The Citadel was not built.
It grew.
Beneath the marrow-haze sky, the Bone Citadel pulsed in stillness—its spires curved like femurs wrenched skyward, its gates jawbones fossilized mid-scream. The wind carried the hum of blood through latticed bone channels, a low drone that never stopped, never relented. Every breath of the city stank of iron and memory.
Mirell Thass stood barefoot on the rib-bridge leading into the inner sanctum. The marrow beneath her feet was warm. It had started breathing again.
She didn't have much time.
The glyph under her skin pulsed—just once. A warning. Her body tensed. Her stolen Nexus organ—the Thirteenth Spiral, if the forbidden records were true—was awake and aware. She felt it chewing through her upper spine like a nested parasite trying to unfurl.
She clutched her cloak tighter. It was slick with Vitae-stains from the lab. Still fresh.
Still warm.
Still hers.
She hadn't meant to kill Master Luthien.
But it had spoken.The glyph.The one she carved by instinct, not by rite.
She could still hear it whispering. Not in words, but in breath—a sound shaped like meaning.
Nyss... Kar... Zath... Jhun.
Her own voice trembled in her throat as she replayed the sounds. Four syllables of command. The air around her had changed when she spoke them. Not magic. Not power. Something worse.
Recognition.
Something had heard her. Something buried too deep in the marrow-shelves to have a name.
Mirell shook it off. She reached the Gate of the Inner Ossuary. The guard posted there—a bonewrought creature, half-man, half-grafted vertebrae—stepped forward, halberd carved from its own femur.
"Thass," it rasped. "You were not called."
She didn't stop walking.
The guard moved to block her. She raised her left hand—and let the glyph shine.
No spell. No gesture. No chant.
The glyph emerged, rising like steam through the skin of her palm. Four interlocking lines: one spiral, one fang, one curve, one loop. It was alive. It moved slightly with each breath she took.
The bonewrought staggered.
Then it knelt.
Its halberd dropped to the floor with a hollow clang.
"Forgive me," it whispered, and bowed its skull until a crack split the dome.
Mirell stepped over it and entered the ossuary.
She passed through corridors lined with fossil-thrones—each bearing the whispering remains of past Vitaurgist Wardens. Bone dust clung to her like ash. The deeper she went, the more the Citadel remembered her.
She was leaving. It could feel it.
And it did not like that.
As she approached the final chamber, the marrow-lights dimmed. Shadows lengthened unnaturally—no flame, no wind. Just movement. She wasn't alone.
Reiss?
The thought came unbidden.
Her twin brother had vanished weeks ago, swallowed by a Vault deeper than any allowed. They said he fell in battle. But Mirell knew him. If he was dead, the Citadel would have sung.
Instead, it had gone silent.
She reached the Ritual Hollow. The floor was carved with Concord Bone, the kind that grew in spiral lattice when soaked in Lucid Vitae. She knew the path. She had walked it in dreams.
The Nexus housing chamber was in the center—filled with scrolls, glyph-panes, and pulsing organs kept alive by pipes feeding in fresh blood.
There, floating above a rune-soaked altar, was the Thirteenth Spiral.
Her Spiral.
It rotated in the air like a conch shell made of bone and light, veins wrapped around it like serpents. It pulsed in rhythm with her breath. It was listening.
She stepped forward, knees shaking. Her hand lifted toward it.
Don't.The thought was not hers.
She stopped mid-reach.
This is not the first hand you've worn.
Mirell's eyes widened. Her fingers curled involuntarily. Her muscles spasmed, just once—enough to make her stagger back.
The Spiral dropped from its hovering position and latched into her chest like a wasp sting. She screamed—no words, only marrow-deep sound. Her spine arched, her teeth split, and for a moment she saw.
Cities that sang.Mountains that bled.A cathedral built from writhing hands.The name.The first name.
Then—silence.
The pain stopped.
The Spiral was inside her now.
Not implanted. Integrated.
She collapsed on the bone floor, sweat and blood mingling. Her eyes flicked to the threshold.
She wasn't alone anymore.
Three figures stood in the doorway.
Tall. Cloaked. Faces hidden beneath stitched masks made of others' skin. On their chests pulsed matching glyphs—older versions of her own.
The Heralds.
Oran Vale's children.
"You've heard it," one said.
Mirell staggered to her feet, the Spiral burning in her chest.
"I wrote it," she hissed.
And then she ran—through the ossuary, past the kneeling guard now reduced to shards, into the marrow-halls where the Citadel's memory would either shield her… or bury her alive.
Behind her, the Heralds did not chase.
They waited.
The deeper she went, the more the Citadel remembered her.
It wasn't a metaphor.
The walls began to hum—low and guttural, like a throat clearing itself. Veins of pale marrow-light pulsed with rhythm. Not her rhythm. Something older. Something watching. She passed a corridor where one of the spinal lanterns blinked, as if in thought, then stayed lit.
That meant it recognized her as someone else.
