[POV: Ezekiel]
It wasn't a staircase.
Not really.
It was a vertebrae.
Massive. White. Each step wider than his shoulders.
Curving downward into a shaft lit only by runes that responded to memory.
The moment he stepped onto the first vertebra, the silence changed.
It didn't resist him.
It acknowledged him.
---
He sat on the third step.
Breathing.
For the first time since the Pale Garden—
> He thought without pain.
No static.
No fracturing.
No bleeding logic.
Just… thought.
---
> "I'm not dead."
It sounded absurd in his head.
Not because it wasn't true.
Because he wasn't sure he still counted as alive in the way people meant it.
He looked at his hand.
Flexed his fingers.
Spoke aloud, softly.
> "Witness."
The sound didn't shake the vault.
It just stayed there.
Present.
Real.
> "That's all I said. One word."
He looked down the spiral of bone and stone.
A voice—his own—rose in his chest, slow and cautious.
> "But it was the right one."
A pause.
Then:
> "Why?"
---
The air shifted.
The glyphs in the bone did not answer.
But his body didn't resist the question.
He could ask now.
He could speak now.
And every breath didn't feel like a negotiation with a sleeping god.
---
He stood.
Walked to the next step.
And said, just to say it:
> "My name is Ezekiel von Quinsley. Fifth-born. Third prince."
No resistance.
> "I'm not cursed. I'm not a hero."
Still nothing.
> "I saw them die. I didn't stop it. I didn't scream."
Silence, but not judgment.
> "I let it in. I let him in."
He touched his chest.
Light flared under his fingers.
Azrael pulsed once—cold, silent recognition.
Ezekiel whispered:
> "And he's still here."
---
Another step.
Then another.
The further he went, the more his voice felt like his own.
No cracking.
No snapping glass behind the tongue.
He passed the seventh vertebra.
The glyphs beneath it hummed.
Not alarm.
Not rejection.
Alignment.
---
> "They wanted me to disappear."
He said it calmly.
> "So I'll leave."
He paused.
Then—smiled.
It was small. Brief.
Not joy.
Not irony.
Just… control.
> "But I'll do it loud."
---
[POV: Ilhera – Close now]
She felt it.
The moment he passed the seventh step, her breath caught.
> He's talking again.
She picked up her pace.
The palace was closing stairwells—trying to force her into dead ends.
It wouldn't work.
He was no longer leaking through the cracks.
He was reshaping the stairwell around himself.
> "Speak carefully, Ezekiel," she muttered.
"That place doesn't forget its listeners."