Emily woke with the taste of ash on her tongue.
For a moment she lay still, staring at the ceiling of her dormitory as if it might crack open and tell her the truth the council refused to say aloud. The bells had stopped their three-note tolling hours ago, but the silence they left behind felt heavier than sound.
She turned her head toward the small mirror hanging above her desk.
Two Emilys looked back.
She bolted upright, heart hammering. The image in the glass steadied—only one reflection, only her. No second face, no phantom standing beside her. Just a pale young woman with stubborn eyes and a braid that had come half undone in sleep.
She exhaled slowly.
"Get a hold of yourself," she muttered. "You're not a child."
Still, when she swung her legs off the bed and her bare feet touched the cold stone, she did not look at the mirror again. Not right away.
The academy had banned mirrors overnight. Orders from the council. Most students obeyed, yanking them down, shrouding polished metal, turning glass to face the walls. Emily hadn't. Not because she trusted what lurked inside them—but because she did not trust the council more.
She forced herself to stand, walk to the washbasin, and look again.
This time, only one Emily. No delay. No double.
Yet something was wrong.
Her reflection's eyes lingered on the faint smear of ash still clinging to her collarbone, though she had scrubbed herself raw the night before. The ash from Eldrenvale's strange storm did not want to leave skin—or memory.
She remembered Felix standing on the bridge, talking like a man who had lived more than one lifetime. She remembered the thin ring of gold she thought she saw around his pupil when he glanced at the river, like the outline of a sun that hadn't decided to rise.
She remembered his tears during their duel.
Damn him for complicating everything.
"You're late," her roommate mumbled from the other bed, turning over and burying her head under the blanket. "Combat drills moved to dawn, remember? Because ash-storms make people stupid."
Emily pulled on her uniform and buckled her swordbelt with practiced ease.
"I remember," she said. What she didn't say was that she wasn't going for drills.
Not first.
First, she was going to find Felix von Frederick and demand answers he would either give or she would cut out of him, one truth at a time.
The academy courtyard felt like a painting someone had smudged with charcoal. Ash dusted the flagstones, turning every footprint into a ghost of movement. Students moved in small groups, voices low, glancing up at the sky as if expecting it to crack.
The grand ward's runes—those etched along the towering outer walls—burned faint and sickly instead of their usual bright, steady red. The ward had been breached last night. Everyone heard it in the horn's cry, even if no one would officially admit it.
Emily's boots left light prints behind her as she crossed the courtyard. She headed not toward the training field but the infirmary wing at the outer ring—the place where the academy had quietly housed skilled physicians who owed favors to the duke and the council alike.
If Felix had collapsed after last night's council summons—and she had seen how pale he looked—he would have gone to only one person.
The clinic's hallway was almost empty. The candle at the far end burned low, as if it had been awake all night.
Emily raised her hand to knock.
Before her knuckles touched wood, the door opened.
Marianne stood framed in the doorway, sleeves rolled up, hair tied back with a strip of red cloth. There were faint circles under her eyes, but her gaze was sharp, assessing Emily in a single glance.
"I was expecting you," Marianne said.
Emily stiffened.
"Oh? Did your... medical intuition tell you that?"
"That," Marianne said dryly, "and the fact that stubborn women rarely sleep after the world cracks."
She stepped aside. "Come in. Keep your voice low."
The clinic smelled of herbs, old paper, and a thin thread of something metallic that never quite left—a reminder that blood had recently had business here. On a narrow bed near the far wall sat Felix, bandage wrapped around his ribs beneath his shirt, another pale strip peeking from beneath his left eye.
He looked up when she entered.
For one heartbeat, the old reflex flared: anger, disdain, words she had prepared for years to throw at him whenever she needed a weapon that cost nothing. But they didn't fit anymore. They bounced off the man sitting before her, wrong shape for the new outline.
"Emily," he said simply.
She hated that he said her name like he'd been practicing it in silence.
"What happened last night?" she asked. No greeting, no courtesy. "The ash, the mirrors, the horn. And your eye."
Marianne shut the door behind her and leaned against it, arms folded. "You have five minutes. Then I'll tell you to leave or stay, depending on whether you can listen without trying to solve your feelings with a blade."
Emily's jaw tightened. "I don't solve things with feelings."
"Exactly my concern," Marianne murmured.
Felix's lips twitched—the ghost of amusement, quickly gone. He motioned to the chair beside the bed.
"This is going to sound insane," he said. "More insane than usual. But if you're going to be anywhere near me from now on, you need to hear it."
