They camped that night on a ledge overlooking the Spiral Basin—a jagged crater from some ancient battle, now filled with crystallized Essentia and warped trees that grew sideways.
Mireth sat by the fire, wrapped in her cloak, staring into the flames. Her expression was unreadable.
Cael was silent beside her, the weight of what he'd almost done gnawing at the edges of his thoughts.
Finally, she spoke.
"I was part of the Sealed Choir once."
Cael turned to her. "You mentioned them before. I thought they were extinct."
"They are," she said. "Because we chose obliteration over decay."
She removed her glove.
Her left palm was not skin.
It was absence. Not scar tissue, not injury—just a void, as if her name had been peeled away from existence.
"We thought if we removed our names—our definitions—we could become timeless. Outside death. Outside entropy. Glyphs without contradiction."
Cael stared. "You erased your own identity?"
"Voluntarily," she said. "But I was the only one who survived the ritual. The others… vanished. No remains. No memory. I don't even remember their faces."
She flexed the hand. Nothing happened.
"They didn't die. They were unwritten."
Cael shivered.
"I left after that. I realized power without memory is just destruction. There's no self left to guide it."
She glanced sideways at him. "That's why I help you. Not because I think you're the chosen one. But because you remind me of myself before I crossed the line."
Cael looked down at his own hands. The glyphs were no longer passive. They pulsed faintly, like veins beneath the skin.
"Mireth… I don't know if I can stop. I don't know if I want to."
"Then choose something else to be," she said, simply. "You don't have to be a god. You can be a guide. A barrier. A question."
He thought of the glyph he'd almost finished. Of the way the Void monolith had pulsed when he hesitated.
He thought of the mirror chamber. Of the feather-quill, and the reflection who wrote reality.
"You can still change the ending," Mireth said. "But you have to want a story, not just an answer."
He didn't sleep that night.
But he didn't finish the glyph, either.