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Chapter 14 - Threads in the Blood

The glass spiral hadn't moved since morning. It stayed where he'd placed it — coiled gently in the fold of his coat, too fragile to feel real, too heavy to be imagined. When he picked it up, it rang faintly in his hand like it remembered sound but couldn't quite speak it.

He hadn't shown Kesh yet. Not because he was hiding it, but because he didn't know what it meant. Maybe he was hoping she'd see it herself, say it was normal, say it was nothing. She hadn't.

Instead, she'd spent the better part of the morning drawing lines across the stone floor — chalk symbols, some of which looked like his spiral but with lines crossed through them. He didn't ask. She didn't offer.

Then, around midday, the smell hit them.

It wasn't rot. Not exactly. It was sharper, colder. Like something had been buried in salt too long and started to forget it was ever alive. He covered his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, but the air carried it anyway — not through his nose, but behind his eyes. A pressure like a memory being squeezed.

Kesh froze when she noticed it.

"Don't move," she said.

He didn't.

Her knife was out in one hand, compass in the other. Both twitched.

"Something breached."

He nodded slowly. "The Hole?"

"No. Not yet. This is a bleed."

She stepped forward, tracking the smell. Then she turned toward the south wall — the one with the black scrape that had started as a crack but now curled upward like a claw mark.

"There's a thread anomaly," she said. "In the stone. Probably small."

He didn't know what that meant, but his bones did. His skin itched along the places where truth had touched him — not the spiral, but the old wounds. The cuts from the jump. The scrape on his wrist.

The blood there was moving again.

Kesh dragged a rusted basin into the center of the chamber and ordered him to stand over it. "Your blood's reacting," she said. "That only happens when an echo is forming."

He looked down at the cuts. They weren't deep, barely scabbed over, but the skin around them had turned pale and translucent. Underneath, red threads pulsed faintly in unnatural patterns.

"What's an echo?" he asked.

"It's what happens when you change too quickly. When a part of you that should've died — didn't. The world remembers a version of you that no longer exists. Sometimes, it fights to bring that version back."

He didn't speak.

"I had one once," she said. "It took the shape of my twin brother. He died years before I took my first truth."

"What did you do?"

She dipped her fingers into the blood in the basin and scrawled something jagged onto her own palm.

"I killed him again."

The words hung like dust in the light.

That night, he dreamed again.

This time the spiral wasn't in the sky or the stone.

It was inside him.

He stood in a dark field with no horizon, surrounded by rust-colored fog, and when he looked down, he saw it — carved beneath his ribs, its pattern burning through his chest like it was being drawn from the inside out.

In front of him stood the echo.

It wore his face.

But the eyes were wrong. Too wide. Too quiet. It didn't speak. Didn't need to. The way it stared said everything.

You shouldn't be here.

He reached for the anchorbone — but it was gone.

The echo raised its hand, and behind it, the fog began to spin.

A whirlpool in the air, made of old light and forgotten heat, dragging the ground upward into a spiral. Windless but loud. Soundless but screaming.

He stumbled back.

It stepped forward.

And then it split — not in motion, but in memory.

The figure broke apart into three moments of itself: one smiling, one crying, and one completely blank. All three took another step.

He turned to run.

The field didn't end.

The dream didn't end.

And then the pain came back.

Not his. Not real. Not now — but it bloomed anyway, crawling up his spine, dragging with it the weight of a dozen forgotten wounds. As if the price he'd paid for the first truth had been borrowed, not stolen. And the debt had come due.

He woke up with blood on his tongue.

The spiral mark was glowing faintly.

And across the floor, etched into the stone by something sharp and trembling, was a sentence written in his own handwriting:

"If you feel it again, you are no longer alone."

He didn't remember writing it.

Kesh stood over him with the compass drawn and the knife dripping.

"You almost didn't come back," she said. Her voice was quieter than usual. Not soft. Just... tired.

"Was it the echo?"

She nodded. "You drew it in too close. It tried to replace you."

He touched the mark on his chest. It burned faintly beneath his skin, but the pain was fading again — that strange, terrible emptiness creeping back.

Kesh crouched beside him.

"You're past the point of undoing now," she said. "The Hole remembers you. And so does what lives near it."

He met her eyes.

"So what now?"

She looked down at the cracked spiral in his palm — the one made of glass that hadn't been there yesterday.

"Now," she said, "we start watching for the next Truth."

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