Emily did not sit. She stayed standing, hand resting on her sword pommel.
"Try me."
He weighed her with his gaze, as if measuring not her strength but how much truth she could carry without breaking.
"There are things moving in this city," he began, "that aren't supposed to exist yet."
He told her—not everything, but enough.
About the shadow that knew his old name.
About the mirrors cracking and the sanctuary circle.
About the book Marianne had shown him, about the Golden Eye and travelers and Severance.
He did not tell her he had once written this story. That truth clung to the inside of his teeth like poison he wasn't ready to spit.
Emily listened without interrupting. Her expression shifted only once—when he mentioned the faceless figure calling him Carter, not Felix. At that, something sharp flickered behind her eyes, gone in an instant.
"And now?" she said when he finished. "After you broke this... mirror-bond?"
"Now," Marianne answered, stepping forward, "he's marked. The Master will look for other mirrors, other ways to reach through. Doors aren't just glass, Emily. They're people. Promises. Places. Anything that reflects."
Emily exhaled slowly. The rational part of her wanted to reject all of it, call it delirium from blood loss and fear. But the city had changed. The ash outside, the way light bent, the way her own shadow had stretched too long on the bridge the night before...
And she trusted Marianne's competence more than she trusted the council's assurances.
"So you're saying," she summarized, "that some ancient thing wants to claw its way back into our world, and it needs you specifically as... what? A vessel?"
"A mirror," Felix said quietly. "But we severed the first link."
"And we mean to keep severing," Marianne added. "By finding every mirror he could use and removing it from play."
Emily frowned. "You're talking about going to war with a being that can fracture a city's reality by looking at it."
"If you prefer," Felix said, "we can wait politely and let him pick his host."
Her glare bounced off his calm. "You're insufferable."
"Frequently," he agreed.
She turned away, pacing once, twice, fingers drumming on the hilt of her sword. The decision she was about to make was heavier than any duel she had fought. Duels ended. This would not.
"You mentioned something on the bridge," she said at last, not looking at him. "About standing between a story and its ending. I thought it was just you being dramatic."
"It was," he said. "And it's also true."
She stopped and faced him again. "Fine. Then answer me this, Felix von Frederick: where do I stand in that story?"
He held her gaze. No smirk, no arrogance, no trying to charm her with words. Just a tired young man who had seen more endings than beginnings.
"You," he said, "are the one he wants next."
The air in the room thinned.
"Ridiculous," Emily scoffed, but there was a hairline crack in the word.
Marianne stepped to the shelf, pulled out the ancient book, and flipped to a page Emily hadn't known she wanted to see until she saw it: a drawing of a woman with a blade raised, golden threads extending from her and weaving into seven arches.
"Some mirrors walk," Marianne said softly. "Some are born. Some are forged. You're not just a promising swordswoman, Emily. You're a convergence point. Your mana, your lineage, your place at this academy—all of it makes you an ideal... surface."
Emily's throat went dry. She had always known she was strong. The academy had told her so. Her mentors had praised her talent. But to hear she was valuable to it—
"Stop," she said. "You're not going to scare me into hiding."
"Hiding?" Felix shook his head. "No. I was hoping to scare you into staying close. To us. To me."
She stared at him.
"Arrogant to the end," she said. But a part of her—the part that had watched tears fall from his face onto her skin—heard something else underneath: fear. Not for himself.
"All right," she said abruptly. "What do you need me to do?"
Marianne smiled, small and genuine. "Today? Live your routine. Go to drills. Attend classes. Act as if nothing has changed."
Emily blinked. "That's your great plan?"
Felix shifted, grimacing as his ribs protested. "If the Master wants you, he'll move soon. And he'll assume you're unaware. A predator is easiest to see when it thinks it's unseen."
"You want to use me as bait," Emily said flatly.
"I want to use his arrogance," Felix corrected. "We'll stay near. We're not sending you alone to the slaughterhouse."
"And if he attacks in a dormitory full of students? In the middle of the mess hall?"
"Then he reveals more of how he works," Marianne said quietly. "And we learn how to kill him faster."
Emily's fingers tightened on her sword until her knuckles paled. She had faced monsters on the training grounds, sparring matches that left bruises and broken noses. This was different. The enemy here wasn't flesh. It was reflection, intent, hunger wearing reality like a coat.
"Fine," she said at last. "I'll go to drills."
She turned to Felix. "But if I die because of this, I will haunt you."
"I'll deserve it," he said.
She hesitated at the door, then added, without looking back, "You'd better not make me regret trusting you."
