The golem's mournful wails still echoed across the plains by the time they were walking again.
Dee sulked, arms crossed, cloak dragging in the dust. "I gave it life. Emotion. Poetry."
"You gave it an existential crisis," Vampher muttered, tightening the straps on his pack. "And now it's probably founding a religion based on self-loathing."
"Hey," Hiro added, pointing back toward the rocky hills, "he left behind a trail of tear-shaped pebbles. That's impressive. For a rock."
Despite the banter, their mood dimmed. The levity evaporated as the sky changed.
Above them, the ripple left by the severed thread had widened overnight. Its edges glimmered like torn film stretched across the heavens, pulsing not with light, but memory. Glimpses of not-quite-real moments flickered there: a younger Dee laughing beside a monstrous shadow. Vampher staring into a mirrorless world. Hiro speaking with someone they'd never met—and yet missed.
They turned away.
Because the path ahead had shifted again.
It bled.
Literally.
Where once there was dust and stone, now ran a ribbon of red. A stream without a source, trickling along the path like a vein across the land. It didn't pool. It didn't soak. It simply moved. Guiding them.
Vampher frowned, kneeling beside the flowing blood. He dipped a finger into it and raised it to his nose. "It's not blood. Not exactly. Too cold. Too clean."
"It's dreamstuff," Dee whispered, watching it wind like a living map. "Fused with memory. This is prophecy territory now. It's pulling us."
Hiro scowled. "So what do we do? Follow it?"
Dee shook his head, slowly. "We're not following it." His expression hardened. "We're hunting it."
The blood-river wound into a forest of bone-trees.
Tall, skeletal things—trunks like femurs, branches like ribs, leaves like whispers. The trees didn't move, but their shadows did, flickering in shapes that almost resembled faces, memories, regrets. No birds sang. No wind stirred. Just the hush of breathless waiting.
And there, in a glade where the blood ran thickest, they found it.
The Second Lock.
It was alive.
A child.
Or something shaped like one.
Pale. Still. Curled like a question mark at the base of a shattered monolith. Crimson veins stretched from its chest into the earth, feeding the blood-stream. Its lips moved in silent dreams. Its fingers twitched, grasping at the air as if reaching for a memory it hadn't yet lived.
Vampher's breath caught in his throat. He stepped back. "The child who walks with none…"
Dee nodded slowly, voice distant. "Born of dusk. Crowned by sun."
"What does that mean?" Hiro whispered, eyes darting across the glade.
"It means this is the second lock," Dee said. "But it's not a tether. It's a person."
Vampher took a slow, cautious step forward. His foot touched the edge of the glade.
And the child stirred.
Its eyes snapped open.
And screamed.
Not a cry of pain.
Not a child's wail.
A scream of truth.
Reality warped.
The forest fell upward.
Time cracked sideways.
And suddenly, they were somewhere else.
Inside the scream.
A place between memory and metaphor, echo and self.
A cathedral of bleeding glass.
Columns of shattered reflections lined the void, suspended in stillness. The air smelled like ink and lightning. Floating within the cathedral, circling the center, were infinite versions of the child—each older, each wearing a different name.
General. Oracle. Monster. King. Prophet. Villain. Corpse.
Each turned to stare at them.
Dee stepped in front of the others, arms wide.
"This is not your future," he said, voice hard as obsidian. "This is a cage built of 'could have beens.' We refuse it."
The child-echoes smiled.
They spoke in unison.
"You refused your roles. But you are still in the story."
Then the true second lock revealed itself.
A version of Vampher stepped forward from the shadows.
Older.
Regal.
Drenched in the robes of a false priest. His eyes were hollow. His mouth bled ink that floated up like smoke.
He raised a hand.
And the child at the center of the cathedral rose with him, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings.
"This is what happens when you stop choosing," said the False Vampher. "The prophecy chooses for you."
Hiro drew his blade.
Dee held him back. "This isn't a fight of blades. It's choice."
Vampher trembled. He took a breath. Stepped forward.
"You're not me."
The lock tilted its head. "I am what you would have become if you had obeyed. If you had stopped thinking. If you had followed the seals. You would have ruled. Been worshipped. Never doubted again."
"But I did doubt," Vampher said.
"Yes. And now, your dreams bleed for it."
The lock offered him a thread.
A crown made of stories.
It shimmered with promise: power, peace, adoration.
"Wear it," the lock said. "And the scream will end."
The cathedral seemed to hold its breath.
Vampher reached out.
Paused.
His hand hovered above the crown.
Then he smiled.
"No."
The crown turned to ash in his hands.
And the bleeding glass shattered.
They fell.
Through reflection.
Through versions.
Through dreams.
Back into their bodies.
Back into the forest.
The child was gone.
Only a faint whisper remained, drifting through the bone-leaves:
thank you.
The blood-river faded into mist.
They stood in silence.
Dee exhaled first. "Two down."
"Kind of," Hiro said, rubbing his temples. "Did we break it or deny it?"
Vampher looked at his hands.
He still held the ash of the crown.
It shimmered faintly.
"I think," he said slowly, "we freed it."
A low hum answered him.
The sky-ripple had widened again.
But now, a second tear bloomed beside it—brighter, sharper.
Far, far away, in the Room of Threads, the weaver paused mid-weave.
Its many eyes blinked.
"…They're not breaking the locks," it said.
"They're undoing them."
Behind it, the crowned figure leaned forward.
Its lips curved.
"Interesting," it murmured.
Then smiled wider.
"Let's make the third one personal."