The echoform's grip clamped down on Coren's wrist—unyielding, cold, not quite physical, but with a pressure that screamed of memory and meaning. It looked like him, but worn thin—like a reflection scrawled on parchment, the edges smudged and twitching. The Spiral on Coren's skin flared, and time staggered.
Then the world slipped sideways.
He didn't fall. He was pulled. Not into darkness, but into something worse—silence.
The archivum vanished. Viremore, the streets, the weight of stone and time—it all dropped away like a torn page.
Now he stood in a space that pulsed like thought: vast, shifting, filled with faint whispers that never formed words. Shapes formed and dissolved in the distance—books, perhaps. Maybe tombstones. Or both. The sky above bled slow spirals of gray.
The echoform stood across from him, calmer now, as though it had stepped out of a fevered memory into something colder.
"You don't remember," it said—not a question. Its voice matched his, but it was tinted with sadness. "You gave too much. And now even the Spiral is hungry."
"I don't want your riddles," Coren snapped. "Who are you?"
"I'm you. The part that stayed behind. The part that was left behind." Its ink-blurred hand lifted slowly, pointing at Coren's chest. "You left yourself here. Now you've come to reclaim what was lost… but not without cost."
Coren's breath came shallow. "Why now? Why is this happening?"
"Because you've started to scratch beneath the wax and varnish. You've started reading again."
He tried to take a step back, but the space around him resisted. Like the Spiral didn't want him to retreat.
"You were part of something, once," the echoform went on. "Something old. Bound not by blood or law, but by truths carved into silence."
It stretched out its hand again. This time, it held something—a scroll, long and blank. White, save for the faintest shimmer in the grain of the paper. A shimmer like the Spiral's light.
"You want to know who you were? What you were part of?" the echoform said. "Then take it. Take back your right to remember."
Coren reached out—hesitant, hand trembling. As his fingertips brushed the scroll, the Spiral on his wrist bloomed with sudden heat. His skin cracked. Lines of ink—black, fine, ancient—unfurled across his arm, like vines wrapping around bone.
He dropped to his knees, gasping. The Spiral whispered. One word, over and over, in a tongue older than any he'd studied—a word he could not write, only feel, like the echo of a forgotten vow.
The void twisted again.
---
He landed hard on cold stone.
The real world returned in a jolt—the scent of dust and old vellum, the flicker of torchlight. The echoform was gone. Only the Spiral remained, pulsing now in slow, thoughtful rhythm.
But something was different.
Coren looked at his hand. The ink that had run across his skin had faded, but a single symbol remained: a spiral enclosed in an open eye.
Not just a mark.
A seal.
The scroll—still in his grasp—had changed. Its once-blank surface now bore a single line:
> "Only those who forget may find."
His breath caught. Not because he understood—but because something inside him did.
---
The archive shelves groaned.
Books shifted, whispered, moved on their own. One dropped from a high shelf and landed open near his feet. He picked it up instinctively. Its cover was unmarked, but the pages inside rippled with diagrams—wheels within wheels, broken circles, names scratched out by red ink.
And near the spine, etched in cramped handwriting:
> "Viremore was built atop the buried Spiral. It leaks into many many thoughts. Memory. Names. Those who live long enough in this city forget not just who they are, but what they're meant to protect."
The hairs on Coren's neck stood up.
He turned the page. More sketches—one showed a figure with no face, surrounded by candles, offering a name into a black mirror.
Another diagram caught his eye: a quill made of bone, dipped into a basin of ink labeled simply "Truth."
He sat back, thinking hard. Ink. Memory. The Spiral didn't give power freely—it demanded sacrifice. A name for a secret. A secret for a weapon.
But what secret had he just paid?
He looked at his hand again. The seal on his skin pulsed faintly. And for just a second, in the periphery of his vision, he saw his own reflection staring back at him from the ink on the page.
Not the man he was now—but the one he might have been. With colder eyes. With blood on his collar.
---
Whispers from Below
Somewhere beneath the archive, a low scraping echoed up through the stone—like something stirring in response to the Spiral's activation.
Coren rose, gathering the book. The Spiral pulled at him—not violently, but insistently. As if it was guiding him.
There was more here. He could feel it. Not knowledge. Not answers. But layers. Shelves of forgotten truths that had begun to unravel the moment he stepped through that hidden door behind the wine cellar in the merchant's district.
He followed the Spiral's pull.
Behind a far bookshelf, nearly hidden, a slab of wall bore the faint outline of a doorway.
Not a door.
A seal.
Its borders were etched with the same spiral-in-eye design now burned into his skin. It responded to his presence. As he neared it, the lines glowed faintly—white, like paper catching flame.
A voice—not his own, not the echoform's—spoke in his mind. Clear. Measured.
> "You are unbound. Therefore, you may descend."
The seal split down the middle.
Beyond it: a narrow stairwell, winding down into a darkness that pulsed like a heartbeat.
--
Hey hey hey! Author again! What do you all think of the story progression so far?? If you like it be sure to save this in your library ! It would be motivating to me.