Chapter Three:

  “The Mirror Field”

  The chains bit into her wrists as they marched her into the light.

  Helen squinted against the glare, blinking until the white haze burned itself into shape. Stone pillars. Sand. High walls bleached by sun and stained by time. Above her, the arena seats were mostly empty—but not silent. Somewhere beyond the shadows, she could feel them watching. Guards. Enforcers. Maybe even one of the Triarchs.

  This wasn’t Damarion’s stage. There were no weapons. No cheering. No blood on display.

  This was something else.

  Helen and the others—roughly sixty in all—were herded into a wide circular space at the arena’s center. No lines. No rules. Just the heat and the eyes.

  A tremor pulsed through the stone walls, rhythmic and slow. She felt it before she heard it—soft at first, like a heartbeat muffled by distance. Then it grew louder. Deeper.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  The illusions started before the announcement.

  At the far end of the arena, a figure materialized from the air like smoke given shape. A woman in a torn robe of ash-smeared crimson and black. Her face was veiled beneath a porcelain mask split by a jagged crack. One eye burned from the gap like a coal buried in snow, and the lower half twisted into a smile that looked etched in agony.

  Thessala the Pale Oracle.

  Her voice carried without echo. No amplification, no distortion. Just words, clear as a whisper at Helen’s ear.

  “You stand upon the Threshold of Truth,” Thessala said. “Today, you will face yourselves. And in so doing, you will show me which half deserves to leave.”

  Helen didn’t move. No one did.

  The mask’s smiling half turned slightly toward them. “The Mirror Field has been set. The rules are simple: survive. Find your truth. Or fall.”

  The ground trembled. Slabs of stone began to rise around them—mirrored panels, twisting into jagged walls. The circle broke. Visibility dropped. The maze began to build itself.

  Helen’s fingers twitched at her side, aching for the hilt of a blade she didn’t have. She looked up—Thessala was already gone. Only the whisper remained.

  “Half will leave,” it said. “Half will stay. And none will be unchanged.”

  The walls closed behind her with a sound like grinding bone.

  Helen didn’t move at first. She kept her back to the jagged panel that had risen from the arena floor, listening. But there was nothing—no footsteps, no voices. Just the sound of her own breath, and the occasional shift of stone on stone as the maze continued to settle.

  The Mirror Field.

  It was darker inside than she expected. Not pitch black, but dim—lit by a strange, sourceless glow that shimmered across the mirrored walls. Each panel reflected her imperfectly: in one she was younger, face clean, eyes wide. In another, she was older, scarred, her hair cut short and eyes hollow. None of them looked back the same way.

  She moved forward.

  Her boots crunched over sand and loose stone. Her reflection followed, fractured a hundred ways as the panels twisted around her. She turned a corner and stopped.

  A body lay in the corridor ahead.

  Face down. Still. Blood pooled beneath it.

  Helen’s first thought wasn’t shock—it was calculation. It could be real. But it could just as easily be a test.

  She approached slowly, one step at a time. When she reached the body, she crouched. The back looked familiar—dark hair, lean shoulders.

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  She rolled it over.

  Her own face stared back.

  Eyes wide. Lifeless.

  Helen staggered back, heart hammering.

  A voice echoed through the corridor—not Thessala’s, but her own.

  “She hesitated.”

  Another panel lit up to her right. In it, her reflection sneered. “She was too slow.”

  More mirrors came alive, each showing a different version of her. One shouted. One wept. One laughed.

  “She can’t win.”

  “She won’t survive.”

  “She left them to die.”

  Helen clenched her fists.

  This was the game.

  Not to fight. Not to run.

  But to break.

  She took a breath, stepped forward again, and walked deeper into the maze.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been walking.

  Time unraveled in the Mirror Field. The sky, if there was one, didn’t change. The air stayed the same—thick, dry, and heavy with the smell of dust and burnt metal. Every turn brought her back to some twisted echo of herself.

  She'd seen a version of her grandmother, waiting by a fire that never went out. She’d seen the heart of Athens burning—the marketplace, the old stone courtyards, the statues melted and toppled.

  The maze didn’t want her dead.

  It wanted her hollow.

  She pressed forward anyway—until the path turned, and the maze showed her the fire again. Her own silhouette, chained to a pillar, eyes burned away to glowing pits. The statues of Athens didn’t fall—they screamed as they melted, reaching for her with molten fingers that never touched. She’d stood there too long. Let the weight hit too hard. And when her hand moved, it wasn’t a decision. It was instinct. She struck the mirror. Not to break it—but to stop it. To silence it. It didn’t crack. It laughed.

