The morning after the Seeker's disappearance, the Academy tried to pretend nothing had changed.
Breakfast was served with the same clatter of trays and half-hearted greetings. Lectures resumed on leyline mechanics and sigilcraft. Students murmured about minor anomalies—the fading of floating candles, the glitching of timekeeping runes—but the staff waved these off as seasonal arcane interference. Even Lyra, sharp-eyed and unshakably inquisitive, seemed more focused on her sparring rotations than on the sudden dullness in Rayne's eyes.
But Rayne knew the truth.
The world was beginning to tilt, and he was standing at the axis.
He barely touched his food. The mark beneath his shirt pulsed in slow rhythm, as if syncing itself to something deeper than the ticking of clocks. The Ledger had changed him—perhaps even named him anew. But it had also broken a seal. Something older than memory was seeping through that crack, and now it wanted him.
Classes blurred past him. Names of spells, historical dates, diagrams of magical circuits—all passed like smoke through his thoughts. Instead, he kept thinking of the words:
"The Mouth speaks. The void listens. The ledger bleeds."
And worse—he remembered how right it had felt to call the Seeker into silence.
He had willed it, not spoken it. Not cast a spell, nor drawn a rune. He had thought, and reality had answered.
Was this the power the Realmless Prince was destined to wield?
He didn't want it.
But it wanted him.
By sunset, he found himself walking without thinking. His feet brought him to places he didn't consciously choose—stairwells he'd never used, abandoned corridors beneath the Alchemical Annex, and eventually, a hallway that hadn't existed yesterday. Its walls were lined with bronze sconces shaped like open hands. Blue flames hovered an inch above each palm, casting long, shivering shadows across a floor that rippled faintly, as if made of water and glass fused together.
At the end of the corridor stood a door, or perhaps a veil. It was made of shifting mist, but framed by silver runes that hummed quietly when he neared them. The spiral on his chest itched, then burned.
The veil parted for him.
He stepped through—and into a chamber unlike anything the Academy admitted to housing.
It was circular, impossibly vast, with no ceiling in sight. Mirrors lined the walls—tall, obelisk-like slabs of obsidian and glass, each framed in bone-white filigree that shimmered with symbols he didn't recognize. Each mirror pulsed faintly with its own heartbeat. Some were clouded. Some reflected nothing at all. Others... showed visions that weren't his.
He stepped closer to one. The mirror flickered.
At first, it showed him as he was—hair unkempt, eyes tired, hand clutching the Ledger now wrapped in leather and rope.
Then, it changed.
He saw himself dressed in robes of void-black velvet. A crown of rusted stars floated above his brow. His eyes glowed with molten silver, and behind him marched a host of formless things—shapes with too many limbs, too many teeth, all singing in a language made of screams and memory.
The crown tilted. The mirror cracked.
He staggered back, breathing hard.
"This is where the world forgets its own face," said a voice from the room.
He spun. A woman stood nearby. She wore the Academy's colors, but her badge was wrong. It bore no school crest. Only a single word etched in metal:
"Archivist."
She looked no older than thirty, but her eyes shimmered with the glassy stillness of ancient lakes. Her presence was weightless and unbearable all at once.
"This is the Mirror Hall," she said. "You are not meant to be here."
"I didn't know where I was going," Rayne replied.
"You did," she countered. "You simply forgot. That's what the Spiral does. It winds thought into instinct."
She approached slowly, her hands behind her back. The mirrors behind her shimmered with countless Raynes—some laughing, some weeping, one in chains, another burning from within. She ignored them.
"I know what you found," she said softly. "The Ledger. The Mark. The Mouth."
Rayne tensed. "Then you know what's happening to me."
She studied him for a long moment, then shook her head.
"No," she whispered. "No one knows what's happening to you, Rayne. That's the point. You've entered a part of the pattern we don't have language for."
"I didn't choose this," he snapped.
"You were chosen. There's a difference."
He looked away. The mirrors throbbed with silent storms behind the glass.
"Why me?"
The Archivist turned, and her cloak fluttered like candle smoke. "The Spiral seeks the one who is forgetting himself. You were the only one here who had started to become real in more than one timeline at once. You were already starting to slip between versions of yourself. You think it began with the wall in the Underhall? That was just the keyhole. You were already the door."
Rayne felt hollow. "What happens now?"
The Archivist gestured toward a distant mirror, shrouded in veils of whispering smoke.
"That one remembers the first time the Ledger was opened," she said. "By someone who didn't survive the naming. You are the second."
Rayne swallowed. "So why am I still here?"
She walked closer, her voice low.
"Because the Ledger doesn't want you dead, Rayne. It wants you to finish writing it. You're not a reader anymore. You're becoming the ink."
Before he could respond, the mirror beside them flickered again—and showed a future Rayne hadn't imagined.
He stood before a field of ash. Stars blinked out overhead like dying embers. Around him, the bones of gods were cracking into sand. The Ledger floated, open and endless, each page dripping ink into reality, shaping and unmaking in equal measure.
And Rayne? He was smiling.
Not cruelly. Not madly.
But knowingly. Willingly.
He stepped back.
"I won't let it happen," he whispered.
The Archivist didn't look surprised.
"You already are," she said.
And then she was gone.
No sound. No spell. No motion. Just absence.
He was alone in the mirror chamber.
The Ledger, still bound and dormant at his side, began to warm again. But now it felt less like heat—and more like breath.
As if the book was alive.
As if it was waiting.
And with a final glance at the glass that refused to show his present self, Rayne understood something horrifying:
The mirrors didn't show alternate futures.
They showed memory.
But not his.
The world's.
And the world remembered what it was like before Rayne existed.
And it was trying to remember how to forget him again.