The door burst open before she could breathe a reply.
Light and shadow collided, gold fire laced with smoke blinding her. The air roared like a heartbeat too close to her ear. The room, the Queen’s voice, Seliora’s grasp, all shattered into spirals of sound and scent. Roses, frost, blood, ash.

Then silence.

When Myrren opened her eyes, she was no longer in the Queen’s solar.
She stood at the heart of the Spiral Hall, where the prophecy had been carved into stone. The walls glowed faintly, the spirals etched there turning like slow stars. Beneath her bare feet, the marble pulsed with the same rhythm as the token in her palm once, twice, thrice then split its light into two colors.

Gold.
Black.

Each vein of light snaked across the floor, circling her ankles, climbing the walls. The air thickened until every breath tasted of contradiction, honeyed warmth and bitter iron, Thane’s sunlight and Corven’s cypress frost. Her vision blurred; she could smell time itself burning.

Footsteps echoed down opposite corridors.
Two sets.

From the left, a firelight bloomed, flooding the hall with warmth. Thane emerged through the blaze, coat unfastened, crownless, eyes frantic with love and guilt. “Myrren,” he called, voice cracking. “You have to come with me. Whatever this is, it’s a trick, a curse. I’ll burn it down before it takes you.”

From the right, shadow rippled like ink poured across glass. Corven stepped from its heart, expression unreadable, silver chain glinting across his wrist where the tether burned through skin. “He can’t burn what’s already ash,” he said quietly. “You know where light leads, Myrren. You’ve seen it.”

Her heart stuttered.
She had seen it, the loops, the deaths, the firelit vows that turned to gallows ropes. And in each one, a choice. Always between devotion and the dark.

The spirals on the walls spun faster.
Smoke and light collided, forming mirrored images: in one, Thane’s arms closed around her before he turned away at the crown’s command; in the other, Corven’s chains coiled her wrists as he whispered, “You’re mine until the end.”

Her pulse beat between them, dizzy and cruel. The token flared so hot she dropped it. It struck the marble with a sound like shattering glass, and from the crack, two glowing spirals spread outward, twisting in opposite directions.

Thane’s fire swept one side of the hall. Corven’s shadows devoured the other.
And Myrren stood in the center, light on her left, dark on her right, realizing with a sick, certain clarity that both paths were hers, both fates already written.

The crack widened.
From it, the Spiral Hall unfurled like a mirrored dream, two halves dividing before her eyes.

To her left, the marble glowed with firelight. Thane knelt beside a fallen crown, face streaked with ash. Behind him, nobles shouted her name, half in praise, half in accusation.
To her right, the stone froze under spreading frost. Corven stood before a throne of shadow, his chains coiling outward to bind courtiers like marionettes.

Myrren’s breath fogged between both worlds. Each inhalation seared one lung and froze the other.

“Choose,” whispered the air. It wasn’t Thane’s voice or Corven’s. It was the Queen’s, layered with the soft echo of a hundred Seers repeating her words through time. “Light or shadow. Crown or chain.”

“I will not” Myrren’s protest faltered. The visions moved without her.

In Thane’s world, she saw herself robed in white beside him, his Queen. He touched her cheek tenderly before stepping onto the dais, where the nobles awaited.
“Myrren Vale is guilty of no crime,” he declared, his voice ringing like a sword drawn for love.
And then, from behind him, the Queen’s guards seized her. His hand dropped; his eyes filled with horror and he did not stop them.

Betrayal again, the same as every loop. The crown above him burned brighter until his own skin began to crack.

She tore her gaze away, gasping.

In Corven’s half of the hall, the vision shifted. The shadows knelt at her feet, whispering her name like worship. The tether between them gleamed, silver and alive.
“Freedom,” Corven said softly. “If you’ll take it from my hand.”
But when she reached for him, the chain ran cold and heavy up her arm, around her throat. His expression twisted, not triumph, but grief. “Forgive me. It’s the only way I can keep you.”

She wrenched free and the chain followed, tightening until her vision sparked with light.

Both worlds collided. Heat and frost roared together, the two futures collapsing back into one blinding spiral.

Myrren staggered, choking on air that tasted of wolfsbane and ink. The carvings on the walls blazed. For a heartbeat, she saw the Queen standing between both flames, untouched, her gown trailing ash.

“You see now,” Aelira murmured. “Every path ends where I need it to. Love binds better than law. Devotion kills more cleanly than poison. You were never meant to choose, Myrren. You were meant to spin.”

The walls convulsed. Faces flickered in the stone, Seliora, Ori, Holt each whispering fragments of past loops. The Silent Veil’s mark burned through the marble, a sigil of onyx spirals crossing gold ones, sealing the vision shut.

Myrren clutched her head, memories fracturing. “No… no, there’s a third way, there must be”

The Queen smiled faintly. “There never is.”

The spiral token rose from the floor, suspended between fire and shadow, pulsing like a heart torn in two. Each beat dragged at her chest, pulling her toward one fate, then the other. Her knees buckled.

And in that instant, when both Thane and Corven reached for her across the divide. Myrren realized the cruel truth:
Neither path freed her. Both were designed.

She had never been choosing between men.
She had been choosing which cage would close first.

The air shattered.

Light crashed against shadow, splintering the Spiral Hall into shards of gold and black. Myrren’s scream caught in her throat as the token’s glow surged, no longer a pulse, but a heartbeat trying to tear itself apart. Cracks veined across the marble floor, forming two perfect spirals that spun in opposite directions. The sound was unbearable, a chorus of her own voices repeating through time:

“You trusted him.”
“You chained him.”
“You died for both.”

Thane’s hand reached through the light. “Myrren, look at me!” The devotion in his eyes burned so fiercely it frightened her. “If you step away, everything I’ve done, every vow means nothing!” His fire flared, licking the edges of his skin like guilt turned to flame.

Corven’s voice rose from the shadows, steady, grief-laced. “You don’t need his fire. The spiral feeds on your belief, let it starve. Come to me, and I’ll bind the silence before it devours you.”

Both voices pulled her apart. Her senses fractured: roses, cypress, smoke, frost, blood, and ash every scent of her life unraveling at once.

The Queen’s silhouette appeared at the far end of the hall, framed in the fusion of light and shadow. Her voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silk. “Break, Myrren Vale. Break, and the kingdom survives.”

The spiral symbols carved into the walls ignited, forming an ascending helix of flame and frost. The heat scorched her skin; the cold split her lips. She staggered forward, arms outstretched, toward neither prince, toward the heart of the storm itself.

“Stop!” Thane shouted, lunging through the blaze.
Corven did the same, shadows streaming from his wrists like chains snapping free.

They collided at the center, fire and darkness devouring each other leaving Myrren caught between them.

The spiral token burst.

Light flooded her vision: two futures overlaid.
Thane’s hands on her throat as he begged forgiveness before the crown.
Corven’s chains around her wrists, his mouth against her pulse, whispering mine as the world burned.
Both ending in ash.

She screamed.

“There must be another way!”

Her voice tore through the hall, louder than prophecy, louder than flame. The spirals convulsed, then inverted, imploding into a single point of darkness that swallowed sound and light alike.

When silence returned, the hall was gone.

She stood in nothingness, the ash still falling around her like snow. The token lay at her feet, cracked in two. One half gold, one half black, still pulsing faintly, as if alive.

Somewhere beyond the dark, a whisper answered her defiance:
“Find it then, child of scent and silence. But every way leads back to us.”

The whisper faded, leaving her alone in the void.

And as the last flecks of ash dissolved against her skin, Myrren realized that
the spiral hadn’t ended.
It had split.