He remembered the color of ash before he remembered his own name.

  Not white. That was too clean, too sterile. It was something murkier, the kind of grey that hung in the air after the fire had already done its worst. Like the memory of burning, not the act. It coated the barracks—every tile, every cot, every breath he took. It even stuck to his eyelashes. He blinked up at the cracked ceiling and wondered, absently, if sleep was just another way to drown.

  The ceiling had a long fracture running through it—spider-thin and half-hearted, like the building was trying to say something but got tired halfway through. He followed the line with his eyes, slow and dull. It disappeared behind a tangle of wires that buzzed faintly and then snapped still again. No light came from them. Nothing ever did.

  He stayed lying down. Breathing quietly. If he didn’t move, if he kept still enough, maybe the ghosts would forget about him. Maybe they’d move on.

  But they never did.

  And Vaelian Cross was still alive. Somehow. Always.

  He rolled onto his side. The cot whined beneath him, the sound too sharp in the stillness. Was it morning? Hard to say. The light bleeding through the small window had that weird, distorted haze to it, like it had been scraped through a dozen filters and came out wrong. Pale, almost bruised. Aether light. Cold and sour.

  His shoulder popped as he sat up. The pain was familiar, like an old roommate who never paid rent but wouldn’t leave. Muscle memory. Or maybe just the body forgetting how to be a body. He ran a hand through his hair—damp. Cold sweat, probably. Or maybe the tail-end of a Thalyss dream. He couldn’t tell. Didn’t matter either way.

  The mirror across from him had been broken for months. Someone smashed it during a riot—who, no one remembered anymore—but the shards still clung to the wall like stubborn teeth. In the fractured glass, twelve crooked versions of him blinked back.

  None of them looked quite real.

  The corridor outside was quiet. Not silent—that didn’t exist here. But quiet in that way that made your stomach curl a little. Like the quiet before something shifts. You could hear footsteps in the distance. Metal on metal. But no voices.

  His boots scuffed against the floor as he walked. Not hurried. Not lazy. Just… there. Existing in the space he occupied, like he had no real reason to be going anywhere, but not enough of one to stay still either.

  He passed two squads. No one saluted. No one spoke. Just a handful of side-eyes and half-buried whispers. A few stuck to him like gnats.

  Something-something Twin Mirror.

  Something-something mad.

  He didn’t flinch. Just kept walking.

  There were worse things to be called than a mistake.

  Commander Thren was waiting in the observatory, standing still with that posture that always made her look like part of the architecture—sharp-angled, exhausted. She didn’t greet him. Just nodded toward the viewport, eyes never leaving the glass.

  He moved beside her. The Aetherglass buzzed faintly beneath their boots, like it could feel them standing there. Like it didn’t like it.

  Below, the city sprawled out in slow decay. Spires of steel and synthetic light reaching into the sky like they were trying to stab something that wasn’t there. Down below, the Undercity twisted under a blanket of smoke and filter haze. Nothing ever stopped moving down there. Not really.

  He could feel it even now—the low pulse of Thalyss bleeding up through the floor, whispering behind his teeth. A wrongness that had settled in his bones and didn’t seem interested in leaving.

  Thren handed him a report pad. He didn’t take it right away.

  “Recon team C-5,” she said. “Convergence anomaly in the Verge. Five dead. One… back. Partially.”

  His fingers curled around the pad. He didn’t read it.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  Her silence lasted long enough to be considered deliberate.

  “They were Echo-bonded,” she said eventually. “Early-stage. Unauthorized ritual. Someone leaked it.”

  “Your mess.”

  Her jaw tightened. “Your consequence.”

  He looked at her then. Not like a soldier. Not even like a man. Just… tired. That deep kind of tired that lived behind the eyes.

  “Why not just end it?” he asked. “Be easier.”

  He didn’t say it like a dare. Not anymore.

  Thren didn’t blink. “Monsters make better symbols. And we’re out of saints.”

  The Verge District smelled like rust and old breath. A hint of something sweet underneath, like fruit left out too long. He didn’t breathe through his nose. Didn’t have to. The taste of it clung to everything.

  The buildings leaned like tired old men. Whole streets sagged inward, gravity pulling wrong. People moved like shadows—fast, twitchy, hunched over themselves. Trying to be small. Forgettable.

  Vaelian walked through them like smoke. People looked. Not directly. Just enough.

  A girl sat on a cracked column base, legs folded under her. Maybe ten. Maybe younger. Her skin was threaded with black veins—Thalyss bloom, still early. Her eyes were pale as fog, but she turned her head as he passed.

  “You’re the one that burned the Tower,” she said.

  He paused. Just a beat.

  “I’m the one who didn’t stop it.”

  She tilted her head like that made her sad. Or maybe like it made her understand.

  “That’s worse,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Just kept walking.

  There was a body in the pit. Male, probably. Used to be. Now it was… wrong. The head was mostly gone. Replaced with something that pulsed like a second heartbeat. Echo-bond had failed. Or never took. Hard to tell.

  Filaments of dark moss curled out of the eye sockets. Something was growing from the ribs. Still moved. Not breathing. But twitching.

  He stared at it for a while.

  A medic shifted beside him. “Sir… should we—?”

  “No,” he said. “Burn it.”

  “But the—”

  “It’s corrupted,” he said flatly. “Same as him. Burn it before it sings.”

  They obeyed.

  They always did.

