Light clawed her back from the dark.
Stone pressed cold against her knees; the scent of iron filled her throat. For one disoriented instant she thought the spiral had only changed color, red to gold, but the sound of chains told her it had changed worlds instead.
A hundred torches hissed before her like watching eyes. Someone spoke her name, too loud, too official, and she realized the echo of confession had become law.
The tribunal hall stretched around her, marble veined with ash. Nobles crowded the balconies, silks rustling like wings above a carcass.
And above them, the Queen sat motionless upon her throne of white fire, veiled and fragile, a faint shimmer of wardlight pulsing at her brow where the crown touched skin.
Alive, but ghost-pale, as if poison still whispered through her veins. Even the air dared not breathe too close.

The tribunal’s scent was worse than any poison: fear steeped in perfume, sweat beneath gilded collars, and the faint sweetness of decay from flowers strewn at her feet.
Myrren steadied her breathing. Chains circled her wrists, thin as jewelry but humming with a wardlight that pulsed in time with her heart, each throb whispering guilty.

Aurelia’s voice rang from the dais. “Mistress Vale, you stand accused of serving the Silent Veil by craft, by knowledge, by blood.”
The courtiers murmured like a hive stirred. On the bench beside the throne, Kael laid out her journals, every line gleaming with her own handwriting.
Spiral sketches. Formulas. Words she had never written. Bind, break, crown of ash.

Seliora caught her eye from the defense rail. A warning, subtle as breath: Do not flinch.

She tried not to.
The Queen said nothing. Her silence weighed more than Aurelia’s accusation.
Lightbinding wards shimmered in the walls. Thane’s design, she realized. He was absent, but his power filled the hall; the torches burned with his signature gold. The air itself reeked of roses and smoke.

“Speak,” Aurelia commanded. “Tell us why the spiral mark was carved into your vials, why your antidotes trace the cult’s design.”

The crowd leaned forward, hungry for spectacle. Myrren inhaled, and the tether inside her chest trembled, a faint answering hum as though Corven’s shadow had heard the summons.

“I brewed antidotes,” she said evenly. “Not poison. The marks were for tracking routes, dates, supplies.”
Her voice caught as she saw the pattern inked across Kael’s parchment. The points formed the spiral she had dreamed in the dark. Her spiral.

Laughter rippled through the hall. “Tracking what? Victims?”
“Or converts?”
“Perhaps herself,” someone sneered.

The tether pulsed again, sharper now. Shadows flickered along the floor, crawling toward her chains before vanishing. Holt shifted his stance behind the benches. Seliora’s rings clicked once, twice.
Even the Queen’s veil stirred, though no wind moved.

“Enough,” Kael said, his tone smooth as oil. “If you are innocent, Mistress Vale, then show us what pattern your poisons truly make.”

The hum in her veins became a roar. She lifted her head, and the spiral map burned behind her eyes.

Myrren forced her trembling hands flat against the table. The chains hummed as the wardlight adjusted to her pulse. Beneath her palms the parchment shimmered, the pattern of her supposed crimes inked in gleaming red. She saw every delivery route she had made for the healers’ guild, every antidote shipment traced across Eirden’s starving provinces, every desperate night she had ridden through famine smoke.

They were all there. Together they formed the spiral.

Gasps rippled through the court as Kael tilted the map toward the torchlight. “There,” he said softly. “Every point her hand touched. From the river quarter to the northern mines. A perfect curve.”

“It is not perfect,” Myrren snapped before she could stop herself. “The gaps are where antidotes failed to reach, where riots burned the stores. The pattern is not a curse. It is a map of survival.”

Aurelia’s fan stilled mid-flutter. “So you admit you made the spiral?”

“I admit I tried to save lives,” she said. “But famine draws patterns no healer can control.”

Uneasy laughter flickered through the balconies. The Queen did not move. Only the faint glimmer of her crown marked breath.

Kael spread another sheet, this one scrawled with prophecy fragments in her own hand. One shall bind, one shall break. The words gleamed like blood under the wards. “You wrote this too,” he murmured. “Do you deny your own prophecy?”

“My handwriting,” she whispered, “but not my will.”

A rustle surged through the nobles. Several ward-lamps flickered. The tether in her chest pulled tight, a silent shudder that dragged her senses sideways. For an instant she saw shadows behind Kael’s shoulders, chains uncoiling, reaching. Corven’s presence, watching.

She seized the moment. “If I am the Veil’s servant, then why does my map mark only antidotes, not deaths? Why do the victims live along its curve while the rest of Eirden starves?”

Seliora rose from the bench, voice ringing clear. “Because someone wanted it to look like worship. A false spiral. A mirror for the court’s fear.”

Aurelia turned, venom-sweet. “Cousin, you speak of treason.”

“Then let it be spoken,” Seliora said. “The Silent Veil feeds on our silence more than on her craft.”

The Queen’s head lifted slightly, veil stirring in faint amusement or warning.

Kael’s calm did not break. “Truth or illusion, it binds the kingdom still.” He snapped his fingers; a scribe poured black sand across the parchment. The spiral glowed crimson, each point igniting until the pattern blazed upon the floor itself, alive and pulsing.

