The spiral pulsed again.
Not visibly. Not to Merel.
But Ivar felt it in his skull—the way a scent triggers memory, or a single crack in silence opens an entire scream.
He crouched. Pressed his palm flat to the manhole's metal crust. The rust was thick with age, but the heat beneath it was fresh.
He expected Lysa to speak again, to feed him another cryptic phrase. She didn't.
Instead, she crouched opposite him, mirroring his position. The shadows caught the curve of her face, soft where her body was not. There was something in her eyes now that hadn't been there in the Bone Archive. Not wonder. Not fear.
Recognition.
"I saw that mark once before," she said.
He didn't look up.
"Where?"
"Under a bed of dead rats." She licked her chapped lip absently. "They were arranged in a spiral. Still warm. Someone—or something—had made them breathe after the lungs were gone."
He met her gaze. "You?"
"No." She paused. "But I think… I understood how."
The weight of that admission lingered in the air like smoke. She didn't explain. And Ivar didn't ask. Her kind of knowledge—creator-born, shapeless—wasn't something he could dissect. It had to be lived into.
A shiver passed through the iron beneath them.
Not from the city. From below.
And then—a voice.
Not spoken. Not shouted. But remembered.
A child's whisper, inside his skull.
"He's looking. He's always looking. The one who can't close his eye."
Ivar jerked upright. The whisper left no echo.
Merel noticed. "What was that?"
"I don't know."
But Lysa said nothing.
She was already watching the next spiral.
It was forming—not on the ground, but on a wall behind them—as mildew blooming in precise curvature. Each line thickened, green and gray, growing like moss guided by memory.
More children were watching now.
Not from the street. From the gutters. From between rusted bars. From under the skirts of the city.
Eyes reflected light like glass teeth. They didn't blink. They didn't speak. But they knew. These were the forgotten ones—the Threadlings. Ghosts the city hadn't bothered burying.
One child, skeletal-thin and ash-streaked, met Lysa's gaze.
Then vanished.
She let out a sound. Not a gasp. Not a sigh. Just a quiet exhale like she'd swallowed her own voice.
Ivar stepped forward. The spirals were everywhere now. Not obvious. But present. Inked into peeling signage. Etched into dried bloodstains on a stone pillar. Carved into the side of a pigeon's broken wing.
Eelgrave wasn't just broadcasting him.
It was summoning.
"It's not a warning," Merel said again, frowning. "It's a path."
"No," Ivar said softly. "It's a mirror."
That stopped her.
He turned to her fully for the first time since the collapse. "The city's reflecting what it sees. Me. The mark. The spiral. But it isn't showing people what I am. It's showing me what the city has become."
"And what is that?" she asked.
He pointed down.
"Unhealed."
They pried the manhole open just as rain began to fall in earnest. Not heavy—Eelgrave never poured—but a soaking drizzle that crept into cloth and bone. Lysa went first, barefoot, fearless. She dropped like she'd done it before. Ivar followed. Merel hesitated, then cursed and went after.
The underground wasn't a tunnel.
It was a wound.
No walls. Just the sense of passage. Drips echoed not because of acoustics, but because of distance that couldn't be measured. Roots hung like tendons from the ceiling. Pipes bled rust down cracked concrete ribs. Everything here stank—not of decay, but of remembered life. Like the place had once tried to be alive and failed.
The spirals continued.
On brick. On bone. In scratches left in the dirt. Lysa moved without hesitation. Ivar followed. Merel muttered under her breath but kept her pace.
They came to a junction—four ways branching into darker hollows. One of the spirals glowed faintly. Bioluminescent moss shaped in perfect curvature. A child's lullaby echoed from the left-most tunnel.
Then stopped.
Ivar moved toward it.
"No," Lysa said, suddenly sharp.
He stopped.
"I know that song," she said. "And I know who's singing it."
Silence again.
Merel looked between them. "Who?"
Lysa didn't respond.
Instead, she knelt.
Scraped something from the tunnel floor. Bone fragments. Small. Child-sized.
"They tried to call it back," she said.
"What?"
"The thing in the spiral." Her eyes were distant. "But it doesn't answer. Not to them. Only to us."
Ivar swallowed.
Not because of the bones.
Because of what he saw behind them.
A mural.
Half-buried. Half-rotted. But clear enough.
Children—drawn in charcoal and pigment—circling a black spiral that stood in place of a sun. No faces. Just holes. Mouths gaping.
And at the center of the spiral…
A figure.
Not a god. Not a beast.
A boy.
With a single white pupil spiraling like a drain.
Ivar felt his stomach turn cold.
Lysa touched the mural with her fingers, as if brushing dust off a grave.
"I thought it was a warning too," she whispered. "Back then."
He said nothing. Couldn't.
The spiral behind her began to shift.
Not move. Not glow.
It… rearranged.
As if responding to her touch.
As if answering.
The stone behind it began to breathe.
No—no, not breathe. Open.
A crack. Just wide enough.
Ivar stepped forward, instinct tightening behind his ribs.
Merel raised her weapon. "Ivar—"
He waved her off. "It wants us to follow."
"No. It wants to see what you'll do."
Same thing, he almost said.
But then Lysa did something he didn't expect.
She turned to him. Really looked.
And asked, "If you go through… will you still be you?"
He didn't answer.
Not because he didn't know.
But because the question had never occurred to him before.