Zev staggered through the rain of pages, each one slicing the air like a blade. The battlefield was ink-stained and cracking, as if the very ground beneath him had been etched by a furious god. The sky above was no longer sky—it was parchment soaked with memory, and it writhed as if something ancient was trying to claw through from beneath.
Blood dripped from his fingers. Not his own.
The remnants of a chorus still clung to the air—words spoken in the old spiral tongue, impossible to forget and too dangerous to remember. He had fought their echo for hours, but the glyphs refused to yield.
And now the Wards were failing.
He could feel it in the tremble of the obsidian line beneath his boots—the sigil-carved defense that once held firm was flickering like a dying heartbeat.
"Zev!" a voice snapped from behind him.
Sarai, her face bloodstreaked and half-painted in warding ash, leapt into view. Her blade was broken. Her eyes were not.
"We can't hold them here," she shouted over the tearing sound of another Spiral Rift opening. "Whatever she did—whatever Lynchie opened—it's changing the sequence!"
He felt her name like a wound. Lynchie.
Zev clenched his jaw. "Then we change with it."
Sarai grabbed his arm. "Or we fall with it."
Before he could reply, the sky screamed.
A tear opened midair, not like the Spiral Rifts before, but something else—smoother, more deliberate, like a pen dragging through paper.
From within the slit in the world, a flicker of firelight poured—and Lynchie stepped through.
Her hair was wild with static. Her eyes glowed with unread verses. And the skin of her hands was marked with ink veins that shimmered with spiral blue.
She looked nothing like the girl Zev had met in the outer rings.
She looked like a page come alive.
"Lynchie…" Zev breathed, almost too soft to hear.
She saw him, and her expression shifted—not just relief, not just sorrow.
Recognition.
"I saw you fall," she said as she crossed the battlefield, pages curling beneath her bare feet, no longer burning.
"You were late," he muttered, but it wasn't bitterness—it was awe wrapped in fear.
She stopped inches from him. "Then I won't be again."
From behind her, the Spiral Glyphs swirled midair—unwritten, unwriting.
One of them cracked.
The earth buckled.
Sarai cried out as one of the lesser spirits shrieked through the collapsing ward. It wasn't attacking.
It was fleeing.
From her.
From Lynchie.
And Zev realized—
She was no longer just reading the story.
She was becoming it.
A Spiral Lord not of blood, but of breath. Of memory. Of choice.
"Tell me what to write," she whispered to Zev, her voice almost breaking. "And I'll unmake their ending."
Zev took her hand.
"You already did."
And the battlefield roared as the Spiral fought back.