  She turned the next corner—and froze.

  A version of herself stood ahead.

  Not in glass.

  Not in a panel.

  In the flesh.

  It stepped forward, barefoot on the stone, same eyes, same scars, same broken knuckles. But the mouth was wrong. Too wide. Too calm.

  Helen moved backward, instinctively checking the walls for an exit. None appeared.

  The other Helen mirrored her, step for step.

  "Why fight?" it asked, voice her own—but colder, laced with something she couldn't name. "We’re the same. Let me finish what you’re too tired to do."

  Then it ran at her.

  Helen dove sideways, shoulder hitting stone as the doppelg?nger crashed into the spot where she’d just stood. Not an illusion. Not smoke. It hit hard, like bone on bone.

  She scrambled to her feet. The other was already turning, eyes locked, mouth stretching wider.

  It charged again—only this time, Helen didn’t dodge. She stepped in.

  They collided like war.

  She felt the impact in her ribs, the burn in her shoulder.

  Helen drove her elbow into its throat, then slammed its head into the mirrored wall behind them. The glass didn’t crack—but the reflection did.

  The other Helen flickered. Twitched. Then vanished into dust.

  The air calmed.

  But now she was bleeding.

  The cut on her arm wasn't deep, but it stung in a way that said real.

  She looked around. No more duplicates. No more voices.

  Just her breath and her heartbeat.

  And then—footsteps.

  Helen dropped low and waited. A figure moved through the corridor—wiry, tense, eyes wide with fear. One of the others. His name was Marcos, she thought. Younger than her. He didn’t see her at first.

  Then he turned—and froze.

  “It’s you,” he said. “You’re not real.”

  Helen stood slowly. “I’m real.”

  “That’s what the last one said. Right before it tried to talk me into killing myself. Then she shattered like glass.”

  He stepped back, hand trembling at his belt. He had a shard of mirror—jagged and sharp. It dripped red.

  “Marcos,” Helen said. “I remember you. You tried to escape the night before the Banner Trial. You got caught. They broke your leg.”

  He flinched.

  “I watched you limp across the finish line,” she continued. “You didn’t scream.”

  He blinked fast, as if trying to clear fog from his eyes.

  Then he dropped the shard.

  A low hum passed through the maze. One of the mirrored walls near them shifted, revealing a new path.

  Helen exhaled.

  Marcos looked at her. “They wanted me to kill you.”

  “I know.”

  He nodded, shakily. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked in silence. Not allies. Not enemies. Just survivors.

  As they moved deeper into the path, the walls shimmered with less urgency. The voices dulled. The illusions dimmed.

  The pressure inside the maze loosened—like a storm moving just far enough off the horizon to make you think it was over.

  But the maze wasn’t finished.

  Not yet.

  The walls didn’t fall so much as vanish.

  One moment, Helen was walking beside Marcos through another long corridor of fractured light. The next, the floor shifted, and the mirrors dissolved into dust that spiraled upward like smoke.

  They stumbled out into sunlight.

  The arena looked different now—emptier. The illusion dome had dropped. Above them, stands that once echoed with unseen voices now sat in eerie silence. There were no spectators. Only the guards.

  And the bodies.

  Helen counted quickly—then stopped. Thirty. Maybe thirty-one. No more.

  Some were walking, like her. Some were crawling. A few stared at nothing. One boy laughed, head tilted back, hands twitching like he was still inside the maze. Another rocked back and forth, blood drying on his palms.

  No one cheered. No one welcomed them.

  The sand drank it all.

  Then the air shimmered.

  Thessala appeared again—projected above the arena like a ghost of glass and flame. Her mask was cracked down the center now, both sides smiling.

  “You have endured,” she said. “For now.”

  She drifted across the arena floor without touching it. Her voice wove between the survivors like a thread tightening around their throats.

  “You were shown your truths. Some of you broke. Some of you bent. Some of you... adapted.”

  Her gaze turned toward Helen. The mask didn’t move, but Helen felt the attention land like a hook in her spine.

  “You’ve earned favor. But not freedom.”

  The projection vanished.

  A gate opened.

  The survivors were herded through it—not by force, but by exhaustion. No one spoke. Not even the guards.

  Back in the cells, Helen sat with her back to the wall, just like before. But everything had changed.

  Across from her, Marcos was still breathing.

  So were others.

  But the silence wasn’t the same.

  It wasn’t fear anymore.

  It was memory.