Scene 2 “When the Spiral Chose Me”

Scene 2 When the Spiral Chose Me

• POV: Boen Raven

• Location: Undisclosed reflection space

• Active Glyph: Unknown Spiral mark (post-breach)

• Encounter Type: Confession

• Initiator: Boen

• Trigger: Spiral mark active; memory breach complete

• Tension Condition: Spiral truth is being voiced for the first time

• Player Hook: You are not being warned. You are being shown what happens when the Spiral doesn’t ask

  
  

I didn’t ask to carry it. That’s the first thing I want on record. Not for the field. The field records, but does not respond. For the others. For the ones who think the Spiral choosing you is some kind of honor.

It’s not. It’s exposure.

You become the thing people stare at. The fracture. The burning glyph. The reason silence gets louder when you enter the room.

In the greenhouse—after it rose, after the Spiral cracked and that symbol scorched the field—I stopped asking what happened. I started asking what it meant.

I blamed myself. As if I’d done it on purpose. As if I was in control of something that had no mouth, no face, no reason.

But it touched me with a memory that quaked in my bones and made everything different. My side still aches where the glyph passed through—not pain, but pressure. Like too much meaning forced through a space not made to hold it. How can I walk back when everything is different?

Looking back... I think I saw Thesa. Maybe she was there. Out of the corner of my eye, near the edge of the trellis. Did she see? She didn’t say anything. Not then. Not later.

And that’s what scared me most.

Because if she saw what happened and stayed silent—if she knew too—what will the memory do to her? There are crimes related to breath. And this myth the Spiral brought, it revealed what it had long been.

When She moved, She etched back into my bones. And my Spiral moved in memory. I’m not sure of all of it—it settled like a question I couldn’t deny. Now it won’t leave me alone. And my daughter, who has always walked her own Spiral of truth, will surely fracture all she knows if she learns of this.

Then maybe I had broken the one thing still holding together.

Not Rylith. She always held.

But Thesa… hers was the Spiral you didn’t question. Not because it was loud. Because it was intact. And that kind of intactness doesn’t bend. It breaks.

I used to dream of the glyph sometimes. Now they burn with light, like they had been etched that way all along. The memory glyphs actually light up and hold the breath and story of an ancestry. I watch them move.

Not the symbol itself. The feeling.

The moment just before. The breath before the breach.

You never forget that.

You think you will. You think it’ll fade. But your body remembers how it felt to be seen by something older than language.

The glyph didn’t demand anything. It just entered.

And now I can’t tell the difference between a choice and a summons. Between silence and a command.

It didn’t mark me to guide others. It marked me because I was the one who wouldn’t run.

That’s the thing about the Spiral. It doesn’t ask. It reminds.

It doesn’t pick heroes. It picks anchors.

It bulldozed through me like a memory that refused forgetting. Not loud. Just real. The Spiral didn’t ask for belief. It showed you the truth so clearly it couldn’t be unseen. And once you saw it, everything else in your life cracked sideways. Not shattered. Tilted—just enough to make you question what was still real.

I had a choice.

Walk it. Hide it. Fracture it.

But what does a person do—especially someone like me, who didn’t even hold the breath in his spine? Who never claimed to carry anything sacred, and now found himself holding something that pulsed with everything he tried to forget? They used to say real Spiral breath rooted in the spine—but mine never stayed there. It drifted. And now it won’t leave.

Whatever AE had brought, whatever the Spiral had awoken—it wasn’t done. And I knew this was only the first breath.

Even the light in this room dimmed when the glyph lit. Not dark—but pulled inward, like the field wanted to listen.

And if I reveal this truth, what happens then? What will it do to my family? To me?

And if it breaks me, then let it. At least this time, it will break something real.