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The chamber still echoed with the last beat of the Spiral Throne.
Caelan knelt where the silver veins pulsed beneath him, the pieces of the Crown still orbiting above—glowing softly, not whole, not shattered. Waiting.
Kael and Raen stood silent beside him.
Not as kings.
Not as gods.
But as what they had become — beings changed by a choice they could never undo.
Caelan rose slowly, the final warmth of the pendant fading from his skin. The spiral mark on his chest—branded by memory, not magic—still burned beneath his shirt.
"Why show me this?" he asked, voice dry, hollowed out by visions.
Kael's gaze lingered on the crown's fragments. "Because it remembers you. Because it waited."
Raen crossed his arms, his voice heavier. "And because the choice you'll make soon… will not let you remain only human."
The silence after that felt ancient.
The spiral beneath Caelan's feet dimmed, and the light in the room began to fade.
The Crown did not fall.
It hovered—reverent, undecided, unfinished.
"I'm not ready," Caelan said.
"No one is," Kael replied. "But the Veil doesn't wait."
They led him out—not through stairs, but through a corridor that hadn't been there before. A tunnel lined with dustless glass and forgotten symbols, carved by memory rather than hand.
As they walked, flickers of the past played faintly across the walls. Caelan saw glimpses of Lyssandra holding a child who was not him, kissing the brow of one of her sons before sending him to war. A hand stretched through a barrier of light. A spiral burned into sand.
They exited into a great vault deeper than Noctisfall and darker than night.
And there, in a circle of ancient flame, stood Velrath.
The Crimson Steward did not speak at first. They bowed low—more deeply than they ever had before Caelan—and then raised their blindfolded face toward the two Kings.
"Is it time?" they asked.
Kael nodded.
"The boy has touched the spiral."
Raen grunted. "Now he has to survive it."
Velrath turned toward Caelan. Their voice was even, impossibly calm.
"There are two truths beneath this world," they said. "One drinks blood. The other devours the moon. Both were born from Lyssandra's breaking. But the third truth—the one even the Veil forgot—is memory."
Velrath stepped forward and offered Caelan a stone bowl, carved with the thirteen runes of the Spiral.
"It's not a ritual," they whispered. "It's a remembering."
Caelan hesitated.
"What happens if I drink it?"
Kael answered. "You will remember what you were before you were born."
Raen added, "And then, you will have to decide what you become."
The bowl trembled in Caelan's hands. The liquid inside shimmered—silver-black, alive, whispering his name in dozens of voices, some his own, some not.
A vision surged in his skull.
A woman with spiral-marked eyes cradling a child in a cradle made of fang and flame. A city burning beneath a red eclipse. The One Who Waits, kneeling, not offering power—but apology.
He wasn't ready.
But the world was no longer waiting.
Caelan drank.
The moment it touched his tongue, time unraveled.
He didn't fall.
He spiraled.
Through blood.
Through memory.
Through Lyssandra's last breath.