The Spiral was speaking in ways it was never meant to.
Not in scripture.
Not in tongues.
But in deaths.
In the city of Inkborn Scholars, the first fatal whisper came at dawn.
A storyteller named Velra had been mid-tale, her audience rapt, her voice weaving an epic of gods and rebellion. Then she stopped.
Eyes wide.
Mouth trembling.
She spoke only one sentence:
> "I die at the next word."
And when she uttered that word—hope—her lungs collapsed into dust. Her throat unraveled into narrative thread. Her body dissolved into unfinished sentences that scattered on the wind like torn parchment.
By nightfall, eleven storytellers were dead.
Not murdered.
Unwritten.
—
Nyx stood over the eleventh corpse with her blade unsheathed and breath stilling in her throat.
She did not fear death. She had walked with it too often.
But this was not death.
This was reversal.
"Someone is weaponizing narrative itself," she murmured to the wind. "Turning words into blades."
