The air was singing.
Not in tune—not quite—but the kind of song that comes when too many voices say the same thing at different times. In the shattered ruins beneath Vinterra, between the bones of the forgotten Veiled Quarter and the unraveling dream line of the city, Nameless stood with a legacy wrapped around him like a second skin.
Aveline's voice pulsed through his veins, a hum buried just beneath the beat of his heart. Not dominant. Not controlling.
Just… present.
Watching.
And with it, his power had grown.
Across the broken courtyard, the Mirror born came.
Seven of them.
All clad in robes of smoked-glass thread. Each bore a mirror-mask, their faces hidden behind polished obsidian. Glyphs ran across their garments in faint violet—a language not taught but remembered. Each step they took mirrored perfectly, flawlessly—like their reflections walked before them rather than behind.
Elira stood to his left, her walking cane crackling with active glyph wards, breath shallow. Her sleeve was torn, her right glove burned away from a near-miss sigil flare.
"That's not just any Mirror born unit," she whispered. "That's a Council-bonded Scry Sept."
Nameless didn't respond.
He stared at the central figure—taller than the rest, mask fractured on one side, revealing a mouth that smiled too wide and never blinked.
The Lead Scryer.
It raised a hand.
Behind it, the air warped—mirrors spinning into existence like coins flipped in slow motion, forming a circle of glass around the sept.
Each surface shimmered.
Each surface showed a different Nameless.
Dead. Dying. Betraying. Burning.
One showed him standing atop the Guild's Spire, arms outstretched, while the city chanted his name in terror.
Another showed him cradling a child with Aveline's eyes.
A third showed him alone, forgotten, a page in a book no one ever read.
The Scryer spoke.
Its voice was a reflection—not sound, but an echo:
"You've passed the threshold."
"You're bleeding into all paths."
"You are the unfinished ending of a tale we buried in silence."
Nameless took a step forward.
The ground beneath him shimmered, dream-warded, the sigils Aveline once taught now fusing with the script of his own making.
He raised his hand.
Wrote a single phrase into the air:
"The mirror lies."
The script pulsed.
Dreamward activated.
The surrounding mirror-ring cracked, each shard rebounding its image into the next, folding into a recursion loop. Reflections bled together, forming a storm of indecision and narrative chaos.
The Scryers reeled.
One of them staggered backward—tripped on their own echo, collapsing into a reflection that vanished as soon as they touched it.
Elira gasped.
"You just—"
"Rewrote their certainty," Nameless said quietly. "They see too many versions of me now."
"They can't fix on one to kill."
[Path Update: Fractured Echo – Tier III.5]
— Advanced Dreamward: "Truthless Reflection"
By embedding contradiction into mirror-resonant fields, Nameless can collapse observational certainty. Targets are left unable to perceive or strike him without accepting the narrative he forces.
— Dream Residue: 5 (Warning: threshold approaching critical)
Higher-order dream entities are now aware of Nameless. Persistent resonance fields have appeared across Vinterra.
The Scryer screamed.
Not a sound.
Not a word.
A ripple.
An emotional punishment.
Nameless reeled.
Memories not his own flooded his mind:
A Guild apprentice, disemboweled after dreaming of a future where he lived to retire.
A mother, forced to forget her child to maintain reality's dream-stability.
Aveline herself, erasing the name of her first love to hide him from the Mirror born.
He fell to one knee.
The dream line cracked around him, silver threads sparking in all directions.
But Elira stepped forward, palm out, and—
Touched the shard embedded in his coat.
It pulsed.
Her eyes widened.
"You… you burned this for me."
"I did," he muttered.
"Then take this."
She carved a glyph into the air.
It wasn't one Nameless knew.
Old. Jagged. Grief-born.
And then—
She pressed her palm to the ground and whispered:
"Remember her."
The earth trembled.
Beneath them, the buried pages of the Veiled Library surged upward, spectral and soaked in ink. Books that had once been burned in ritual suppression rose again—flapping like paper birds, spiraling around the Mirror born sept.
They screamed in confusion as memory and fiction merged, writing them out of certainty.
"You can't erase a story once it's told," Elira said.
"Especially when someone remembers the ending."
Nameless stood, breathing ragged.
He reached into the air.
Pulled down a thread—a new one.
It shimmered with silver and violet, inscribed with a symbol: a half-moon above a quill.
The sigil of the Echo-Scribe.
He wove it around the reflection storm.
And spoke, clearly:
"Let them forget me."
The Mirrorborn burst—not in gore, but in unmaking.
Like scenes cut from a story after final edits.
Gone.
Aftermath
Elira collapsed beside him, spent.
Nameless sat still, the dust of lost names swirling around them.
Far above, the city stirred.
Mirrors trembled.
And the citizens of Vinterra woke from a shared dream—none of them remembering why their pillows were damp with tears.
But the Guild did.
The Church did.
And the Tribunal did.
And each whispered one word, in fear:
Nameless.