The spiral rift beneath Ravelyn did not hum, or glow, or beckon. It breathed.
Kael's corpse lay at the edge of its dark mouth, slack-jawed and softening, but not with rot. His skin unraveled like thread, each pore loosening until structure gave way to vapor. Not smoke. Not decay. Something finer. Memory, unbound—flooding the air with the sharp tang of rose-lantern oil, the iron of blood-soaked parchment, the scent of bread from a fire that never finished baking.
Rill watched without watching. One of her swayed, singing something low and arrhythmic. The other wept soundlessly, fingers curled into the ruin of her own robe. Two halves, split not by violence, but by the inevitability of being too much for one body.
"This was never meant for her," one Rill whispered.
"None of us were meant for anything," the other said. "We were just left to remember."
Fennel backed away. She clutched her own arms so tightly her elbows bled. She was humming—no, keening—an old lullaby. Her voice cracked around words she didn't know, syllables that tasted like cradlewood and wet stone.
"Why do I know this?" she gasped. "I was never sung to. My mother never—this isn't mine."
Rill's head tilted. "It was someone's. The lattice doesn't sort by owner. It remembers what's loud."
Lysa did not move.
She stood at the edge, the breath caught between inhale and scream. Her coat whipped in the hot wind rising from the rift, though the air had no real motion. Only intention. Her fingers hung limp. Her eyes were wide, unfocused. Something inside her had unlatched.
The glyphs came slowly at first.
Not drawn. Not summoned.
They formed.
One appeared on the ribwall behind her, unfurling in soft glimmers of bone-light: a child's handprint, smeared with soup. Another blinked into being beside it—a doorway, half-shut, bearing the marks of a lock no longer latched. Then: a throat mid-cry. A bloodstained scrap of woven cloth. A cracked lens. A mother's breath caught just before slapping a cheek.
The glyphs weren't spells. They were moments.
The spiral rift fed on them. It drank memory through Lysa's breath. Every exhale painted a scar across the walls, every memory she failed to repress transmuted into light and sigil. The ground beneath her feet shuddered, not from seismic shift, but from remembrance. The rift wanted more.
"Make it stop," Fennel whimpered. "Please, Lysa. Please, I don't want to remember."
"It's not me," Lysa breathed. Her voice was hollow. "It's the place. It's the lattice. It wants..."
"You," Rill said flatly. "It wants you."
Lysa turned toward her. "Why me?"
"Because you don't lie to it," Rill said. "The rest of us learned how to. You... leak."
And the lattice rose.
It did not rise as a tower or bridge or seal. It rose like a scream. Ragged. Shattered in its symmetry. Each rib of it quivered with marrow-light, born not of power but of pressure. The pressure of being seen. Of remembering too much. Of being asked to carry what was never hers.
It didn't rise because it was ready.
It rose because she wasn't.
Lysa opened her mouth to cry out, but no sound came.
She remembered.
Kael reaching for her with empty eyes.
A child pressing a dead rat to her chest, saying, "Fix it."
The first time something she loved turned to ash in her hands.
The lattice responded.
It warped and reformed, twitching like a half-healed wound. Glyphs crawled across its surface, spinning into new shapes. Faces formed and unformed—hers, Rill's, Ivar's. Fennel's hands clutched at her ears as the lullaby bled out of her in a scream.
"This isn't magic," Fennel sobbed. "It's punishment. It's a curse."
"No," Rill murmured, eyes distant. "It's memory. And memory never forgets."
Lysa fell to her knees. Her voice came out choked. "I didn't ask for any of this. I never wanted to create. I just wanted it to stop."
The glyphs pulsed, as if agreeing.
From the ribwall beside them, a figure detached itself as if peeling away from the bone itself. He was translucent, his form flickering like a heat haze, and fragments of the wall seemed to cling to him - bits of mortar, twisted roots, and shards of bone. His eyes glowed with a faint, ethereal light, but there was no warmth in them, only a bottomless sorrow. A spiraling line from his eye to his belly where he was consumed.
"Bound,"he rasped, his voice a chorus of whispers that seemed to emanate from the very stone. "Bound to the wall. To the memory. To the suffering. You can't stop it...you can never truly contain it." His gaze fixated on Lysa, a desperate longing in his spectral eyes.
Ivar, his every sense on high alert, assessed the entity with detached curiosity. He scanned the spectral form, his fingers twitching at his side. "An echo," he murmured. "A Wallborn, perhaps, warped by the influence of the spiral. An anomaly within an anomaly. The calculations do not hold up for something that can break the wall..."
"Anomaly, yes. Abomination, definitely,"the wraith whispered, his form flickering more violently. "The walls remember the pain, they hold onto it. But the beast doesn't exist. No, and neither will you." He was trying to tear himself free from the wall to stop the rising. But the weight was too much for him. "It wants you to forget it It doesn't want to leave a trace behind"
Rill's eyes narrowed, her hand tightening on the hilt of her bone knife. "One of the Wallborn – twisted by memory and loss. A walking corpse, nothing more."
"Corpse? No. I live. I'm still very much alive,"the wraith hissed, his translucent hand passing through the solid stone of the wall. "The walls want to feed and they will. They feast as the worlds change. The wall takes." He reaches down into the space. "I remember all for this and will never find peace" He gestures toward the glyphs with his insubstantial hand."Please...don't show her." It seemed that he was reaching out for them from inside the very walls of the world.
"But you did create," Rill said gently, her voice cutting through the wraith's lament. "Even when you hated it. Especially then."
Still, Lysa remembered.
And memory, in the place where the weave thinned, was enough.
From the rift's belly came voices. Not screams. Not calls. Accounts. Testimonies. The whispers of old walls that remembered blood. The pulse of doors that remembered not being locked. The hunger of children who remembered being forgotten.
Lysa turned. Not fully. Just enough to catch the reflection of herself in a glyph still forming.
"That's not me," she whispered.
"It will be," Rill said gently. "If you keep remembering."
"Then maybe I won't," Lysa said. Her voice was quieter now. "Maybe I forget everything. Maybe I give it what it wants."
"If you do," Rill said, "you won't come back the same."
Fennel let out a sound like a cracked laugh. "Who here's still the same?"
The wraith – Silas – strained against his invisible bonds, his form flickering and dissolving as if struggling to maintain cohesion. He watched Lysa with growing despair, knowing that her choices would determine his fate and the fate of countless others trapped within the walls."No. Stop. I said no," There was a tone of desparation.
With a final act of defiance, Silas reached out his hand a touch. It was a skeletal hand. He reaches out to touch Lysa. But he fails. As Silas approached, from behind his arm, a skeletal hand ripped itself out of the nearest glyph - the very glyph that Silas touched - and pulled him back through it.
There was a moment where you could see all the faces in that face as he was sucked in.
His existence was his prison and non-existence gave Lysa strength
The hand reached into his chest and gave him one last memory. It gave him death.
His final word was not heard. Just gone
She didn't recognize what she had become. The look of horror.
Behind her, the lattice groaned. It was still rising.
Not a salvation.
Not a return.
An aftermath.