Chapter 40 — Echoes of the Spiral
He woke up standing.
No gasp. No jolt. Just presence.
Lucien's eyes were already open—though he hadn't opened them. His arms hung limp at his sides, skin caked with something he couldn't name. His legs held his weight, though they trembled faintly. His head sagged forward, chin low, breath shallow. It took him a moment to even recognize that he was breathing again.
The corridor stretched around him in both directions.
Endless. Seamless. The black obsidian beneath his feet reflected nothing. Not his shadow. Not his form. The world was still devoid of light—yet he could see.
Perfectly.
It was the same corridor.
The same place.
After everything… he was back.
He stood motionless, too dazed to fully absorb the implications. His fingers curled slightly, twitching like they were searching for sensation. The pressure of memory pushed in at the edges of his skull—too vast, too tangled, too soon.
His mouth was dry.
His lips parted, but he didn't speak.
Couldn't.
Emotion clotted his chest like wet sand, too heavy to cry through, too thick to process.
His mind flickered, jumping from image to image without control: the cracked mirror… the twelve silent figures… the pain in his hands… the wide smiles… the stretching necks…
The stars.
And then—
Black.
He had blacked out again. Or been taken again. Or rewritten. Or—
He didn't know.
Lucien's chest heaved as his body caught up with his awareness. His hands pressed against his face. They were still his hands. Shaking. Clammy. But real.
He was real.
Wasn't he?
His shoulders sagged.
Then, slowly, his feet moved.
One step.
Then another.
He didn't think about walking. He just did.
Not to reach anything. Not to escape.
Just… to avoid stillness.
Stillness meant feeling.
And feeling meant falling apart.
His steps made no sound. As always. But now it unsettled him less. Not because he was used to it, but because he was too tired to care.
His mind replayed it all—too fast, too warped.
The garden.
The sun.
His mother laughing.
The watering can slipping from his fingers.
The sky dimming.
The breath that caught before his body collapsed.
Then the Trial.
No, not the Trial.
The thing behind it.
He remembered the hallway first—how foreign it had felt, even when it was quiet. The glitching steps. The stuttering movement. The way his body didn't feel like his anymore.
That had only been the beginning.
He remembered the slow warping. How up turned to down, how left folded inward, how forward didn't mean anything.
Then the mirror. Floating in a chamber threaded with gold. His reflection—but older. Changed. Stronger. Smiling, then speaking. "Soon."
Then the twelve.
Twelve presences sitting upon thrones that didn't feel like thrones. He hadn't known what they were, only that he shouldn't have seen them.
The pain had come next.
Not physical pain—at least, not in the way he understood it. Something else. Something that clawed through his being like meaning unspooling from form.
He didn't want to think about what came after.
But he couldn't stop it.
The field.
Burned earth, still smoking. Stars blazing overhead like wounds in the sky.
And the children.
He hadn't known them. And yet… he had. Their faces had pressed against his memory like hands on glass. Too perfect. Too symmetrical. Too still.
And those smiles.
They had made his skin crawl without moving.
They hadn't breathed.
His footsteps slowed.
His hands flexed at his sides.
His body remembered the pain before his mind did.
The moment his palms touched theirs, something had been put in him. Not a thing. Not a presence.
But a pressure.
A mold, perhaps.
And when they'd drawn closer—when their faces had neared his, necks unbending and eyes empty—it had felt like time itself twisted around him.
Until it broke.
Lucien stumbled. One foot caught on nothing. He almost fell. His hand reached out to steady himself against a wall that wasn't there.
The corridor shimmered faintly, and for a heartbeat, the shadows across the walls flickered into familiar shapes.
A silhouette.
A memory.
Maybe both.
But it vanished.
He rubbed at his eyes, not even realizing how hard he was trembling.
He felt hollow.
Not numb.
Empty.
Like something had scraped the inside of him clean. Left him walking in a body that remembered how to move, even when the mind inside it wasn't sure what it was moving for.
Lucien's thoughts tried to organize, stacking memory like cards on a table. He had to understand. Had to grasp some form of logic.
He'd been called.
That was the start. His Trial had begun. He'd entered it like everyone else. Taken from his body, his world, his life. Dropped into something cruel, strange, unreal.
He was supposed to be tested. Supposed to survive, to learn, to grow.
But this—whatever this was—had nothing to do with surviving.
Something had hijacked it.
Corrupted it.
Changed the shape of the Trial itself.
The Veil wasn't meant to break.
It wasn't supposed to fracture.
And it definitely wasn't meant to show him things that didn't make sense in any world.
So what was happening?
What was this place?
He didn't know. And worse—he didn't think he was supposed to.
Lucien's walk became slower, more hesitant. His breath quickened. Not from exertion—but realization.
He might be lost.
Not just in space.
Not just in Trial.
But in something else.
A layer behind the layer.
A crack in the rules.
And he was starting to suspect… he wasn't meant to survive this one.
His steps finally stopped.
His shoulders sagged. His arms hung heavy. He stared at his reflection in the black floor below him.
It looked wrong.
Not monstrous.
Not scarred.
Just… not him.
Older. Not physically. Not visibly. But changed. Like something inside him had aged a hundred years while his skin stayed thirteen.
Lucien knelt slowly, lowering himself until his knees met stone.
The corridor stretched endlessly before him.
But he didn't care where it led.
He didn't know what waited.
All he knew was that he wasn't the same.
And he wasn't sure if the boy who had been taken from the garden even existed anymore.