"Created by students who wished to blame some sort of ill fault to the Academy that was once built on love and power?"
Love and power.
Not wickedness and suffering but love and power.
The reframing makes me think about what I saw with Gabriel when we floated on that makeshift log raft. The waters Professor Eternalis claims didn't exist but definitely did, where memories surfaced of academies split like twins, of our parents speaking of creation rather than inheritance.
There's a page missing from this story.
Multiple pages, probably. Entire chapters that would explain how love became wickedness, how creation became destruction, how Elena's jealousy transformed from sibling rivalry into realm-shattering betrayal.
But how are we going to discover the truth?
The question loops through thoughts that are becoming increasingly sluggish. My eyelids feel weighted, each blink lasting longer than the last. The exhaustion isn't natural—I've pushed through physical tiredness before, operated on minutes of sleep during the trials.
This is different. Heavier. More insistent.
Like the realm itself wants me unconscious.
I try to keep walking while using my free hand to rub at my eyes, trying to clear vision that keeps multiplying. The stairs aren't just spiraling now—they're fragmenting. I seethree different versions of our path, each one equally real but impossibly different.
"Are you okay?" Atticus asks, but his voice sounds distant.
Not quiet—distant.
As if he's speaking from much further away than the hand still clasped in mine would suggest. The disconnect between physical proximity and auditory distance makes my stomach turn with vertigo I can't explain.
I don't want to look back, don't want to trouble him or the others with what might just be my own failing. My eyes fight to focus on Professor Eternalis, who seems to be getting further ahead despite maintaining the same pace.
Or is she maintaining the same pace?
The stairs feel endless.
Each step should bring us closer to whatever destination she's leading us toward, but instead we seem to be climbing through infinity itself. The spiral tightens and loosens without pattern, sometimes so wide I can't see the central column, sometimes so tight I should be able to touch it but can't because my arm won't extend that far even though it should be able to reach.
I try to answer Atticus, to reassure him that I'm fine even though I'm increasingly certain I'm not.
But now I'm seeing three versions of everything.
The stairs we're on, solid beneath our feet but increasingly uncertain in their connection to anything else. Stairs that float free in space that shouldn't exist within building interior, each step a leap of faith that gravity will work as expected. Stairs that invert, running along ceilings that are also floors, where up and down become matters of perspective rather than physics.
All three versions exist simultaneously, overlapping in ways that make my eyes water trying to track which one is real.
Maybe they all are.
Or none are.
I take a step forward, trusting muscle memory more than vision to find the next stair.
My foot finds nothing.
The sensation of falling forward is immediate and inevitable. My body pitches into space that should contain solid surface but doesn't, or does but not where I expected it, or exists in a dimension slightly to the left of where I'm trying to step.
Exhaustion pulls me under before I can even scream.
Not the exhaustion of overexertion but something more fundamental. Like consciousness itself has become too heavy to maintain, thoughts too dense to process, reality too complex to parse into understandable components.
My eyes roll back, that last voluntary movement before everything becomes involuntary.
