When the music died, the silence followed her out of the hall.

She ran until the corridors lost their shape, where mirrors bending, torches doubling, footsteps echoing out of time. Each turn bled into another version of itself, until she no longer knew which passage led to dawn or to memory. The spiral token burned in her pocket, its pulse matching her own. If the court could vanish between breaths, if even Ori could be erased, then only the Seer might still remember what was real. Thane would forbid it. Corven would warn her. But neither could answer the question clawing at her ribs.
If the spiral was devouring the living, how long before it swallowed her?

The Spiral Hall stank of burnt myrrh and rot-sweet violets, the Seer’s incense of choice. Myrren pressed a sleeve across her mouth, though the smoke still clawed her throat. Symbols carved into the marble floor pulsed faintly with blue light, shifting like breath beneath skin. Each glow marked another loop of prophecy, another lie she had lived.

She shouldn’t have come alone.
Corven had warned her that every question the Seer answered cost a truth.
Thane had forbidden her to return at all.

But the whispers in her dreams had turned to screams, and tonight she needed silence to bleed.

“Seer Liora.” Her voice trembled despite her resolve. “You spoke of the spiral once. Tell me what it means. Tell me why I remember things that never happened.”

From the dais, the Seer lifted her head. A veil of thin ash-gauze hid her eyes, yet Myrren felt the weight of their seeing. The woman’s hands trembled over the bowl before her liquid silver swirling inside like captured moonlight.

“The spiral chooses who remembers,” the Seer murmured. “You were never meant to.”

The hall tilted. “I was there, at the banquet, the trial, the firelight, and then I wasn’t. Which is real?”

“All of them.” The Seer’s smile cracked like porcelain. “You have walked these stones a hundred times. Each ending rewinds to its own beginning.”

“Then stop it.” Myrren’s nails dug crescent moons into her palms. “If you see the threads, cut them.”

A dry laugh. “Child of scent and silence, do you not yet understand? Every loop is a lie. Every kiss is a poison. The spiral has no beginning but only an end.”

The words hit like toxins. The air curdled with rose oil turning to ash, silver light souring into green. Myrren’s senses splintered: a flash of Thane’s firelight promise, Corven’s shadowed hand, her own scream echoing from gallows unseen.

“End?” she whispered. “Whose end?”

The Seer dipped her fingers into the bowl. The liquid hissed. “Yours… unless you learn whose love you are dying for.”

The light flared, blinding. For a breath, Myrren smelled nothing, no smoke, no stone but only frost and the metallic tang of her own fear.

Then she saw it: herself, suspended in air, a rope biting into pale skin.

The vision broke. She staggered back, bile rising.

From the dais came the Seer’s whisper, soft as breath on glass:
“Run, before the next loop tightens.”

The corridor outside the Spiral Hall breathed like a lung. Torches guttered, shadows stretching and shrinking as if alive. Myrren pressed her hand to the wall, but even stone seemed unsteady beneath her touch. The Seer’s words echoed inside her skull. Every loop is a lie. Every kiss is a poison.

She could still taste the frost of that vision, the rope, the ash, the quiet beneath her own strangled breath.

“Every loop is a lie,” she whispered again, and the sound of it nearly broke her. “Then who am I when it ends?”

A whisper of air stirred behind her. The tether pulled taut before she turned.

“Corven.”

He emerged from the dim, his expression unreadable, shadows curling faintly around his boots like living smoke. “You went to her.” His voice was low, nearly swallowed by the whispering torches. “After I told you not to.”

Her knees threatened to buckle, but pride held her spine straight. “You told me not to seek the truth. I’m done being blind.”

“I told you the Seer’s spirals poison memory. You don’t know what you’ve breathed in there.”

“I know what I saw.” Her voice shook. “Myself, hanging.”

Something inside him went still. For the first time, he stepped closer, and the shadows that followed him recoiled as if burned. “That is not the end meant for you.”

She laughed. Bitter, cracked. “You sound certain. As if you’ve watched it before.”

He hesitated, thumb tapping once against his palm. “Some ends repeat.”

