He didn't sleep that night.
Not because of nightmares — those had stopped. It was the silence inside his body that kept him awake. A stillness where something should've been screaming.
The pain was gone, and that terrified him more than any voice from the Hole.
Kesh watched him without saying much. She'd seen this before. He could tell. The way she checked his pulse every few hours without asking. The way she didn't react when he scraped his palm on the jagged stair rail and didn't flinch. The way she muttered to herself while redressing the wound even though it had barely bled.
"You need to remember what you are now," she said finally, once the lantern light had dimmed enough to throw long shadows across the floor. "You're missing a sense. People don't think of pain that way, but it is. It tells you where you end."
He stared at the bandaged hand.
"It doesn't feel like I'm missing anything."
"That's because it already took it. That's how Truths work."
Kesh stood and moved to the wall, drawing a symbol in chalk above the copper-rimmed entryway. A jagged spiral with a tooth drawn through the center.
"People think pain is weakness," she continued. "But it anchors you to your body. Without it, you forget how to move carefully. You break without noticing. You trust your skin too much."
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
She wiped her hand off on her coat. "We'll test your limits tomorrow. See how bad it is."
The next morning, she made good on her word.
They climbed a sloped hallway to an abandoned scaffolding overlooking the service drains. Below, a channel of greywater passed through broken tanks and rusted filtration fans. The air stank of chemicals and something sharper — old blood or fermented salt.
Kesh picked up a stone and tossed it onto a rotten plank across the gap. It cracked and splintered but held.
"That's where you're going."
He looked down. "That's a fifteen-foot drop."
"Sixteen," she corrected. "You'll land on the plank, jump across the pipe, and climb the ladder back up. If you misstep, you'll break something."
"Why?"
"Because you need to break something."
She said it without cruelty.
Without glee.
Just necessity.
He stepped to the edge and felt for the first time how strange his body had become. Not weightless, not invulnerable — but numb in a way that was disorienting. Every movement felt exaggerated. Like he was borrowing someone else's limbs.
He jumped.
His landing was clean. Too clean.
His ankles rolled with the impact, but he didn't stumble.
He didn't feel the shock in his knees. Didn't feel the bruise bloom along his ribs as he struck the edge of the pipe on the way up. He just kept moving. Like a puppet without strings, obeying momentum instead of instinct.
When he reached the top, Kesh didn't clap or congratulate him.
She just held up the compass again.
"It's pulling harder now," she said. "Whatever you stirred in there — it's bleeding through."
He didn't know what to say.
So he asked something else instead.
"How many Truths have you taken?"
Kesh looked at him for a long moment. Her face was unreadable. Then she tucked the compass away.
"Enough to regret most of them."
That night, the dreams returned.
Not fractured this time.
Focused.
He stood in the same hallway as before — the one beneath the Archive chamber, with the floating candles and bleeding maps — but something was different. The candles flickered backwards. The air moved like a tide. And a door had appeared at the end of the corridor that hadn't been there before.
It was marked with his own spiral, but inverted.
Backwards. Wrong.
He stepped toward it, but the hallway stretched — not away from him, but through him.
Each step he took, he felt thinner.
Lighter.
Less real.
And then the door opened on its own.
Behind it stood a shape.
Not a person. Not a shadow. A suggestion.
A version of him, maybe. But older. Hollow-eyed. Wrapped in pale threads that hissed with the sound of paper being burned underwater. It reached out, and before he could recoil, it placed something in his hand.
He looked down.
Another spiral — but this one made of glass.
The moment he touched it, the dream ended.
He woke at dawn with sweat clinging to his spine.
The glass spiral was still there, resting on his chest.
He hadn't brought it in with him.
Hadn't taken it from the real world.
And yet it sat in his palm, cool and humming.
Kesh hadn't stirred.
Neither had the room.
But something had changed in the air.
Like the Hole had taken a step closer.
Or like the second Truth had noticed him.