The air above the Rift was thin and dry. Sharp with pressure where no storm should exist.
Kaelen sat on a broken column of half-melted stone. Sharpening his blades with slow, practiced rhythm. Not for the edge, just for the feel of it.
He didn't look up when he heard the steps.
He knew that rhythm.
Coren's cloak didn't rustle. It never had.
Sylva's, however, dragged wind with it. Every step crisp like someone who dared the ground to speak first.
Kaelen looked up only when she stopped five paces away.
"I was wondering if they'd send someone I liked," he said.
Sylva smirked. "And instead, you got twice the trouble."
They bumped wrists. Nothing more, but it echoed like old battles do.
"Still limping on the left?" Sylva asked.
"Only when I want them to underestimate me," Kaelen replied.
She chuckled. "Some things don't adapt."
"Yet."
Coren stood nearby, eyes already scanning the slope below.
"The glyph line here hasn't faded. Residue's recent. Kael's encounter was only the first stir."
A rock clattered somewhere in the canyon. Too rhythmic to be natural. Kaelen's hand went to his blade, but Coren shook his head once. Not yet.
Sylva crouched beside a cracked spiral impression. "This one tried to carve itself into the stone. Failed."
She wiped black grit from her fingers, the residue squirming like dying insects before dissolving. "That means memory instability."
"Not feedback," she added, watching the residue twitch. "It's rejection. Like it tried to latch onto something and failed."
Kaelen sheathed one blade. "We dealing with corrupted soldiers again?"
"Some. But the rate of evolution is no longer reactive. It's recursive." Coren tapped a finger against his thigh. Three quick pulses. Their old signal for imminent ambush. "They're adapting between encounters."
"Which means," he added, "we can't rely on what worked yesterday."
Kaelen scowled. "We're not fighting instincts anymore. We're fighting memory."
Sylva looked up, her braid slipping over one shoulder like a noose. "And that's why you brought me?"
Coren didn't blink. "I brought both of you. You've killed more Spiral-born than most squads combined."
"And you're here because?"
"To make sure you don't do anything permanent too early."
Another rock fell. Closer this time. Kaelen exhaled through his nose. The only sign he'd noticed.
"Then we move fast," he said. The words hung between them, heavy as a drawn blade.
The path downward wasn't a slope. It was a spiral.
Not just worn by time, but sculpted. Each loop perfectly spaced, as if the mountain had been turned on a lathe by some colossal, patient hand.
Coren walked first.
He didn't carry a weapon.
He didn't need to.
The air bent around him like water around a stone. His Ki pressing against unseen boundaries. Every third step, the ground emitted a subsonic whine stone remembering pain.
Sylva followed. Dragging the blunt end of her spear. The metal shivered where it touched exposed glyphs, emitting brief, dissonant chimes.
Kaelen kept to the rear. His shadow stretching unnaturally long behind him, as if the Spiral-light couldn't decide how to render him.
The ground split twenty paces ahead.
Not a clean rupture. The edges bristled with half-formed Spiral sigils. Their strokes aborted mid-curl like screams frozen in time.
Sylva slowed. "This wasn't interrupted. It resisted."
Coren traced a finger above the cracks. Static leapt to his skin, forming ephemeral runes that spelled TURN BACK before dissolving.
"And whatever did this," he said, wiping charged residue from his fingers, "wasn't afraid of being found."
They reached the collapse's edge.
The soulstone ring pulsed arrhythmically. It's light syncopated like a failing heartbeat. The suppression spikes weren't just rusted. They were melted. Their tips fused into the stone in perfect spiral patterns.
Inside the ring, the corpse's hands were clamped over its ears. Fingers dug into temporal bones. A final, futile attempt to shield against whatever had hollowed it out.
Kaelen exhaled. The sound echoed twice. Once from his lips, once from the tunnel behind them. "We're late."
Sylva knelt, her glove peeling back the tactical collar to reveal unbroken skin. "No wounds. No struggle. Just…" She tilted the head. The eyes were intact, pupils blown wide. "Terror."
Coren crouched, his own shadow merging with the corpse's elongated silhouette. "Ki collapse. Soul implosion."
A drop of black fluid fell from the ceiling onto the dead man's badge. The metal sizzled where it struck.
Kaelen's blade was halfway drawn before he stilled it. "They drained him?"
"Worse," Sylva said, standing. She kicked the nearest spike. It crumbled to oxidized dust. "They made him watch."
Coren studied the glyph lines now writhing inward, as if the very stone were trying to forget what it had witnessed.
"They didn't kill him to erase him." The light shifted, casting his face in jagged shadows.
"They killed him to become him."
They moved beyond the corpse.
