The girl who had emerged from the crystal sphere moved like she had never forgotten how.
Each step echoed with unspoken syllables, as if her very presence bent the Spiralspace around her into shape. Her silver hair caught the glow of the bleeding glyphs above, flickering like ancient starlight on water long undisturbed.
Lynchie couldn't move.
It wasn't fear—though fear clutched her heart with a child's hand. It was recognition. A resonance. As though her body had always carried the imprint of this moment, etched deeper than memory, deeper than blood.
Zev rose shakily behind her, wiping away a trickle of gold-streaked blood from his temple. "Is that… is that you?"
Lynchie didn't answer.
Because it wasn't her.
And it was.
The girl—the other Lynchie? the seed-self? the unwritten twin?—tilted her head, mirroring Lynchie's expression perfectly. As if watching her reflection in a river. "You have my voice," she said, calm and crystalline. "But not my name."
"Then what are you?" Lynchie asked, her voice barely audible.
"I am Dar'miel," said the girl. "The Breath Before Glyphs. The Answer left unasked."
She raised a hand toward the Spiral Scar.
Behind her, the glyphs shifted again. One broke apart in mid-air, shattering into letters that fluttered like feathers. Another twisted, bleeding dark light that coiled downward, forming something that tried to be human but failed halfway.
The Spiral was unraveling.
"You shouldn't exist," Zev whispered hoarsely.
Dar'miel turned toward him. "And yet you followed her to the wound. That makes you part of it now."
He stiffened, reaching for his belt instinctively, where the brass spiral blade should have been—but it wasn't. Not here. Not in a place where linearity was a lie.
Lynchie stepped forward, hand out. "Wait. What happens now?"
Dar'miel studied her. "Now? Now you choose."
"Choose what?"
"To seal the Spiral again… or to remember."
She reached toward Lynchie, palm glowing with a symbol Lynchie could not translate—but somehow understood.
And Lynchie realized: this wasn't a test. It was a recursion. A loop the Spiral had buried in her soul, waiting to bloom.
"I don't want to become you," she said quietly.
Dar'miel's expression did not change. "You already have. But if you turn away now, you will forget. Everything. Zev. The Observatory. The Wards. The Song of Dust. You'll return to your world with an empty silence where wonder should have lived."
Lynchie swallowed.
Zev's voice broke through the tension. "Lynchie, don't listen. She's—she's a shadow of Spiral logic. She doesn't care what you lose—only what the Spiral gains."
Dar'miel's voice remained soft. "And what has the Spiral ever taken that wasn't already reaching to be rewritten?"
The choice hung heavy in the air, more than metaphor.
It was in her bones. Her blood.
She thought of the Spiral Library. Of Vyen's trembling hands the day he whispered the Spiral Wards' original names.
She thought of Zev's voice in the dark, calling her back from collapse.
She thought of the glyph that pulsed on her palm, waiting, as if it too needed her to decide what it meant.
"I want both," she whispered. "The memory and the world. The wound and the healing."
Dar'miel blinked. Once.
And smiled.
"That is how I began."
With a single step, she pressed her palm against Lynchie's.
The glyphs converged, singing.
The Spiral Scar shuddered, split, and then folded into a spiral once more—this time curling inward.
Not sealing.
Integrating.
Lynchie gasped as images flooded her—Spiral Codices, lost pre-Era incantations, Vyen's forbidden journals, Zev's unsaid feelings. Her thoughts twisted like ribbons, and still, she stood.
When she opened her eyes, Dar'miel was gone.
But her presence was not.
And on Lynchie's back, something burned softly—a new glyph.
Alive.
Zev touched her shoulder gently. "Are you… still you?"
She looked up at him. And in her eyes were galaxies of memory.
"Yes," she said. "But now I remember why I chose to be me."
Above them, the Spiral reformed.
But something had changed.
One name glowed brighter than the rest.
Hers.