The dreams began quietly.
At first, they were whispers—merchants waking in the night with black stars behind their eyes, children murmuring in their sleep about wings made of smoke. Then, within days, the dreams grew teeth. Entire districts fell into waking trances, eyes glazed, speaking in Kael's forgotten tongue.
Arenne could feel his reach threading through their minds like frost through glass.
He was not trying to destroy Elarion.
He was trying to remember it differently.
She stood before the Sanctum of Reflection, an ancient hall sealed since the old world. Its doors were carved with mirrors that did not show her face. Instead, they showed her other selves: the queen she had been, the goddess, the lover kneeling in moonlight beside Seraphyne.
Vaelen approached, his expression tense.
"The dreams spread through memory. They come from the inside. If you break the seal, you'll walk into your own reflection."
"That's the point," Arenne said softly.
"If Kael uses the past to twist what is real, then I must face it where it still lives."
Elyndra appeared behind him, her glow dimmed. "The Mirror Veil is not a place. It's a wound. Once you enter, you'll see yourself as Kael does."
Arenne glanced at both of them, calm despite the warning. "Then perhaps I'll understand him."
Without another word, she placed her hand upon the mirrored door.
Light bled from her palm. The reflection rippled—then split open like water.
The Mirror Veil was a world made of memory.
Each step she took echoed twice—once in the present, once in the past. The air shimmered with fragments of moments she had lived and forgotten: Seraphyne's laughter in the garden of stars; Lyssara's human hand, warm in hers; the sound of thunder when the first world fell.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Kael's voice surrounded her. He stepped from the reflection of herself—a dark twin, half light, half shadow. His eyes burned with something that was not hatred but sorrow twisted too long into bitterness.
"You carry her face," he said, circling her slowly. "Seraphyne's calm. Lyssara's defiance. You are both the wound and the knife."
"I am what remains," Arenne said, her tone even.
He smiled faintly. "Then remember this."
The mirror-world convulsed. Images burst around them: Seraphyne standing before Kael in the old world, the stars bleeding red above them. Kael kneeling before her, asking for mercy she could not give. Seraphyne turning away, sealing him beneath the sea.
"She condemned me to silence," Kael said. "Now you speak her words, breathe her mercy. But mercy is not justice."
Arenne raised her hand; the light of Elyndra's dawn bloomed across her skin. "And vengeance is not remembrance."
The two forces met—light and shadow folding into each other. The Veil rippled, showing a thousand versions of the same truth: gods falling, lovers parting, worlds dying.
Then Arenne reached forward and touched his chest. "You are not forgotten," she whispered.
Kael froze. The darkness around him shuddered. "You would forgive me?"
"I don't forgive you," she said. "I accept you. Darkness is part of what we were—and what we are."
The shadow that was Kael exhaled, dissolving into dust and starlight. The Veil cracked, light pouring through like dawn through broken glass.
When Arenne opened her eyes again, she was back before the mirrored doors, Vaelen and Elyndra kneeling beside her. The city outside was quiet once more; the whispers had stilled.
Elyndra touched her arm. "You went too far into the wound. You should have—"
Arenne looked at her, silver and gold flickering in her irises. "No. The wound is where healing begins."
She turned toward the city. "Kael is gone, but others will rise. The balance has only begun."
Vaelen bowed his head. "And what of you, my queen? Each time you enter the Veil, you lose something of yourself."
Arenne smiled faintly. "Then I will learn to live with what remains."
Above them, the crimson moon shimmered in the pale morning light—a reminder that the world still watched its queen walk the thin line between light and shadow.