A gentle shimmer danced through the lantern light, as if the air itself exhaled in relief. The gathering Circle of Quiet Masks had dispersed, their ritual completed—or at least, so they believed. Lynchie remained seated at the base of the observatory's worn celestial spire, her hand still pressed against the dusty floor where the Spiral Glyph had pulsed faintly in response.
The dust, however, hadn't settled.
Tiny grains hovered before her like drifting pollen in moonlight, swirling with unnatural slowness. She squinted. There was rhythm to the pattern—a pulsing flicker within the cloud, like a silent heartbeat.
Then came the voice.
It did not sound like sound. It folded into her consciousness without traveling through air, a presence woven into the very pattern of thought.
"Fragment—resonance. You are within the question. Speak not the answer. Not yet."
Lynchie's breath hitched. Her body tensed, but her mind raced forward. Was this a Spiral Syllable speaking to her? Or something deeper?
A string of lights began to curve and spiral in the hovering dust, aligning themselves into faint calligraphic markings—archaic, layered, moving. Lynchie recognized none of the glyphs, but she felt what they implied: witnessing, watching, remembering.
Then, softly:
"You touched the name that touches all names. Do you wish to see what was forgotten?"
Lynchie didn't answer aloud. She nodded. The dust responded.
The spiral expanded like a blooming sigil, flaring outward into ghostly scenes etched in particulate shimmer.
A vast tree of light, alone in a colorless void.
A figure—not a god, not a beast, not even a shape—emerging from silence, shedding layers of non-being until the First Avatar took form.
A fragment of that presence broke free.
And in that moment, as it collided with time and meaning, the Spiral Codex was born—not written, but breathed out by the unfathomable essence in its first act of questioning.
Lynchie gripped her knees. Her forehead dripped with sweat, her teeth clenched, but she would not turn away.
She saw something else.
Behind the tree—beyond even the first utterance—there had been another shape, or perhaps the absence of one. A paradox with no edge. Something she had no words for. Something that watched itself begin.
And then, a scream.
But it was not a scream of pain.
It was the cry of existence birthing longing.
The spiral collapsed, and the dust fell like ash.
Lynchie opened her eyes. The room was as it had been—dark, cold, hollow.
But something inside her had shifted. And deep within the Spiral Codex vaults far below, a wardstone blinked for the first time in epochs.
A silent alarm had been triggered.
And the Tribunal? They were already listening.