Lynchie followed the guide's silver-plated robes up the endless stairwell, its edges vanishing into floating terraces strung with glass bells that chimed without wind. Each step rose in an arc, defying physics and gravity, veiled in silken fog.
A hush had settled over her. Behind her, the lesser initiates still whispered—fifty voices from fifty worlds murmuring in fractured languages—but up here, above the third tier of the academy's southern wing, sound seemed to collapse. Not silence, exactly. More like pressure: a presence pressing inward.
The stairway coiled around a translucent column. Lynchie squinted. Was that water? No. Dreams.
Within the column, figures drifted—slumbering students wrapped in light, floating upward like seeds drawn into a tree's canopy. Their faces were strangely peaceful, save for the occasional flicker across their brows: distress, joy, ecstasy. As if each was living another life in real time.
"What is this place?" she whispered.
The guide paused on the step above and looked down. His face was half-hidden under a veil of embroidered silver lace, but his voice emerged warm. "The Conflux Spire. Memory and Dream entwine here. New initiates must pass it before entering their True Hall."
Lynchie felt something stir inside her—a prickle along her shoulder blades, a tightening behind her eyes.
"Does it... choose something about us?"
"Not chooses," the guide said, beginning to walk again. "Reveals."
As they climbed, the dream-channel beside her pulsed brighter. Faces she didn't know flashed past. Then, for a moment, her own reflection appeared—not her now, but older. Taller. Cloaked in radiant ash, a crown of black-gold horns suspended above her brow. She blinked.
Gone.
She stumbled, breath catching. The guide's hand snapped out to steady her. "You saw it, didn't you?"
She nodded slowly.
He withdrew his hand. "Then you're not just passing through. The stair remembers you."
She didn't understand. Not fully. But something behind her ribs felt known now, like a puzzle piece clicked into place.
When they reached the summit, the fog parted, revealing a marble archway encrusted in opal and twilight moss. Beyond it sprawled a courtyard like a shallow bowl filled with violet light. Floating platforms revolved around a luminous central orb—the Eye of Induction.
A shadow stepped forward.
He was tall, sharply dressed in robes of navy and dusk-violet trimmed in amber thread. A brooch on his collar bore the sigil of House Halcyon: a seven-pointed feather circled by a broken ring.
"Lynchia Fuentes Regino. We've been expecting you."
The voice sent a tremor down her spine.
Her new mentor.
And somewhere on the outer edge of the observation decks, hidden behind a glyph-veiled dome, a figure stirred. Cloaked in reflection, it watched her with a thousand eyes—not hostile, not kind. Curious.
It whispered across planes to someone unseen:
"She remembers the horned crown. The spiral has begun to turn."