The “S” symbol pulsed on the mirror’s surface.

  It wasn’t ink or engraving. It was something alive, beating like a heart trapped in glass.

  Sera stepped back. I didn’t.

  “Do you hear it?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  But I did.

  A voice—no, voices—started to leak through from the other side.

  Whispers. In my language. In others. In none.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  > “The script no longer holds.”

  “The fracture has remembered your name.”

  “Silence has a price.”

  —

  I wanted to pull away, but the mirror held me. Not physically—mentally.

  Like my mind had stuck to the image… a personalized warning.

  And from within the static, a single voice rose above the rest:

  > —Ryouhei.

  My name.

  Spoken warmly. Intimately.

  Then:

  —I knew you’d come.

  —

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The surface rippled. The image dissolved, and in its place appeared a face.

  A woman.

  The same one I’d seen in dreams before waking in Eclipsia.

  Gray eyes, white hair, a scar running across her lip.

  She wore the clothes of someone once sacred… now desecrated by merely existing.

  And she was smiling.

  > —I’m S.

  And you… are the mistake we’ve been waiting for.

  —

  Sera tried to break the connection with a spell, but her magic bounced off the mirror.

  As if it was already connected… to something greater.

  “Why did you show me that throne?” I asked.

  “Because some things can only be built on corpses,” she said calmly.

  “But also because… you have to choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  > Which version of yourself the world will remember.

  And which one you’ll bury… in oblivion.

  —

  The glass cracked.

  A red flash flooded the room.

  And then—silence.

  But the letter “S” remained.

  Like a promise.

  Or a threat.