Dust choked the horizon as Liora and I stood before what remained of the Fallen City. Once a citadel of shining obsidian towers, it now sprawled like a skeleton across the desert, its ribs of stone catching the dying light. The air shimmered—too still, too quiet.
"Don't breathe too deep," Liora warned. Her voice carried a note of fatigue, and yet the blade at her side gleamed with restless fire. "The sand remembers. It listens."
I nodded, gripping the hilt of my half-broken sword. Every grain beneath our boots pulsed faintly, as if a heartbeat lingered in the ruins.
We stepped forward.
The world blinked.
For an instant the city was whole—streets alive with music, banners snapping above a thousand people—and then it wasn't. Only sand and the echo of laughter remained.
"An illusion?" I asked.
"Not exactly," Liora murmured. "Echoes of what died here. The Fallen City refuses to forget its own destruction."
We pushed deeper through shattered archways. The wind carried fragments of voices, whispers that sounded almost like my name. Each time I turned, there was only heat and emptiness.
Then I saw it: a tower still standing in the distance, glassy and crooked, mirroring the bleeding sunset. The Mirror Sanctum—the place we had come to find.
---
Inside, the air was colder. Black glass walls reflected us endlessly, twisting our shapes until we looked like strangers.
Liora raised her lantern. "Gautam… every reflection is moving at a different pace."
She was right. In one pane, my reflection turned before I did; in another, Liora was already walking ahead. A wrongness pressed against my skull.
"We stick together," I said, touching her shoulder. "No matter what happens—don't let go."
Her fingers tightened around mine.
We took one step forward—and the mirrors breathed.
A thousand copies of us smiled back, their eyes glowing faint gold. Then the floor rippled, and my reflection stepped out of the glass.
It looked exactly like me—same scars, same exhausted glare—but its grin was too wide. "Finally," it said. "I've been waiting for you to wake up."
Before I could react, it lunged.
Steel clashed. Sparks scattered. My double moved faster than I did, mimicking every strike a fraction before I made it. Each blow I tried to land was already parried.
Liora leapt in, cutting through another mirror where her own reflection had drawn a blade. The chamber erupted in chaos—dozens of us fighting ourselves.
The mirrors screamed when struck, light spilling like blood.
"How do we stop them?" I shouted.
"Break the rhythm!" she called back. "They copy what we expect to do. Surprise yourself!"
I forced my muscles to betray my instincts—sidestep instead of block, spin when I should strike. The reflection hesitated. I drove my blade through its chest. It shattered into dust and light.
But the victory was short-lived. The walls pulsed again, and every remaining reflection froze mid-motion, staring past us toward the center of the chamber.
The floor cracked open.
A pedestal rose, bearing a single obsidian mirror the height of a man. Its surface shimmered not with reflection but with depth—like staring into a pool of night. The moment my gaze touched it, something inside me answered.
"Gautam," Liora whispered, "step back."
I couldn't. The mirror called to me—not with sound but with familiarity. I felt the same pressure I'd felt when the Shadow Sovereign had spoken my name in the storm.
Come home, a voice echoed inside my head. You were born from me.
The glass rippled. A shadowed hand reached out.
Liora shouted my name and grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away, but the floor fractured beneath us. For a heartbeat I saw her face lit by the glow of her lantern—fear, determination, love—and then she was gone, swallowed by light.
I stumbled back, gasping. The mirror no longer showed me—it showed her, falling through endless corridors of stars.
Then it showed something worse.
A figure stepping out of the darkness behind her—wearing my face.
"Stop!" I slammed my hand against the glass. "You can't have her!"
Cracks spider-webbed across the mirror, but instead of breaking, the surface absorbed the light. My hand sank into cold liquid shadow. Pain shot up my arm, searing my veins with frost and fire.
Accept it, the voice whispered. The mirror remembers the true you. She does not.
Images flashed—battles I'd never fought, cities burning, the Shadow Sovereign kneeling before someone who looked like me.
My knees buckled. "No… I'm not him."
The chamber darkened. The mirror flared, spilling out waves of force that hurled me across the room. When I hit the wall, shards rained down like glass rain.
Through the ringing in my ears, I heard Liora scream—faint, distant, as if through water.
And then the mirror shattered.
---
When I woke, half the tower was gone. Moonlight poured through the broken roof. The pedestal was empty. The mirror lay in fragments around me—each piece reflecting a different world.
In one shard, Liora was still falling. In another, I saw myself kneeling beside the Shadow Sovereign.
I reached toward the nearest fragment, and my reflection turned to face me independently, its eyes black with gold rings.
"Every mirror leads somewhere," it said softly. "Choose the wrong one… and you won't come back."
Before I could reply, the shard pulled me in.