Aarav didn't remember walking back.
He remembered falling.
Down corridors that bent the wrong way. Past students who didn't speak. Through doors that whispered his name.
When he reached his room, the lights wouldn't turn on. The shadows welcomed him like old friends.
He collapsed onto his mattress, still dressed, still trembling.
And the moment his eyes closed, they came.
The memories.
They didn't return like a story.
They returned like blood.
Thick. Warm. Unstoppable.
His childhood.
Not the version he remembered — the dusty windows, his father hunched over broken watches, his mother whispering to the gods.
But the other version.
The forbidden one.
A candlelit room beneath their house in Varsha.
Chalk symbols scrawled across the floor.
Voices chanting in a language that twisted the air.
He saw himself, five years old, led by the hand — not gently, but deliberately — down a narrow staircase that no longer exists.
He saw his parents kneeling.
Not broken. Not defeated.
Devout.
And in front of them, a figure in crimson robes — the same mask that Maya had worn.
The same voice.
"The boy is ready. Let him see."
They had cut his palm with a silver blade.
Not deep. Just enough.
He remembered the sting.
The way his blood hissed when it hit the symbol on the floor — the serpent coiled into itself.
And then, he remembered the cold entering his bones.
The way the world tilted.
The voice in his head that wasn't his, but fit too perfectly.
"You belong to the Helix. You are the axis. You are the door."
Aarav woke gasping.
He was drenched in sweat. The sheets tangled around him like vines.
But it wasn't fear anymore.
It was truth.
He hadn't joined the Order.
He'd never left it.