Felix didn't answer with words. Instead, he closed his hand around the small mirror shard in his pocket, feeling the word he'd scratched there—No—bite into his palm.
He had no intention of letting anyone else be a door.
Dawn drills at the academy were usually loud, full of shouted commands, clashing steel, mana crackling in the air. Today, they began in near-silence.
Ash muffled footfalls. The instructors had dark circles beneath their eyes. Some students stole glances at the sky, expecting it to start bleeding.
Emily took her place in the front row, spine straight, expression cool. Inside, her thoughts crawled like insects.
She felt watched.
Not by instructors or peers—she was used to those eyes. This felt different. Like being observed through a keyhole by someone who had never learned to blink.
Felix entered the training grounds a few minutes later, ostensibly as an observer. His noble status allowed him to "supervise" drills he rarely bothered to attend. Today, no one questioned it. The duke's son watching over the academy after a crisis? It even soothed some whispers.
Marianne came too, hovering at the edges with a satchel of medical supplies. To anyone else, she was simply on standby in case of injury. To Emily, she was a point of calm in the corner of her vision.
The drills began.
They practiced standard formations, then mana-channeling exercises, then paired duels. Each movement felt slightly off-beat, as if the entire academy was dancing to music it didn't want to admit it heard.
And beneath it all, faint as breath on glass: the six-note melody.
Emily's head snapped around, searching.
No child.
No musician.
Just the wind.
Six notes again. Soft, patient. The exact cadence she had heard at dawn, stitched into the ash and the chiming bells.
"Emily," her instructor barked. "Focus."
She tightened her grip on the training spear. "Yes, sir."
Six notes.
When the time came for students to rotate stations, she found her path bending—not toward the archery range as assigned, but toward the eastern edge of the grounds, where a long stone bridge arched over the academy's inner canal.
Her instructor frowned. "That's not your—"
Felix crossed the ground with a noble's easy authority. "I'll evaluate her form personally," he said. "She was there when the ward was breached. I want to see how it's affected her."
The instructor hesitated, then bowed. Nobles made poor sparring partners but excellent shields against blame.
Emily shot Felix a look as he approached.
"Baiting the predator, remember?" he murmured.
She grunted. "If this goes wrong—"
"It will," he said. "Just hopefully in a way that favors us."
Infuriating man.
They walked onto the bridge.
Ash swirled up in small ghosts around their boots. The canal below ran dark and slow, reflecting the academy's towers in smudged lines. Students trained at a distance, their shouts dulled by space. Marianne lingered at the far end of the bridge, feigning inspection of a minor injury, eyes sharper than any scalpel.
Six notes.
This time, the sound clearly came from beneath the bridge.
Emily's hand went to her sword.
"Don't draw," Felix said under his breath. "Not yet."
"Oh, so we die with style?" she hissed back.
He didn't answer. Gold flickered faintly at the edge of his iris, as if the eye were testing the air.
The world slowed.
Ash fell more slowly. Voices became distant. The canal's surface smoothed like a held breath.
From beneath the bridge, a small hand emerged—pale, delicate, fingers gripping the stone lip.
Emily's body tensed, mana ready to surge. She stopped herself from drawing only because Felix's hand brushed her elbow, a silent wait.
A child pulled herself up onto the bridge. A little girl, no older than eight, dress ragged and gray with ash, hair hanging in damp strands over her face.
She hummed the six-note tune.
Wrong. Every instinct screamed wrong.
Children didn't move like that, with limbs that remembered how to be something else. Shadows shouldn't cling to ankles when the sun was in front of you.
The girl lifted her head.
Her eyes were too dark. Not black, not brown—an absence of light, like someone had poked holes in reality and forgotten to fill them back in.
"Found you," she said cheerfully.
Emily's skin crawled.
"Stay behind me," she told Felix automatically.
"No," he said. "If she's what I think she is, I'm the one she wants to see."
The girl's gaze slid between them, making both feel equally inspected.
"You're noisy," she told Emily, wrinkling her nose. "Your thoughts stomp."
Emily's grip tightened. "Get off this bridge, child. Now."
The girl giggled—a sound that somehow contained two notes at once, slightly out of tune.
"You're not my instructor," she said. "But you're important. You have nice edges. The Master will like you."
Mana surged in Emily's veins. "Felix," she whispered, "I will kill her if I have to."
"I know," he said. "But that's not a child."
He stepped forward, each movement precise, as if he feared startling something dangerous.
"Who are you?" he asked. Not what, but who. The question of a man who knew stories and understood that names mattered more than shapes.
