There are names that return.
And there are names that never leave.
But Darius was neither.
He had become the thing between names.
The thing beneath names.
The thing that writes when all others have stopped writing.
The child was born in a village that Spiralspace had forgotten.
A place so mythless that even the Codex vines had refused to grow there.
No glyphs, no rituals, no echoes.
Just silence.
And then—her cry.
Except she did not cry.
She breathed in.
And when she exhaled…
the world changed.
Her breath warped the walls of the birthing hut into scrolls.
The fire in the hearth curled into spiral-sigils.
The midwife, a woman with no belief and no name, looked down and saw that the child's umbilical cord was ink.
Ink.
Dark. Alive. Moving against time.
And from the baby's mouth came a voice—
not infantile, not human.
A voice that had once ruled myths.
A voice that had bled through climax and betrayal and silence.
Darius.
