The slope narrowed as they moved into the Rift's throat.
The walls weren't stone. They were fossilized screams. Their surfaces twitching with half-formed faces.
Coren walked ahead. His steps deliberate. Behind him, Sylva adjusted her spear's grip. Not for readiness, but to remind the weapon it still had a task.
"Sealing zones in the dark," she muttered. "Feels like we're digging graves we can't see."
Coren didn't answer.
They reached the first glyph chamber.
The walls pulsed with three-layer spirals. Each twitching like dying nerves. A broken soul-plate lay at the center. Armor cracked from within.
Coren knelt beside it.
"No name tag. They've already started pulling it out."
Sylva scanned the wall. "What happens if they finish?"
Coren rose. "Then something remembers them more than they remember themselves."
The first seal burned as he pressed it to stone.
Sylva grimaced. "And memory's more dangerous than instinct."
Coren pressed the seal deeper. "Especially when it isn't theirs."
The Severance Glyphs
Coren placed the first seal glyph at the chamber's mouth. The glyph wasn't ink or light. It was Coren's own breath. Frozen in the air. Each exhale etched another line into reality, steaming where it touched the Spiral-tainted stone.
Sylva counted his heartbeats. Five per glyph. Too slow.
"Faster," she warned, as the walls began to peel backward around them.
Coren's next exhale came with blood-flecked spit. "They're fighting the seals."
"Three rings per nest," he said. "No more than four steps between each. It doesn't suppress. It fractures memory threads mid-bond."
"Fracturing is cleaner than suppression," he added. "You don't erase the memory. You splinter it so it can't be used all at once."
Sylva raised an eyebrow. "You trust this design?"
He showed his palms. Old burns mirroring the glyph. "I trust the cost it took to learn it."
They moved in silence, placing the seals. When the last ring pulsed active, the echoes began to slow. Some spirals unraveling like frayed dreams.
Sylva exhaled.
"One down."
Coren looked deeper into the tunnel ahead.
"Fourteen to go."
The next hollow smelled like opened veins.
The Second Hollow
The second memory nest was older. No anchor body. No recent kill zone. Just resonance soaked deep into the stone.
Sylva muttered, "This one doesn't feel like a battlefield."
"No," Coren said, placing another seal glyph. "It feels like a suicide note."
The carvings weren't glyphs. They were last words. Scratched deep enough to outlive their writers.
Sylva ran a glove across one of the lines. "These weren't Spiral."
Coren nodded. "No. These were human. And they weren't writing to warn us. They were writing to be remembered."
Sylva planted her second ring and activated it. The glyphs began to unravel.
For a moment, everything was still.
Then the wind stopped. And the stones breathed.
The Swarm
It started with the ground twitching. Not quaking, twitching. Like something under the soil wanted to speak but couldn't form words.
Sylva drew her spear.
"Coren. Back out. Now."
But they were already too late.
The tunnel behind them groaned. Spiral energy flared. Not wild or chaotic, but called. A resonance blast triggered along the cliffside.
The beasts came. Not charging. Flowing like ink through water. Their eyes were gone. In their sockets, tiny glyphs spun.
Dozens. Then more.
Coren's eyes narrowed. "This isn't a defensive response. It's a summons."
"Someone's watching."
The glyphs didn't pulse in alarm. They pulsed in rhythm. A call-and-response pattern.
"It's not warning them," Sylva said slowly. "It's narrating us."
Fracture Response
The swarm hit like a crashing tide.
Coren stood unmoving until the first beast leapt then struck with open palm. Ki spiraling into a shockwave that cracked the creature mid-air.
His hands moved, not combat forms, but sacrifices. Each glyph he drew split his skin.
Sylva moved beside him, her spear arcing wide.
"Behind!"
Coren turned, barehanded. One creature lunged. His elbow struck first, then fingers crushed its spine.
The glyph flares placed earlier began to flicker.
"They're corrupting the seals," Sylva said. "We can't hold this zone."
Coren nodded once.
"We fall back to the ridge. Collapse the entry once we're clear."
The mountain screamed as it fell.
They reached the outer ledge just as the last flare failed behind them.
Coren carved a line in the air with his hand. A suppression glyph snapped open beneath his feet. A long-buried emergency seal.
He spoke a word in an old tongue. Then the cliff behind them cracked, groaned, and then collapsed inward.
Sylva watched it settle. Then looked back at Coren.
"That was deliberate."
"Yes."
"You think it's Spiral?"
"No," Coren said. "Something that wears Spiral like a skin."
Above the ridge, the sky blinked.
The Weight Left Behind (Kaelen)
The wind at the ridge had changed.
Kaelen noticed it in the way the silence felt thicker. The birds hadn't returned. The echo lines under his boots were vibrating again. Not deep resonance, but shallow flickers.
He stood alone by the fractured soulstone ring. The glyphs Coren left behind still pulsed, but slower now. Fading. Straining.
Then came the first screech. Low. Jagged. Not a roar, not a call. Just pain.
A beast limped over the ridge. Half a mountain cat, half Spiral-infected fungus. Its ribs pushed out too far. It's claws dragged as if they didn't belong to it.
The first beast's ribs cracked open like a book, its spine the binding.
Then a second.
Then four.
He muttered under his breath. "Of course."
They didn't wait. They charged.
Kaelen didn't move.
Not until the first claw slashed wide. Then he stepped through its shadow. Blade turning in a perfect arc to sever the shoulder.
The next came from behind. Kaelen kicked off the first body and vaulted into a backflip, landing on a broken ridge.
The second beast parried. Using Kaelen's exact grip from the fight's start.
One blade stuck. He released it. Grabbed the second tighter.
They weren't fighting him. They were learning.
The fourth beast moved wrong.
Its lunge wasn't instinct. It was his feint from the canyon fight last week. Replicated with grotesque precision. When he pivoted, the creature adjusted mid-air. Twisting as he'd taught Sylva during monsoon drills.
"Motherf—" His boot crushed its skull. The bone gave too easily. Splattering black fluid that reformed into tiny, skittering glyphs.
Sylva's voice echoed from memory: "They don't just adapt. They archive."
Deep below, the footsteps resumed.
Back Beneath the Rift (Coren & Sylva)
They made it into a narrow cavern network. Stone etched with old markings, but more natural than Spiral-scarred.
Still, the echoes were present. Not loud. Intentional.
Sylva walked ahead this time, spear humming softly.
"Why would anyone interrupt this?" she asked.
Coren didn't answer.
She turned. "If someone is trying to stop you... it means they don't want the Spiral to stay stupid."
Coren said, "They want it to grow."
"And fast."
He touched the stone wall then pulled his fingers back.
Blood. Still warm.
Not his.
Fresh. Not Spiral.
Sylva saw his expression change and drew her spear without a word.
A sound followed. Quiet, deliberate.
Footsteps.
The footsteps stopped at the chamber's edge.
Then, a wet, gurgling laugh. Not Spiral-distorted, but human.
Sylva's grip on her spear tightened. "Who?"
No answer. Just the click of a safety being thumbed off. A sound no beast would make.
Coren's hand found her wrist. Not yet. His voice was barely more than a whisper.
"We've been followed."