The girl tilted her head. For a fraction of a second, her shadow on the stone did not match her posture. It stood upright, head straight.
"We're practicing," she said. "The Master wants to see how the glass holds. He says your mind is interesting, Carter."
The sound of his old name on a child's tongue made Felix's stomach turn.
"What does he want with her?" Felix asked, nodding toward Emily.
"The girl?" The child smiled. "He needs a path. A pretty one. With strong walls. He wants to walk where she walks. See what she sees. Wear her voice."
Emily stepped forward despite herself, sword an inch from drawing. "Over my dead—"
"Exactly," the girl said gleefully.
The canal's reflection shifted.
In the water, three figures stood on the bridge: Felix, Emily, and a third shape between them—a faceless outline of shadow, its red eyes bright even in the distorted surface. Its hand hovered just above Emily's shoulder, fingers spread as if measuring the fit.
Emily stared.
Her real shoulder felt cold where nothing touched it.
Felix saw it too.
He closed his eye.
Golden heat built behind his lid, pain spiking sharp, but he forced it open. The world peeled a layer back. He saw lines—threads—connecting the little girl's ankles to the canal's dark, from the canal to the shadow in the reflection, from the shadow to Emily's heartbeat, pulsing like a drum.
"If he writes with glass," he whispered, remembering his own words, "we take away his pages."
"Marianne!" he shouted.
At the far end of the bridge, Marianne whipped around. Her hand was already on the book in her satchel.
The little girl frowned. "No Severance," she said, voice flattening. "You used it once already, Traveler. You don't get—"
"We're not severing me," Felix said. "Not this time."
He seized Emily's free hand.
She startled. "What are you—"
"Do you trust me?" he asked.
The worst part was that she hesitated only a heartbeat.
"I hate you," she said. "But yes."
"Close your eyes," he said. "And choose."
Golden light flared in his vision, more painful than any time before. But now, Emily's mana flowed through their joined hands—a sword-mage's disciplined energy, bright and sharp.
The Golden Eye drank it, reshaped it, and spat it out not as sight but as editorial authority over the scene before them.
For a moment, Felix did not see the bridge as stone and ash.
He saw it as words.
Lines describing a child climbing the bridge. Sentences tracing the arc of a hand reaching for a shoulder. Paragraphs thick with inevitability, written in the Master's slick unseen ink.
The shadow in the canal leaned closer, seeking purchase.
"No," Felix said.
He reached, not with muscle but with the part of him that had written stories in another life. The Golden Eye burned, translating thought to change. He plucked at one of the lines—the one that read And the Master's hand closed on the girl's shoulder, completing the bond—and snapped it.
The sentence curled like torn paper.
In reality, the water rippled violently.
The faceless shape's hand in the reflection stopped a hair's breadth from Emily's shoulder, fingers twitching in anger.
The little girl screamed.
Not the shriek of a child, but the grinding howl of glass being dragged across stone. Cracks spiderwebbed from her bare feet along the bridge. Her face blurred, as if someone had smudged her with a thumb in wet paint, and for a heartbeat her true form showed through—a knot of darkness wearing the memory of a human shape.
"Stop rewriting!" she shrieked. "You're breaking the margins! You'll bleed out!"
Felix's knees shook. Blood trickled from his nose, his eyes, even his ears. The strain of overwriting another author's fate was worse than any duel. Emily felt his hand trembling in hers and did something she had never done for him before.
She lent him strength.
Not just mana—trust. A wordless, fierce refusal to let him fall alone.
"If he wants a path," she said through gritted teeth, "then he can trip on it."
She drew her sword in one fluid motion and drove its point into the stone at their feet.
Mana erupted in a circle around them, a radiant ring that intersected the thin threads Felix could see. Her power didn't sever—Severance was not hers to wield—but it re-routed. Paths meant for the Master curved away, redirected into nothingness, like rivers convinced to change course.
The reflection below warped.
The faceless shape staggered, its double in the canal shuddering, edges fizzing, eyes flaring brighter in rage.
"Enough," a new voice said.
Not the child's. Not the Master's.
The canal's surface rose.
Water climbed in a column, defying gravity, wrapping around the little girl and freezing her in place. Runes flickered beneath the surface, old and deep—older than the academy itself.
Felix fell back, gasping.
Marianne stood at the bridge's edge, both hands extended, the ancient book open before her. But it wasn't the page of Severance she had called.
This was something else.
"They're not the only ones who know how to write rules," she said between clenched teeth. "This academy was built on a binding. They forgot that. I didn't."
