Darkness had no weight, yet it pressed against her lungs like smoke.
When Myrren finally breathed, the world rebuilt itself around scent before sound or sight: flour, oil, and heat, the living heart of the palace kitchens.
Voices murmured, ladles clattered, but they came a half-second too late, as though echoing a moment that had already happened.

Her palms still glowed faintly from where she’d held the spiral token before it burst. Two halves of light and shadow, fused now into a single faint bruise along her wrist. The scent of ash lingered beneath the aromas of bread and sugar, and when she blinked, she swore she saw the Spiral Hall’s marble ghosts under the flagstones,  white and black veins spiraling toward her feet.

Had she awakened… or returned?

A servant’s voice cut through her haze. “Mistress Vale? You shouldn’t be here. The Queen ordered..”

Myrren looked up, startled. The servant’s face flickered,  young, then old, then young again,  as if time itself stuttered.
She pressed a hand to her temple. The air hummed.
“Everything smells wrong,” she whispered.

The heat in the kitchens was suffocating. Copper pots hissed, bread cracked open in ovens, and sweet steam curled through the air like perfume masking decay. Myrren moved through the bustle with her satchel slung over one shoulder, trying to steady her breath. The Queen had ordered her to test the day’s feast for “imperfections.”
Imperfections, in Eirden, meant poison.

Her head throbbed with ghost-sound from the Spiral Hall with two voices overlapping: Myrren, look at me and Come to me. Every clang of iron sent the memory sharper. She focused instead on scents: rosemary, yeast, and something wrong beneath it.

A metallic tang.
Faint, but rising.
She followed it to the far hearth where a kettle simmered unattended. The water shimmered strangely, light bending around it like glass under tension. She leaned close, inhaling.
Frostmint, wolfsbane resin… and something else an  unfamiliar, acrid, pulsing with heat as if alive.

Her pulse stuttered. “Who mixed this?”

A boy looked up from the chopping table, eyes wide. “It came from the cellar, Mistress. New shipment. The steward said..”

“Steward said?” Her tone cut too sharp. “Do you know what this will do if it boils another breath longer?” She snatched the kettle from the flame, but the metal scorched her hands, glowing faintly gold then black then light and shadow chasing each other across its surface.

The world tilted. A ringing filled her skull.
The air thickened,  not smoke, not steam, but dust fine as ash spiraling upward.

She staggered back.
Something in the mixture was alive.  A Veil toxin, she realized too late. The scent had a heartbeat.
Her heartbeat.

“Myrren!” A voice, bright, urgent. Thane’s? He shouldn’t be here. Yet she saw his figure at the doorway, firelight haloing his hair.
At the same instant, another voice echoed from behind the hearth, cool and steady: “Step back.” Corven, emerging from shadow, his hand already reaching for her sleeve.

Both sights overlapped, impossible. The same heartbeat pulsing in gold and black.

The kettle shattered.
Light exploded.

The kitchens dissolved into white fire and silence.

The blast struck like a scream turned inside out.
Myrren’s world fractured,  not into darkness, but into two burning halves.

In one, she fell backward into the firelight.
Thane’s arms caught her, his breath ragged, the scent of singed cedar and sweat clinging to him. “I have you,” he murmured, voice trembling beneath command. His lightbinding flared, gold rippling across the broken tiles, sealing cracks with molten glow. The air shimmered around them as though he could hold the world together by will alone. “Look at me, Myrren. You’re safe.”
She tried to answer, but smoke filled her lungs. His touch seared, too bright, too desperate. The light crawling over his skin burned the edges of her vision.

“You shouldn’t have been here,” he whispered, anguish cutting through his tone. “I told them you were mine to protect.”

Mine. The word rang like a chain.

But then, another world bled through the flames.

Cold, silent.
She was on her knees amid black ash, the explosion sucked inward, the light devoured by shadow. Corven’s silhouette emerged from the darkness, eyes gleaming storm-gray, his hand closing around her wrist. His grip was strong, grounding. “You breathe,” he said softly. “Good.”

The shadows around them pulsed with his power, wrapping them in cool tendrils that muffled the roar of the collapsing kitchens. Where Thane’s light sought to burn danger away, Corven’s shadow consumed it whole. “Don’t move,” he ordered. “The air is laced with Veil dust. If you breathe too deep, it will make you see what they want you to see.”