Mirell clenched her fists.
It's too soon. You're not ready.The Spiral's voice again—not words, but concepts pressed into nerve endings. It wasn't cruel. It wasn't kind. It simply existed, and it had expectations.
She reached the Scribe Chamber, where once-venerated Vitaurgists had bled their glyphs onto scroll-skins. The skins weren't parchment—they were dermis, stretched flat and tattooed in ink and memory. Rows of them, hung like drying laundry.
She slowed, turning to one.
Her mother's.
She recognized the pattern—UN'KA-ZATH-KUL, carved in a loop on the spine-skin. Obedience. Flesh. Bone.
Her mother had believed. She had bled freely for the Theocracy.
And died a nameless husk after refusing to let her children be bound.
Mirell felt her jaw lock. Her blood quickened. Her left arm ached.
Something inside the Spiral twitched.
The air grew heavier as she reached the outer wall.
She found herself facing the Echo Mirror—a sheet of blood-glass that didn't reflect the body, only the Vitae Signature of the soul.
She stepped in front of it.
The glass flickered—once, then steadied.
A pale, tangled skeleton stared back.
Her bones looked thinner. Hollowed. The glyphs beneath her skin were glowing faintly, coiling through her veins like worms of light.
Worse than that, something stood behind her reflection.
Tall. Bone-white. Eyes hollow. Its fingers were fused glyphs.
Reiss?
No.
Not anymore.
She spun—nothing there.
Of course not. The Echo Mirror didn't reflect the present. It reflected the inevitable.
Somewhere above, a tolling echoed through the Citadel.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Not the bell of mourning. Not the bell of ascension.
The Hunting Bell.
She ran.
Mirell pushed through the ossuary's narrow throat—a descending staircase built from spine segments—and emerged in the Womb Vault. The air here was thick with formaldehyde and stillbirth. Rows of suspended organs pulsed in glass tubes, each floating in Vitae, twitching against tubes and bone-rings.
Failed Nexus prototypes.
Some blinked.
Others wept.
One banged against its glass as she passed, shrieking in a mouthless silence.
She didn't look at them. She remembered this vault from her early years: the trials, the grafting, the children who didn't wake up.
She hadn't come through that process.
She'd been born with something missing.
And now… she was full of something else.
The Spiral burned inside her—like a brand twisting across her nerves.
A whisper surged through her throat again, unbidden:
Jhun... Drev... Kar...
She bit her tongue.
Too late.
The glyph flared under her ribs, and the air shimmered.
Something entered the vault behind her.
It made no sound. No breathing. No footfall.
But the marrow-lights dimmed, recoiling.
Mirell turned slowly.
A Herald stood just inside the vault's arch.
Not cloaked now. Its mask gone.
Its face was made of faces.
Pale, stitched expressions like melted wax, layered one over another. None moved, but all stared. Its eyes were black wells of inked bone. Glyphs danced across its forehead like flesh-borne insects.
It didn't speak.
It simply pointed.
To her.
Mirell stepped backward, heart thudding.
"You're too early," she whispered. "The glyph isn't complete."
The Herald didn't move.
But the Nexus pods began to shiver. One burst. A tube cracked. The organ inside—a malformed Lumen-Eye—slithered free and crawled across the bone tiles, dragging trails of bloody light.
It stopped at the Herald's feet.
The Herald stepped over it.
Mirell reached into her pouch and pulled the last Bone Key. Her way out.
She plunged it into the ossuary's marrow seam and whispered the escape command:
KUL'DREV.
Unbind structure.
The wall behind her split, revealing the bloodslide—an emergency escape shaft that led into the outer layers of the Citadel.
The Herald lunged.
Mirell jumped.
The slide was not a straight drop. It twisted like intestines. Bone spikes jutted from the edges. She ducked, rolled, twisted her limbs to avoid being gutted.
Somewhere behind, the Herald followed—no footsteps, just the sound of bones unfolding.
The Spiral sang in her ears now. Not whispering. Singing.
We are many. We remember. You will not leave alone.
Mirell slammed into the bottom of the shaft and landed in the Drain Hollow—the pit below the Bone Citadel used to flush experimental residue into the Flesh Channel that ran to the outer provinces.
She was slick with blood.
The walls writhed.
But she was out.
Above her, she heard the Herald screech—not in anger, not in pain.
In joy.
It had marked her.
She felt it. A second glyph now etched into her back.
She couldn't read it, but she felt what it said:
Belongs to the Spiral.
Mirell staggered into the crimson fog outside the citadel. Beyond the Drain Hollow, the Bone Forest writhed in silence.
She was alone.
No, not alone.
She turned slightly, pressing a hand to her chest.
The Spiral had settled.
It pulsed like a heartbeat.
And whispered in her mind:
The world has forgotten what it is to bleed with purpose. Let me remind them.
She didn't answer.
She couldn't.
Because somewhere in that whisper, she heard her brother's voice.