Myrren recoiled. The tether convulsed. Shadows leapt up like startled birds.

And from the back of the hall, a voice cut through the roar, quiet but absolute.
Corven.

“If this is the spiral again,” he said, “let me die in it.”

The hall fell silent. Even the wards seemed to hold their breath.

The words echoed like a blade dropped into water, soft, final, irreversible.
The courtiers froze. The Queen did not stir. The torchlight flared once, then dimmed as though the hall itself recoiled from Corven’s defiance.

Myrren’s pulse stuttered. The tether inside her chest wrenched hard, dragging her toward him. She tasted iron on her tongue. “Corven…”

He met her eyes across the chamber, shadows unfurling at his feet like black silk. “They call it devotion when a prince kneels,” he said quietly, “but treason when a ward does.” His gaze flicked toward the throne. “So be it.”

Guards shifted, hands on their hilts. Holt moved too, half a step forward, jaw tight, caught between oath and pity.

Kael’s voice sliced through the thick air. “You would die for her, or with her?”

“Both,” Corven said simply. The tether thrummed, an audible hum that vibrated through the marble floor. Wardlight shattered in its glow, gold fracturing into violet.

Nobles gasped. The scent of burning perfume filled the room.

Myrren tried to fight it, but the pull deepened; her vision fractured into overlapping spirals, the hall warping into shadow and flame. In one reflection Thane’s light flared; in another, Corven’s hand reached through darkness. Two worlds, two endings she could see both waiting.

The Queen rose. Slowly. Unnaturally. Her veil trembled in a sudden wind that coiled through the chamber.

“Enough,” she said, voice thin but commanding. “This tether, this mockery of fate, ends now.”

Her words rippled like a curse. Kael dropped to one knee. Aurelia flinched back, clutching her fan.

But Myrren saw something else, threads of gold and black twisting in the Queen’s shadow, tightening around her wrists. Not death, but binding.

“Your Majesty,” Seliora began, “she is not..”

The Queen’s hand lifted. “Silence.”

Her veil flickered; for a heartbeat her eyes glowed with the same silver ash that had burned through Myrren’s spiral vision. “Every confession begins again,” she murmured, the same phrase Corven had whispered through smoke.

The hall erupted. Nobles cried out.

Myrren’s knees buckled; the tether went rigid, pulling her toward the dais. Corven broke through the guards, catching her before she hit the floor. The impact sent another shockwave through the wards; torches blew out, petals from the funeral flowers whirling into the air like ash.

When the light steadied again, the Queen’s throne stood empty.

Aurelia screamed. Kael stumbled back, wardlight snapping across his hands. “She’s gone. Saints, she’s gone!”

Only a length of coarse rope lay draped across the seat, coiled in the same spiral pattern that burned across Myrren’s map. Ash dusted its fibers.

Corven’s grip tightened on her shoulders. “They’ve taken her into the spiral.”

Myrren stared at the rope. It pulsed once, like a heartbeat.

And she understood with sickening clarity that this trial had never been hers at all. It was the Queen’s.

The hall had fallen into a silence too deep to be real.
Even the torches refused to move; their flames held still, like paintings. Myrren could taste ash in the air, bitter and familiar, the same ash that had rimmed the vial in her dream.

Guards searched the dais. The rope coiled there was rough, frayed, dusted with grey that glittered faintly when Kael’s trembling hand lifted it.
“It’s warm,” he whispered. “As if it remembers her pulse.”

“Back away,” Holt ordered, his voice iron but uncertain.

Seliora pressed a sleeve to her mouth. “She didn’t vanish. She was taken, pulled into it.”

“The spiral?” Aurelia breathed.

No one answered.

The wards hummed again, low and broken, echoing the tether that still burned between Myrren and Corven. She tried to stand, but her knees shook. The hum followed her heartbeat; every throb drew the rope’s fibers tighter, the coil shifting like a living thing.

“She left it for me,” Myrren whispered. “It’s the same pattern as the map, the same curve.”

Kael’s eyes gleamed with horrid fascination. “Then perhaps the Queen was never our judge. Perhaps she was our next offering.”

Corven caught her hand, shadows trembling along his wrist. “Don’t look at it.”

But she could not stop. Each loop of the rope seemed to breathe. Her mind filled with whispers, the Seer’s voice, Ori’s confession, the Queen’s last words twisting together: Every confession begins again.

The tether jerked once, violent, dragging her forward half a step.

“Myrren,” Corven warned, pulling her back. His grip was steady, but his voice was breaking. “If you cross that mark, you’ll follow her.”

“She’s still alive,” Myrren said, not sure whether she believed it. “The spiral doesn’t kill. It keeps.”

Behind them, nobles stumbled toward the exits, silks tangling, prayers hissing through clenched teeth. No one dared touch the rope.

Myrren reached toward it anyway. Her chains hissed as the wards tried to hold her, gold light flickering against shadow. For a heartbeat she saw two reflections in the coiled ash, her own and the Queen’s, overlapping like a mirror misaligned.

The rope tightened once, like a pulse shared between them. Then it went still.

And in the echoing hush, the spiral on the floor began to turn again.