The girl-things's face contorted, voice cracking. "You can't hold us! We have mirrors—"
"Not here," Marianne hissed. "Not on this bridge. This stone remembers a different oath."
For a moment, the world held.
Water strained, the binding runes burning hot blue. The girl's shadow writhed independently, trying to peel itself free.
Felix felt the Golden Eye flicker, desperate to stay open, desperate to see more, but he forced it shut. Enough. If he pushed further, he wouldn't have an eye left.
"Emily," Marianne shouted, "now!"
Emily didn't need more explanation.
She stepped forward, sword raised. The child-thing glared at her with those bottomless eyes.
"If you kill this vessel," it said, voice distorting, "we'll just choose another—"
"Then learn something," Emily said coldly. "Sometimes you don't get to pick the pieces on the board."
She brought her blade down—not on the child's head, not on the water, but on the reflection in the canal itself.
Steel met surface.
Reality screamed.
The reflection shattered like glass, fragments flying outward, each shard carrying a warped image of the faceless Master, all red-eyed and howling. The water column exploded in a spray of cold rain, soaking the three of them.
The child vanished.
No body. No blood.
Just ash, swirling where she'd stood, dispersing into the gray morning.
The bridge fell silent.
The six-note melody died halfway through its last repetition.
Felix slumped to his knees, chest heaving. Emily stood over him, sword dripping water, not lowering it until Marianne lowered her hands and the water fell back into the canal with a heavy slap.
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
Then Felix laughed once, short and ragged.
"We just picked a fight with a god of mirrors," he said. "On a school bridge."
"A very old school bridge," Marianne corrected weakly, leaning against the parapet. "With protections none of the council remembered to use."
Emily's hands trembled.
She sheathed her sword and turned on Felix.
"You idiot," she snapped. "You could have died."
"Probably," he said.
"And you dragged me into it."
"I asked," he said. "You said yes."
She stared at him, furious and something else.
"You're reckless," she said.
"Sometimes," he answered. "But we just proved something."
"Oh?" she demanded. "What, exactly?"
He wiped blood from his eye, smearing it across his cheek like war paint.
"That he can be opposed," Felix said. "That his writing isn't absolute. That there are other hands on the page."
Emily exhaled. Her anger didn't vanish—but it found a new target, one shared.
"Next time," she said, "we plan better."
Marianne straightened, snapping the book shut. "There will be a next time. That was a probe, not a full assault."
"You think he'll stop sending puppets after this?" Emily asked.
"No," Marianne said. "But he'll change tactics. He'll look for quieter mirrors. Ones we don't watch."
Felix's hand closed around the shard in his pocket. He thought of the council's intact mirror, of his father sitting beneath it, unmoved while the city cracked.
"We go higher," Felix said slowly.
Marianne frowned. "Higher?"
"To the mirror that didn't break," he said. "The one in the council chamber. You said some mirrors are made to keep, not show."
Emily's eyes widened. "You think the Master's already inside the council's glass."
"I think," Felix said, "that if I were a being trying to come back, I'd plant myself where everyone has to look eventually."
The three of them stood on the ash-dusted bridge, dripping with canal water and the echo of a shattered reflection.
Around them, the academy slowly returned to its drills, instructors shouting, students moving, life pretending to be normal.
But each mirror in Eldrenvale—each polished surface, each calm puddle—now carried a flaw. A tiny hesitation. A memory of having almost been claimed.
In some of them, for a fraction of a second, two reflections still breathed when one should have.
That night, as the city curled warily around its scars, a single shard of mirror lay on Marianne's clinic windowsill. The word No scratched on its back caught what little light the candle offered.
In its face, Felix's tired reflection blinked once.
Behind that reflection, for the briefest moment, a second figure stood—a faceless man with eyes like closed wounds.
The shard trembled in Felix's hand.
He lifted it higher, meeting where a gaze would be.
"I'm done being just your character," he whispered. "Find another quill."
The second figure tilted its blank head. Then, very slowly, it raised one finger to where its lips might be and traced a single word in fog across the glass:
Soon.
The fog vanished.
Felix closed his fingers around the shard until the edges bit deep, drawing blood.
He let the drops fall onto the candle's flame.
It flickered, flared, then steadied—brighter than before.
"Then we write faster," he said.
Outside, far above Eldrenvale, something immense shifted its weight in the unseen spaces between stars and glass, displeased.
And somewhere in the academy, a council mirror gleamed with a patience that did not belong to mere silver.
To be continued...