The tether between them thrummed, alive, responding to her anger, her fear, her confusion. It pulsed like the spiral token in her pocket, as though one recognized the other.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” she said. “The loops. The vanishing. The Seer’s words ‘every kiss is a poison.’ You’ve seen this before.”

“Seeing and escaping are not the same.” His voice sharpened. “You think you can break the spiral by asking questions? It feeds on questions. On what you love enough to ruin.”

Her throat tightened. “Then tell me which love ruins me. Thane, or you?”

The words hit him harder than she expected. The air thickened, shadows trembling like struck strings. He didn’t answer.

“You can’t, can you?” she whispered. “Because you already know.”

Corven stepped closer until his breath mingled with hers, cold against her heat, the scent of steel and cypress drowning out the incense still clinging to her hair. “If you keep chasing the truth, you’ll end at the gallows you saw.”

“Then I’ll see it coming,” she said.

The torchlight flared, his shadows coiling as if in protest. “You won’t,” he murmured, voice breaking just once. “You never do.”

For a heartbeat, she thought he might touch her, might steady her, or silence her. Instead, he turned away. “If Thane asks, tell him you never came here. The Queen’s eyes are already on you.”

“Why protect me now?”

He paused at the end of the corridor. “Because in every loop, I try.”

The words left her cold. She pressed a trembling hand to the wall, the pulse of the tether fading like a dying star.

Somewhere in the depths of the palace, a bell tolled, a sound she’d heard before, but could not place.

Not in this life.

Not yet.

The corridor seemed to breathe with her, it was shallow and uneven, as if the palace itself had lungs.
Myrren pressed her palm against the cold stone, but it pulsed once beneath her hand. The pulse matched her heartbeat, then overrode it.

She stumbled forward. The Seer’s voice still echoed through her skull.
Every loop is a lie. Every kiss is a poison.

The words had burrowed deep, turning thought to fever. She felt them now in her blood, a slow toxin threading through her veins.

She reached the archway leading to the outer court. Moonlight cut through the smoke, white and sharp as a blade, but halfway across the threshold, the air thickened.

The light flickered.

For an instant, she stood not in stone corridors but on a scaffold.
Below her is a sea of faces, blurred like candle flames in the wind. Chains on her wrists. The scent of burning rope and frostmint oil, her own mixture, the same she’d once used to numb pain before executions.

A whisper rose from the crowd: traitor…

She gasped and fell backward, slamming against the real wall. The vision snapped, but the scent didn’t vanish. Smoke and mint still clung to her throat.

“Not real,” she rasped. “Not..”

A door farther down creaked open. Voices carried the guards, faint, distorted.

“…the Queen’s orders… the Seer spoke of treason again…”

“…find the scentcrafter, she’s not in her quarters…”

Her pulse spiked. Corven’s warning rang like struck glass: If Thane asks, tell him you never came here.

Too late.

She turned, half-blind, following instinct, or maybe the spiral itself guiding her deeper into its maze. The torches warped as she ran, their flames twisting into coils that mirrored the token’s design. Every step felt wrong, too heavy, too slow. The air tasted of metal and memory.

When she reached the grand doors to the courtyard, her fingers found the token in her pocket, pulsing hot as a heartbeat. It burned her palm, forcing her to drop it.

The onyx spiral hit the floor and rolled. Each turn left a smear of light, until the symbol carved into its surface began to glow.

The world rippled.

Two shadows formed in front of her, one gold, one black. Thane’s light, Corven’s darkness, overlapping, consuming each other until nothing remained but the outline of a noose.

She tried to scream, but the air froze in her lungs.

A voice whispered, not the Seer’s this time, but her own.
You will hang on for loving the wrong man.

The rope tightened around her throat, invisible but real. Her feet lifted from the ground. The vision fractured, light and shadow colliding, Thane shouting her name, Corven reaching through darkness, both too far.

The spiral token shattered on the floor.

When the pressure released, she fell, not into arms, not into darkness, but into blinding light.

And before the world vanished, she saw it clearly: the gallows waiting, the crown of ash above her head, and a whisper carried on smoke..

“This loop ends with you.”