Darkness didn't come all at once—it seeped in from the corners.
The moment the creature entered her, Lynchie felt her senses fold inward. Sound became distant. Light collapsed into motes. Even her thoughts were muffled, like words spoken underwater. But there was a pull—not into death, but into something... other.
A place that did not belong to the academy, nor the heavens, nor the waking world.
It was a realm between pulses, where breath stopped and resumed in the space of non-time.
In that pocket of stillness, Lynchie stood—conscious, unmoving, her body not her own.
All around her, black glass stretched infinitely, the surface covered in shifting constellations. They flickered not with light, but with intent, as though each star were a watching eye or a sealed mouth preparing to speak.
Then the glass broke beneath her.
She fell—not downward, but through.
Through memory.
Through soul.
Through herself.
---
She was six, hiding behind a cracked pillar in the western chapel of Hollowmont's lower city, clutching a stolen mana blossom as her mother's voice—soft, distant, unknowable—spoke from beyond the veil of memory.
A sudden pulse, and—
She was nine, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the ceremonial mirror during one of Father JohnRey's rare returns. Her brother had smiled at her like he knew something she didn't. "You've got it too, you know," he had whispered. "But not yet. Not like this."
And then—
She was fifteen, running from the arc-glass hallways of the academy's east wing, chased by whispers she couldn't unhear, by glances that grew heavier by the day.
They all saw it.
Something about her didn't fit the world they understood.
---
She landed—finally, suddenly—on a still, dark platform of stone.
Before her stood a shape like a man, but wrong.
Not malicious, not twisted, but alien.
Its body was humanoid only in approximation, made of folded shadow and veined light, shaped like a wound dressed in silk. At its core glowed a faint spiral—a copy of the glyph from earlier. The Spiral of the Unmade Halo.
"You are not the first," it said. The voice rang directly in her spine, unspoken yet overwhelming. "But you may be the only one who doesn't shatter."
"I don't understand," Lynchie said, her voice small, human, afraid.
"You will," the creature said. "The fracture is not yours, but the recognition is. The Glyph has chosen."
Lynchie took a step back. "Why me?"
"Because your name was never meant to be mortal. Because the blood in your bones stirs when the stars blink. Because the breath you hold belongs to a world that has forgotten how to dream."
It extended a hand.
"You are incomplete. So am I. Together, we are something dangerous."
---
A gasp ripped from her throat.
Reality surged back like a tide, flooding her senses.
She lay on the cold grass of the observatory, her uniform torn, her fingers twitching. A golden spiral shimmered faintly on her chest, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Around her, students were shouting. Professors cast wards. And Salareth—his face paler than she had ever seen it—stood in silence.
"She's bonded," he whispered. "But not to any beast... not to any glyph..."
He looked to the cracked dome above.
"She's bonded to a memory the heavens tried to erase."
Lynchie sat up, gasping.
And in her mind, the spiral turned again.
Somewhere, deep within her, something ancient had opened its eye—and it would not close again.