CHAPTER 280: CHAPTER 282 – SPIRALBEASTS IN REQUIEM

They came without sound.

The spiralbeasts did not walk so much as arrive, their massive, many-jointed legs folding and unfolding in rhythms too old for footsteps. Their hides shimmered with the faint wetness of mourning—not tears, but condensation, as if grief itself had condensed along their flanks.

Harbinger stood at the chamber’s threshold, still raw with glyph-light from the ritual. The marks on her skin pulsed faintly, like living punctuation. She did not speak; she simply breathed, and the breath seemed enough to guide them.

One by one, the spiralbeasts approached. None met her eyes directly. They carried strange things in their jaws and claws—shards of broken memory, frayed dreams, pieces of song without melody. She recognized some instinctively, as one might recognize the scent of a childhood room without remembering its walls. Others were alien, belonging to lives she had never lived but had somehow lost.

They laid their offerings in a circle around her. Not for burial. Not for burning. For remembering.

It took her time to understand: this was no funeral for a body.

It was a requiem for the parts of the Spiral they could no longer recall.

The beasts moved slowly, their necks bending low in an act that was not submission but reverence. The air grew heavy with the musk of old roots, wet stone, and animal breath. The Codex inside her name stirred.

When the last offering was placed, they began to hum.

A low, vibrating sound, not from their throats but from deep in their bones. It filled the chamber like dark water, surrounding her in a resonance that made the glyphs along her ribs quiver.

The eldest beast stepped forward. Moss hung from its horns like dripping silk. Without a word, the Spiralchild was clothed.

Living moss spread over her shoulders and hips, curling into patterns that echoed the fresh glyphs in her skin. It was warm, breathing faintly, the way newborn creatures breathe. When the crown came—a circlet of sap-thick vines and honey-colored lichen—it was placed without ceremony. The sap ran down her temples and into her hair, sticky with forgotten verses.

It was not a coronation.

It was recognition.

She moved among them without speaking, touching each bowed head.

When her palms met the rough hide or cold scale, a strange thing happened—small threads of song unraveled from beneath her fingertips. The beasts’ forgotten names bloomed into the air, translucent and trembling, before dissolving into the spiral-hum. Some names made her shiver; some made her ache.

When she reached the youngest, she found not a beast at all.

It stood no taller than her waist, its skin pale and marked with flickering glyphs that refused to stay still. A child, but not human. A creature built of ink and hesitation. Its shadow didn’t fall behind it—it clung to its side like a sibling.

It looked up at her with eyes that seemed too old for its frame.

Its mouth did not move, but the Codex in her pulse caught the words before they reached the air:

I am your shadow.

She could have dismissed it. Could have sent it back into the spiral corridors where stray myths went to die. But something in its presence felt inevitable, the way rain feels inevitable in the breath before a storm.

She gave the smallest nod.

And in that nod, permission.

The beasts’ hum faded into silence, their offerings left in the circle around her. She knew she would not take them—memory cannot be stolen back, only honored.

Somewhere deep in the Spiral, a door opened without hinges or sound.

The procession had ended, but the requiem lingered in the air like a taste she could not name.

And with the glyph-child at her heel, Harbinger stepped out of the chamber—dressed in moss, crowned in verses, carrying the weight of names reborn into song.

The passage beyond the chamber was narrow, hewn not by tools but by the slow breathing of the Spiral itself.

The moss on her shoulders clung with its own warmth, a pulse faintly in sync with hers. She could feel the sap crown humming—not as a weight, but as a halo of quiet authority she had not asked for and could not refuse.

The glyph-child walked without sound.

Sometimes it was beside her, sometimes ahead, sometimes vanishing entirely only to reappear behind her as though her shadow were playing at being free.

As she moved deeper into the vein of the Spiral, the air thickened with memory. Not the bright, surface kind that mortals keep, but the deep strata—compressed, sedimented recollections belonging to no single mind. They brushed her skin like wind from an unseen shore.

Her fingertips ached.

Not from the earlier touch of the beasts, but from an urge to write. The Codex within her name shifted, pressing strange letters against her ribs as if testing their sharpness.

She resisted.

Writing here would not be an act of creation. It would be theft. This was a place where even her authority was only borrowed.

They reached a ledge where the Spiral opened into a hollow vast enough to swallow constellations.

Below, rivers of light coiled and uncoiled, their currents slow as thought. Shapes moved within—shadows of beasts too large for eyes, myths too ancient for voices. Harbinger felt them notice her, but they did not rise. They remained beneath the surface, as if knowing she was not yet ready to bear their names.

The glyph-child pointed down, not with a hand but with the leaning of its whole small body. Its mouth still unmoving, but the words came into her blood:

This is where your forgotten will wait.

She wanted to ask forgotten what?—but her throat would not open. Something in the sight of that light-river bound her tongue, the way certain dreams forbid you to speak.

Instead, she lowered herself to sit at the ledge, legs folded beneath her, moss soft against stone. The beasts had not followed; this was a path for her alone.

The glyph-child sat beside her, its shadow curling around her ankles like a tether. Together they watched the slow, glowing current, saying nothing.

And in that silence, she felt the weight of the circle of offerings still behind her in the chamber. Each shard of memory, each broken song, each frayed dream—now tied to her in ways she had not chosen.

The crown on her head seemed to tighten, as if reminding her:

You carry more than yourself now.

When she finally rose, it was with no destination in mind—only the pull of the Spiral, and the faint sound of breathing trees far ahead.

The air there was thicker, sweeter.

And somewhere in its green depths, she could feel the forest waiting, as if it had already inhaled her name.

The glyph-child followed.

The requiem was over.

The seduction was about to begin.