The lattice beneath them no longer felt like wood or stone. It throbbed with a hidden pulse, vibrating in rhythms Viridion couldn't yet name—an ancient sequence encoded by the Engine itself.
Oriven's eyes never left the shifting path ahead, his voice calm but weighted.
"The feather's fragments are more than seeds—they're echoes of unfinished truths. Each one carries a fragment of your paradox, waiting to root."
Viridion swallowed hard, feeling the hum thrumming through his veins. The air was thick, as if reality itself hesitated around them.
"The Engine moves in laws," Oriven continued, "laws that govern paradoxes as surely as gravity governs stars. You've glimpsed but a few."
He paused, counting off on his fingers.
"Law One: The Law of Infinite Approach — no moment completes, no step fully lands. Every arrival births another waiting."
"Law Two: The Law of Unfinished Truths — some truths cannot resolve, because to resolve them would undo existence itself."
"Law Three: The Law of Folded Spaces — reality bends so tightly it forgets direction, folding time and space into Möbius spirals."
Viridion's head spun, but the laws echoed deep inside him, resonating with the fractured steps he'd seen on the stairwell.
Suddenly, the lattice shuddered and folded. The world twisted, and the sky was beneath their feet The fog curled like a serpent, hiding shapes that twisted and shimmered at the edges of sight.
Ahead, a spiral tower carved from the mountain rose—its steps fracturing into infinite smaller ones as they looked closer.
At its base stood two figures cloaked in shifting ember and glass. Their faces were blurred, flickering between possibilities, eyes glowing like dying stars.
"The Emberglass Twins," Oriven said quietly, voice like a shadow. "High-dimensional assassins who don't see your present self, but all your possible futures."
Viridion's breath caught. The whispered legends—the killers who 'skip' you to an alternate death, erasing your true path before it begins.
One twin stepped forward, voice fracturing like shattered glass. "You walk a fractal nightmare, boy. Each choice is a snare; each path a trap."
Viridion's hand went to his Segment Blade, but Oriven's steady grip held him back. "They don't fight like you or I. They fight by erasing possibility."
The ground fractured beneath them. Viridion saw reflections—himself a dozen times over—each version wounded, lost, or broken in impossible ways.
"Wrong turn five steps ago," whispered a fractured reflection—his own face, older, worn, regretful.
The twins laughed, a sound like fracturing time itself. "You think to escape? You're already lost in the loop."
Viridion felt the pull of infinite possible deaths, a suffocating fog of endings not his own. Yet Oriven's voice cut through the chaos:
"Remember the Law of Infinite Approach. You don't arrive. You deny the arrival. They hunt your completion, but you must exist between the steps."
Gathering his will, Viridion focused not on the Twins themselves, but on the strands of possibility stretching between them and his fractured reflections. Each thread hummed with a life of its own, twisting and writhing like serpents of light and shadow.
He raised the Segment Blade, feeling the hum of the Engine resonate along its edge. Instead of swinging at the Twins, he cut through the gaps between moments, slashing at the invisible fibers that tethered his alternate selves. With every strike, the threads frayed, snapping like frozen lightning, severing the connections that threatened to erase him before he could exist.
Time shivered. Alternate Viridions wavered—some flickered out of existence, others twisted and recoiled, their echoes echoing in the lattice like hollow wind through broken stone. The Twins staggered, their forms flickering, unable to maintain coherence across the fractured timelines.
A sliver of pure light arced from Viridion's blade, slicing cleanly through the tangled web. Sparks of possibility burst outward, scattering into the fog like fireflies fleeing a storm.
The Emberglass Twins reeled, their laughter cracking and distorting as their control over the futures faltered. Reality itself seemed to sigh, the lattice beneath them steadying as the threads collapsed.
At last, the Twins' forms broke apart entirely, dissolving into embers and shards of glass that vanished into the swirling mist. Silence reclaimed the spiral tower, broken only by Viridion's ragged breathing.
Everything from "Breath ragged, Viridion looked up"
Oriven's eyes held a fierce calm. "They are the first true test. The Emberglass Twins don't just kill bodies—they kill futures. Your path will be littered with such shadows."
Viridion's gaze caught something beyond the spiraling fog—a pair of copper eyes glinting knowingly.
The Engine's pulse was growing stronger. The dance of paradox had only just begun.