The Ki around them thickened. Not like weight, but like memory. The pressure was emotional, not physical. Regret. Anger. Familiarity that didn't belong.
Sylva slowed. "You feel that?"
Kaelen's voice was low. "It's like standing where you bled once. Even if you never did."
Coren didn't respond.
The spiral underfoot led them to a hollow chamber carved into the stone. Not wide. Not tall. But balanced. Like it had been shaped to match a heartbeat.
In the center hovered a glyph.
Free-floating.
Unstable.
Sylva raised a hand to stop them. "That's not ambient."
Coren nodded. "That's a cast-off. A memory fragment that detached."
Kaelen squinted. "It's... repeating. Looping."
The glyph rotated slowly in the air, lines twisting and snapping back into place.
And beneath it, just barely visible, etched into the ground:
Name: Arden.
Function: Tactician.
Memory Anchor: Active.
Sylva muttered, "Your dead one. The one even the Spiral won't claim."
Coren stepped forward.
And the glyph stopped.
The chamber went still.
Then, without sound, the walls rippled.
Not visually. Emotionally.
Kaelen's heart lurched once. Like someone had dropped him into a memory not his own.
Coren didn't move.
Sylva took a half-step back, brow furrowing.
"Was that—?"
Coren reached out slowly toward the hovering glyph. As his finger brushed the edge, a voice filled the chamber.
Not Spiral.
Not human.
Just fragmented.
"Anchor failed. Repeating memory. Thread corrupted.
Subject: observed.
Mirror triggered.
Seed unstable."
"Designation mismatch. Flame unprocessed. Initiate tag."
Then silence.
The glyph shattered. Not into light, but a scream of unraveling Ki. Spilling into the stone, into their skin, into their bones.
The others turned to leave. Kaelen lingered.
He didn't want to admit it, but the name Arden meant something. Not personally. But the Spiral remembered him through Kaelen. And now Kaelen wasn't sure what parts were still his.
Something about the shattered glyph site pulled at him. The way the fractured lines of Arden's name still pulsed, faintly, like a dying ember. He crouched, fingertips brushing the etched stone.
The moment he made contact, the grooves wept.
Not blood. Thick, black Spiral residue oozed up, clinging to his skin like tar. It didn't burn. It remembered.
A whisper slithered into his skull, voice frayed at the edges:
"You were there when he died. You remember."
Kaelen recoiled, slamming his fist into the stone. The residue splattered, hissing where it struck the ground.
"Break all you want." The laugh that followed was wet, choking. "Memory doesn't shatter."
"Kaelen." Sylva's voice cut through the haze. She stood at the tunnel mouth, spear loose in her grip. "You coming?"
He looked down. His hands were clean.
"Yeah," he said.
Behind him, the shattered glyph shivered. Then stilled.
They stood in silence for a long moment.
The shattered glyph's residue pooled around their boots, swirling like ink in water. For three breaths, no one moved. Until Kaelen's blade twitched toward the blackened streaks.
Sylva caught his wrist. "Don't."
The sludge shivered at her voice, forming jagged runes:
Subject: Kaelen V-7
Coren's boot scuffed through the message before it finished. "Echoes," he said, too flat. "Nothing more."
Kaelen stared at the smeared ground. His knuckles whitened around his hilt.
A distant tremor shook dust from the ceiling. The Spiral was stirring.
Then Coren turned away.
"We're done here."
Kaelen frowned. "That's it?"
Coren didn't stop walking.
"They've started extracting now. Not killing for instinct. Not even to feed. They're harvesting memory."
Sylva fell in beside him. "Then this whole zone"
"Is compromised."
Kaelen's voice was colder than before. "Where do we go next?"
Coren looked back.
His eyes were calm.
But his words cut through the hollow air.
"To the place they haven't started remembering yet. Before it remembers us."
They moved toward the tunnel exit. Then Sylva froze.
"Footprints." She nudged a bootprint in the dust with her spear. Too small for Spiral beasts. Too fresh.
Coren knelt. "Two people. Maybe three."
Kaelen prowled the perimeter. His blade flipped over a discarded canteen near the shrine entrance. Military-issue, but the Academy insignia had been scratched out, leaving jagged grooves.
Scratched, not worn. Intentional. A rejection of belonging. Or a warning left behind by someone who knew what this zone had become.
Kaelen turned it over once more. Spiral didn't carry objects. Whoever left this was still human or close enough to pretend.
Sylva's jaw tightened. "We're not the only ones hunting memories here."
A distant screech cut the air. Not from ahead, but behind them, deeper in the tunnels. Too close.
Coren stood. "No time. Stick to the plan."
As they split, Kaelen pocketed the canteen. Its dented surface felt like a warning.