoke in removal.
His chest felt lighter.
His memories flickered — not gone, just distant.
And then it came.
"PAIN," said the voice from nowhere.
"TO KNOW IT IS TO SURVIVE IT."
"TO SURVIVE IT IS TO LOSE IT."
"WE GIVE. YOU FORGET."
Something burned across his mark.
The spiral unraveled slightly, its shape shifting into jagged lines.
He didn't scream.
He couldn't.
The pain had gone.
Not just vanished — erased.
And with it, the memory of pain itself.
He could remember the event. The feeling of falling. The sickness of fear. But the actual sensation? Gone. Like it had never been there at all.
He stood slowly.
The chair dissolved.
The room folded inward.
And the Spiral let him go.
He emerged back at the rim, breathing harder than he realized. Kesh caught him before he fell.
"You made it," she said.
He blinked.
"I... I can't feel it."
"I know."
"The pain—"
"That's the price," she said, helping him sit. "You gave it away. That's the first Truth."
He looked down at his hand.
The mark had changed again.
Pain had become part of him.
And something inside him had gone quiet forever.