Silence was no longer silence.
In the aftermath of the vault's shattering, every breath Mary drew sounded wrong — too loud, too hollow, as if the air itself no longer knew how to exist without the hum of the memory threads. The walls still bled faint light where glass had melted into the floor. The air tasted of iron and burnt ink.
And across from her — in the place where the vault's core had been — the Queen stood reborn.
Not fully formed, not yet. Her body shimmered like smoke drawn into shape, her movements caught between fluidity and fracture. Her eyes were not eyes but mirrors, each reflecting countless Marys — laughing, screaming, burning. A chorus of selves trapped in her gaze.
Mary staggered backward, the Codex heavy in her grip. "You're not real," she whispered. "You're just a memory."
The Queen tilted her head, smiling faintly. "Then why does your heart beat for me?"
Mary's pulse quickened.
"You're a fragment," she said, forcing steel into her voice. "A shadow of what was destroyed."
The Queen's form flickered — for an instant, she was a woman in regal black, hair cascading like a river of night. Then she blurred again, voice echoing from every broken shard in the room.
"I was destroyed, yes," she said. "But destruction is only another form of remembering. You tried to burn me from the Codex. All you did was free me from the page."
Mary took another step back. The Codex vibrated against her palm, the runes along its spine flickering like dying embers.
"I won't let you come back."
The Queen smiled, and the vault shuddered. "You don't understand. I don't need to come back. I am back — in you."
Mary froze.
The Queen moved closer, her form solidifying with each step. "When I wrote you, I left a thread between us. A tether. You were my last story, Mary. My last attempt at redemption."
"I'm not your redemption."
The Queen's eyes gleamed. "No. You're my hunger."
She raised her hand. The floor beneath Mary's feet split open, and from the crack rose a dark, reflective liquid — quicksilver and shadow entwined. It moved like something alive, whispering as it spread, tracing symbols across the floor in burning light.
Mary stumbled backward, but the silver followed her. Wherever it touched, reality warped — walls rippled, air thickened, time slowed. The Loomspire groaned like a dying beast.
The Queen's voice wove through the chaos. "Every mirror broken. Every reflection erased. You thought you could destroy me by shattering what you saw. But mirrors do not die, my child. They multiply."
The quicksilver rose higher, crawling up the walls like living ink. Within its surface, faces began to form — distorted, half-born, struggling to speak. Some wore Mary's features. Others were twisted echoes of the Queen.
Mary gritted her teeth. "You feed on memory."
The Queen smiled. "I feed on meaning."
Her voice deepened, echoing through the chamber like the toll of an unseen bell. "You of all beings should understand, little author. Stories hunger for retelling. They devour silence. They drink fear. They long to be remembered."
Mary could feel it now — the pull inside her, that same devouring pulse in the Codex. The Queen's essence was binding itself to her. The more she resisted, the more the hunger grew. It wasn't physical. It was conceptual — a rewriting, a merging of narrative selves.
"No," Mary gasped. "You can't rewrite me. I write you."
The Codex flared in her hands, light erupting from its pages. Symbols poured into the air, glowing runes spinning around her like a storm. The Queen recoiled slightly, her form flickering.
Mary seized the moment.
She opened the Codex to the last page — the one that had once been blank — and pressed her bleeding thumb to it.
"Ink," she whispered, "is only blood that remembers."
The page hissed. Blood spread across the parchment, forming words that glowed with terrible beauty.
"I name you story," Mary said. "And all stories end."
The Queen screamed — a sound that split stone. The walls convulsed, the quicksilver rippling violently. The mirrored faces within it shattered one by one, dissolving into black mist.
For a moment, Mary thought it was working.
But then the Codex changed.
The words on the page rearranged themselves — not by her will. The ink moved of its own accord, bleeding backward, forming a new line:
"But not all endings belong to their writers."
Mary's heart dropped.
The Queen laughed, low and echoing. "You tried to bind me with authorship. But you forget — I taught you how to write."
She reached out, touching the edge of the Codex. The entire book trembled, the ink crawling from the pages like serpents of light, slithering across Mary's hands and into her veins.
Pain exploded through her body. She screamed, dropping to her knees as black light raced beneath her skin. The Codex fell to the ground, still open, its pages fluttering in a phantom wind.
"You see?" the Queen murmured. "There is no you without me. No ink without my darkness. No flame without my breath."
Mary's vision blurred. Every heartbeat echoed with another — a rhythm that wasn't hers. The Queen's.
"No," Mary hissed. "You won't take me."
She forced herself up, staggering toward the nearest wall. Her reflection waited there, faint and trembling.
"Help me," she whispered.
The reflection nodded — and smiled with her own mouth.
Then it stepped out of the glass.
The second Mary caught her as she fell. Together, they turned toward the Queen. Two identical faces. Two identical hungers. But only one alive.
The Queen hesitated. "What is this?"
Mary's reflection — her mirror self — spoke first. "You wanted reflection," she said. "So reflect."
Before the Queen could respond, the two Marys clasped hands and stepped forward together.
Light erupted from their joined palms — not gold, not silver, but something deeper, something older. A light that existed before stories began, before reflections were ever made.
The Codex lifted from the ground, pages spinning like the wings of a bird. The Queen screamed as the light enveloped her. The mirrored quicksilver shattered outward, ripping through the vault in a storm of burning fragments.
The light grew brighter, until there was nothing else.
When the world settled again, the vault was gone.
Mary woke on the upper floor of the Loomspire, lying among ash and glass. Her hands were burned. The Codex lay beside her, its pages blackened at the edges, still warm to the touch.
For a moment, there was only silence.
Then — a whisper.
"You can't destroy what remembers you."
Mary looked up sharply.
The mirrors were gone. The quicksilver had evaporated. Yet on the far wall, the faint outline of a figure shimmered in light — the Queen's silhouette, carved into the air itself.
Mary rose unsteadily, every muscle trembling. "You're a shadow," she said. "A ghost."
"A story," the Queen replied. "And stories never truly die. They just… change tellers."
Mary's jaw tightened. "Then I'll keep telling mine."
The Queen's laughter was soft this time — almost tender. "Good. Then let's see which of us survives the ending."
The light faded, and the silhouette dissolved.
Mary stood alone in the ruins of the Loomspire, the Codex pulsing faintly at her side. The hunger within it was still there — quieter now, but not gone. She could feel it breathing beneath the cover, waiting.
The reflection of herself that had fought beside her was gone. Or perhaps… not gone at all. When Mary caught her shadow against the cracked floor, it hesitated a half-second too long before moving.
She whispered, "You're still with me."
The shadow smiled.
And deep below the Loomspire, in the dark hollows where the vault once was, something answered — a low, resonant hum, like the pulse of a sleeping heart.
The Mirror's Hunger had only begun.