“What I’m seeing..” she gasped. “Is it you?”

His thumb brushed her pulse. “It’s always been me.”

The words struck deeper than command.
She blinked and the world flipped again.
Thane cradled her face, tears carving clean paths through soot. “You were almost gone,” he breathed. “I won’t lose you again.”
Again.

The word echoed through both realities.

Her knees gave out. She hit the floor, vision convulsing between gold and black. The two versions of her life collided with flame overlaying frost, devotion overlaying silence. The scent of Thane’s fire and Corven’s cypress merged into something unbearable.

Then, a whisper threaded through the chaos, older than either man: “Every rescue is a rehearsal.”

It was the High Whisperer’s voice, she was sure of it, the unseen architect of the spiral.

The kitchen reformed around her, wrong and right all at once. Servants froze in mirrored postures,  two identical boys holding the same tray, two cooks weeping into the same soup. Every movement doubled, like reflections lagging a heartbeat behind.

Myrren staggered upright, clutching the nearest table. “Stop it!” she cried, though she didn’t know to whom. The vision shivered; half the room burned, half drowned in shadow.

From the doorway, Thane’s voice says “Stay with me.”
From the hearth, Corven’s – “You’re slipping.”

Her heart wrenched toward both. The spiral’s bruise on her wrist burned with light and dark at once.
For an instant she saw herself split, two Myrrens reaching in opposite directions, each one screaming the other’s name.

The air snapped. Reality folded.
And she was falling again, through smoke and silence, into a world that could not decide which man had saved her.

When Myrren opened her eyes, everything was smoke and silence.
Ash fell like snow.
The kitchens were ruined, or they weren’t. Pots stood upright, unscathed, yet the ceiling gaped open to the sky. Her vision stuttered between both: ruin and perfection, disaster and calm.

She lay on cold stone, half her body dusted in soot, half in untouched flour. Her pulse hammered against her ribs, uneven, doubled, as if her heart beat for two lives at once.

Servants gathered at the edges of her sight, their faces pale. Someone was shouting for water; another whispered a prayer.
But their voices blurred, out of sync.

Then Thane was there, or the memory of him.
He knelt beside her, his hands trembling as he brushed ash from her face. His eyes were fever-bright, rimmed red with fear. “Saints, Myrren… I thought—” He swallowed. “It doesn’t matter. You’re alive.” His thumb lingered at her jaw, gentle, possessive. “I won’t let them near you again.”

Behind him, a shadow moved.
Corven stood in the doorway, untouched by soot, his expression carved from disbelief. “You shouldn’t be able to see me,” he said quietly. “Not from this side.”

She stared. “This side?”

He took one step forward, and the air warped,  gold light flickering across the walls, black veins threading through it like cracks in glass. “You’re still inside the spiral,” he said. “You never left.”

Thane’s grip tightened. “Ignore him. Look at me.” His light burned brighter, defiant. “You’re here, with me. This is real.”

Corven’s voice was steady, sorrowful. “That’s what the spiral wants her to believe.”
He raised his hand and the room darkened, the gold swallowed by shadow.

The two halves of the world collided again.
Thane’s warmth flared against Corven’s chill. Pots rattled, fire surged, the air split into a high, keening sound. Myrren screamed, clutching her head as light and darkness tangled inside her.

Then silence.
The next heartbeat was her own.
She was lying where the explosion had begun, surrounded by wide-eyed cooks and guards flooding in behind Captain Holt. No princes. No shadows. Just scorched tiles and a faint spiral of ash where the kettle had stood.

“Myrren?” Holt’s voice cut through the ringing. “Saints, can you hear me?”

She nodded weakly, though her gaze stayed fixed on that spiral of ash, perfect, precise, and pulsing faintly, as if breathing.

Her wrist ached. The bruise there glowed gold at its edge, black at its center.

Two heartbeats echoed in her chest.
Two rescues in her mind.
One impossible memory.

She whispered, barely audible, “Which one of you was real, the one that burned, or the one that bound?”

The spiral shimmered.
And somewhere deep beneath the palace, a whisper answered:
“Both.”