The knife fell with a k-l-a-n-k sound on the floor. the voice that i heard perfectly but still that sound was so quiet that it might as well have been the beat of my own heart.
I stood frozen. My lungs constricted, breath caught somewhere between inhale and command. My hands shook, not from fear—fear had been trained out of me—but from the absence of direction.
For the first time in my life, there was no instruction in my mind. As if no manual was there to guide me at that time or even a button that could flicker and tell me to do this or that.
No voice aligning my muscles.
No silent calculation guiding my strike.
No elemental seal urging obedience, whispering now.
Only him.
The Sovereign.
His eyes were open, deep blue like mine. Calm. Unafraid. As if the blade above his heart had never existed at all.
"You're late," he said. "I was beginning to think they'd stopped making replacements."
It was my voice.
My inflection. My cadence. Even the slight pause before the second sentence—it was mine.
But it wasn't me speaking.
I took a step back. Or tried to.
My body refused.
The elemental seal pulsed beneath my skin, the familiar burn of command and control flaring briefly—as if confused. As if even it didn't know whose will it was meant to follow.
I was caught in a mirror I had never meant to look into.
"Who… who are you?" I whispered.
The word who felt wrong the moment it left my lips. My voice cracked anyway.
He smiled faintly. Not mocking. Not cruel.
Almost kind.
"Who do you think you are?" he asked softly. "Because the real question isn't who I am—it's who they're making you."
The words slid into my mind like ice between ribs.
They.
The Order.
I had followed them for what felt like forever. Their rules had shaped my bones before I understood language. Their commands had replaced instinct, morality, doubt.
And yet—suddenly—I questioned everything.
Every mission.
Every body left cooling behind me.
Every name stripped away and replaced with a designation.
What if it hadn't been me deciding?
What if it never had been?
I reached for the knife.
My fingers brushed the hilt.
It felt heavier than before. Not physically—conceptually. As if it no longer recognized me. As if the blade itself was waiting to see which of us would move first.
"Do you… know why I'm here?" I asked.
The question sounded weak. Childish. The kind of thing I had been trained never to ask.
"I know everything," he replied, his voice steady, absolute. "And I've been waiting for you to realize it."
For the first time, my awareness expanded beyond him.
The chamber.
The wards etched into the stone, precise and layered—older than the palace itself. The silence wasn't natural. It was enforced. Every shadow fell where it was meant to. Every flicker of moonlight had purpose.
Nothing here was accidental.
Nothing here was uncontrolled.
"You…" My throat tightened. "You know about me. About the Order. About everything."
He tilted his head, studying me as if I were something fragile. Something that might crack if mishandled.
"I've always known," he said. "From the first moment they made you, I knew."
He paused, eyes never leaving mine. "I've been waiting for this moment."
A shiver slid down my spine—sharp and invasive. Not the kind the Order trained me to ignore. This wasn't pain. This was recognition. Recognition to see your own reflection as if through a mirror world or just a hallucinating mirror, maybe.
Waiting for this moment…
The fragments surged.
Loose memories with no anchors. Faces that felt intimate but had no names. Places I had never seen, yet somehow missed. Lives that brushed against mine and vanished before I could grasp them.
The pressure returned.
Not pain—never pain.
A tightening behind my eyes. A deliberate resistance. As if something inside me was bracing, preparing to close a door. but for some reasons the muscles were so tight that i wanted to look more see though it but it was just not in my hands.
Something was watching.
"You hesitate," he said quietly. "And I know why."
I swallowed. My mouth was dry, tongue heavy, movements slow. "I… I don't understand—"
"You've never hesitated before," he interrupted gently.
"Not for them. Not for anyone. Never."
His gaze sharpened.
"And yet you hesitate now because you see me. And what you see is yourself. A reflection of yourself if you were not there. A reflection who is not you."
A pause.
"And you don't know which of us is the target. I could be the one with the mission to kill you instead you killing me."
I wanted to strike. Kill him and finish the mission.
Kill. Move away.
And just obey the instructions.
But my body wouldn't respond.
My training fractured. My instincts stalled. The discipline drilled into me since childhood simply… failed.
Something inside me wanted to scream.
Something else—quiet, unfamiliar—wanted me to kneel.
That was when the blackness began.
Not all at once.
A flicker first. The edges of my vision darkening, the world stretching thin. Time bent, warped. Seconds lost their meaning. Minutes slipped through me like water through fingers.
I fought it.
I tried to hold the knife.
Tried to hold my thoughts.
Tried to hold myself.
It was useless.
The chamber dissolved. The Sovereign's voice faded into something distant, echoing through a tunnel I couldn't follow. Inside my skull, I felt it—the lock.
Straining.
Tightening.
Forcing fragments back where they didn't belong.
Then—
Nothing.
I woke to the sound of steel scraping stone.
Dawn light filtered weakly through a narrow aperture. My body was cold. My hands ached, bruised in ways I didn't remember earning.
I was in a different chamber.
Restraints held me—not tightly, not cruelly—but firmly enough to remind me that control was no longer mine.
The Order's agents stood around me in silence, their faces hidden behind featureless masks. No accusation. No anger.
Only observation.
"You deviated," one of them said.
The voice was clipped. Mechanical. Empty of emotion.
Yet the word carried weight.
Deviated.
A concept I had never known.
And yet—it fit.
I had deviated.
From the mission. From the Order. From myself.
My head throbbed. Vision flickered. My thoughts felt like shattered glass—reflections overlapping, cutting into each other, memories without sequence or meaning.
I wanted to ask questions.
About the Sovereign. About why he wore my face. About why I blacked out. About why the seal, the knife, my own body had failed me.
I couldn't.
Not yet.
The Order didn't permit questions.
Only obedience. Only survival. Only repetition.
And yet—beneath it all—something whispered.
Faint. Persistent. Dangerous.
Do you remember?
I didn't.
But I knew—I knew—this wasn't random.
Some part of me insisted this was training. Another layer. Another refinement meant to strengthen my mind, to sharpen my control.
But another thought crept in, slow and terrifying:
Would the Order really go this far?
To fracture memory. To manufacture doubt. To weaponize identity itself.
The thought settled like something poisonous.
I had always believed the Order was precise. Calculated. Efficient. They broke bodies, not minds. Conditioning was meant to sharpen, not shatter.
And yet—this felt deliberate.
Too controlled to be an accident. Too exact to be a mistake.
If this was training, then it was no longer meant to make me stronger.
It was meant to change me.
Or erase me.
Another possibility crept in—slow, unwelcome, impossible to ignore.
What if this wasn't the Order's design at all?
What if this lock inside my mind belonged to something older? Something buried so deep even the Order only knew how to maintain it—not why it existed.
I would never know.
Nothing that happened in this room could leave it.
It could not.
Before another thought could form, the pressure returned—heavier this time. The edges of my consciousness darkened, folding inward. Oblivion pressed close, not as rest, but as warning.
Either I would sink into another round of enforced darkness—
—or something far worse was coming.
Because this time, I hadn't merely failed a mission.
I had hesitated.
And I had tried not to kill myself.