The world cracked when Kael emerged from the Hollow Between.
Not literally—not yet—but the sound of it echoed in the sky: a tension, a split in something unseen. Nyra felt it first, as a keening at the base of her skull. A mourning note played on an instrument made of regret. The others—Velenn, Mora, and Caldris—stopped walking mid-stride, their eyes clouded by the same echoing note, though none spoke of it.
The Echo Stone was gone. Its name had passed into Kael. And so had something else.
They didn't speak of it.
The Garden of Last Names had withered in their absence. The vines were burned, not by flame, but by something deeper—raw unraveling. Names that once glowed now sagged into ash. Shevelis was gone, her shears shattered beside the roots of the Veinroot Tree.
"Kael," Nyra said softly as they left the garden behind, "what did it mean?"
Kael's voice was hollow. "That I was born to finish what the Architect began."
"But what did he begin?"
Kael didn't answer—not because he refused, but because he didn't know. The name still pulsed in his mind, sharp and burning, but the knowledge it carried was fragmented. He could taste parts of it, feel the weight of decisions made eons ago, in a lifetime he hadn't lived. Yet they defined him.
They traveled north.
The Spiral's sky began to bleed—not red like the Blood Moon, but silver, like molten memory. Dreams grew thick and heavy. Trees whispered their own names in the night. Animals refused to speak.
Mora dreamt of herself standing in a mirror, her mouth sewn shut with spider silk. Caldris found insects crawling from his skin, only to vanish when he blinked. Nyra... Nyra heard a lullaby her mother had never sung, in a language that hurt to remember.
And then the envoys arrived.
Four of them, each cloaked in glass-thread and shadow, bearing crests from the Court of the Hollow Crown. They bowed, not in greeting, but submission.
"We have heard the Song," said the tallest, a woman whose mouth was stitched shut. Her words came not from her lips but from the wind behind her. "The Reflection has fractured. The Cursebearer has awakened. The Accord is broken."
Nyra tensed. "What do you want?"
"To follow," said another. "To serve. To kill in your name."
Kael looked at them, sickened. "No."
"You wear the curse. You carry the Architect's scream. You cannot refuse what is already obeyed."
"No!" Kael barked.
He turned away from them and kept walking. The envoys followed, silent, as though his will alone compelled their steps.
That night, Kael dreamed.
He stood in a city made of spines—towers of calcified bone, bridges of tendon and ligament, windows that blinked. In the center of the city, on a throne made of his own ribs, sat a version of himself. Older. Burned. Crowned in broken mirrors.
"Do you see it now?" the dream-Kael asked. "What you're becoming?"
"I'm not you."
"No," said the reflection. "You're worse. Because you still pretend to resist."
Kael woke screaming.
But the sky did not echo him. It was waiting.
---
They reached the Thorns of Ivenhal three days later. Once, the fortress was a monastery dedicated to the Threaded Saints. Now, it was a ruin occupied by the Silent Rebellion—those who had rejected both the Spiral's doctrine and the Maw's corruption. Outcasts. Orphans. Broken blades.
Their leader was a girl no older than sixteen, with a crown of charred feathers and eyes like cracked emeralds.
"I am Lys," she said. "And I remember Kael."
He blinked. "Have we met?"
She smiled sadly. "Not in this life. But I remember anyway."
Nyra stepped forward. "We need a place to plan. Something is coming."
"It's already here," Lys said, beckoning them inside. "The world is tilting. Magic is leaking backward. Time is fraying. And the Hollow Tongue is singing again in places it should not."
They entered the war room—an ancient chapel repurposed into a map of scars. The Spiral was laid out across stone, marked in runes that bled light.
Rings of power pulsed faintly across the map—echoes of places no longer remembered. A lake of glass. A bridge that fed on regret. A prison built beneath a forgotten god's shadow.
Kael pointed to the dead center.
"The Architect's heart lies here. Whatever he tried to build—or destroy—starts in the Ruined Cradle."
Lys shivered. "That place doesn't exist anymore."
"It does now."
Kael turned to the growing group of rebels gathered behind him. "I'm not asking you to fight for me. I'm asking you to fight for a world that doesn't want to remember you. That wants to forget you like it forgot the Architect."
Nyra took his hand.
"If we go," she said, "we go together."
And the rebels bowed.
That night, the stars blinked out—one by one, devoured by something invisible.
The Song of the Hollow Tongue returned.
And the Reflection smiled, watching from the other side of every mirror.
Below the fortress, deep in the bones of the world, something stirred.
It had once been called a god, before it was rewritten into a curse.
And it was waking.