  Later, back in his room—if you could call it that—Vaelian stood with his hands pressed flat against the wall, fingers splayed wide like he could hold something back. The surface was cold. His skin wasn’t.

  Something shifted beneath it.

  He didn’t scream. He never did. Not anymore. But he pressed harder, jaw clenched, arms trembling. His breath came shallow, pulled through teeth like he was rationing it.

  The Aether light buzzed overhead, faint and unreliable. It flickered once, caught on something invisible, then settled into a dull hum again. A warning. Or a joke.

  He pulled away from the wall slowly. The sweat on his back was slick, wrong somehow—like the heat was coming from inside. Like it wasn’t his body anymore. The mark along his shoulder blade pulsed, faint spirals of black and white, deeper than ink. Living, maybe.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor, bare skin on cold tile. The sweat didn’t match the temperature of the room. His breath ghosted in front of his face anyway.

  The mark wasn’t hurting. Not in any way that counted. Pain had packed up and moved out a long time ago. It was something worse now. Memory, maybe. But not his own.

  He pressed a thumb to the scar above his collarbone. Shrapnel. Years ago. Should’ve killed him. Didn’t. It killed four others, but not him.

  That had been the beginning.

  He could still hear the sounds. Not of the explosion. That had faded. But the aftermath. The breathing. The silence. The guilt with a pulse.

  The Thalyss was behind his eyes again. He could feel it. Not like pressure—more like presence. It had a shape sometimes. It wore faces.

  Sometimes it wore his.

  He let his head fall forward until his forehead touched the floor. Cold. Steady. His heartbeat wasn’t.

  “Not tonight,” he whispered to the dark. “Not tonight.”

  A whisper moved through the room in answer. Not wind. No windows. But the sound was there.

  He dreamed of the river again.

  Not the real one. That was gone—dammed up and bled dry to feed the grids, like everything else. No, this river was the old kind. It flowed backward, against time. Against logic.

  It ran through a canyon of bone and memory, pale light flickering beneath the surface. Shadows moved beneath the current. Some had names. Some wore his face.

  On the shore, a girl stood veiled in linen.

  “Vael,” she called softly. “Come away from there.”

  He tried. But his feet were stuck. Mud? No. Something deeper.

  “Lysara?” he called.

  But she didn’t answer. Her veil moved without wind. Her eyes—if she had eyes—didn’t blink.

  He reached for her.

  The dream cracked.

  He woke with the taste of blood in his mouth. Iron and something older. His wrist throbbed. He looked down and saw the bite marks. Small. Too deliberate to be accidental. Too shallow to be defensive. Not self-inflicted—not exactly.

  “Good morning, Vaelian,” said a voice from the corner.

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  He didn’t look up. Just wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’t sleep anymore.”

  The figure stepped forward. Wore his face. Almost. The smile was too wide. The eyes wrong—bright like hunger, like knowing.

  Echoform.

  One of the stronger ones.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  The Echo tilted its head. “You brought me. Or did you forget?”

  Vaelian stood slowly. Not defensive. Just… steady. Measured.

  “I didn’t invite you.”

  “That’s the thing about mirrors,” the Echo said, circling him. “You don’t have to.”

  Vaelian reached toward the nightstand for his blade.

  It wasn’t there.

  The Echo grinned wider. “Looking for this?” it whispered. Nothing in its hands. Just shadow curling at the fingers like smoke.

  “You think this ends with steel?” it asked. “That there’s a wound deep enough to drain it all out?”

  He lunged.

  And then the training ring.

  The jump was jarring—waking dreams always were—but his body adjusted. It always did.

  The space reeked of ozone and sweat. Dozens of cadets lined the outer ring, watching like spectators at a funeral. Their expressions hovered somewhere between awe and horror. Familiar territory.

  Instructor Hale tossed him a staff. The wood was cold. Old. Familiar.

  “You sure about this?” Hale asked, not quite under his breath.

  Vaelian nodded. “They need to see control.”

  Hale snorted. “You’ve got a weird idea of what that means.”

  Across the ring, the volunteer—a tall kid, too confident, all sharp bones and fast hands—twirled his staff like he thought it meant something.

  Some cadets cheered. They stopped when the fight started.

  Vaelian didn’t move like a man. Not really. More like a memory trying to erase itself. Efficient. Precise. Mean. The staff hummed through the air with each strike. His opponent didn’t land a single hit.

  But it wasn’t clean. Not even close.

  Halfway through, the mark on Vaelian’s back flared.

  White light. Then black.

  The staff in his hands shattered with a sound like bones breaking in water. Power surged up his spine—raw, painful. The air stank of scorched nerves.

  Someone screamed.

  When the smoke cleared, the recruit was twitching on the ground. Alive. But wrong. Something behind his eyes had cracked. Something that wouldn’t go back together again.

  Vaelian stood in the center, chest heaving.

  “Lesson’s over,” he said.

  No one clapped.

  He found Lysara in the greenhouse.

  It wasn’t really a greenhouse anymore—most of the plants were dead or dying, and the light filtering through the cracked dome ceiling had a yellow-green tint that made everything look sick. But she still came here. Sat under the same tree. Or what used to be a tree.

  She was kneeling in the dirt when he arrived, blindfold on as always, her fingers sunk wrist-deep into the soil like she was trying to find something worth holding.

  “You were dreaming again,” she said before he even spoke.

  He lowered himself across from her, boots crunching quietly on the dead leaves.

  “You saw?”

  “I felt.”

  She didn’t lift her head. Didn’t move. Just kept her hands where they were, buried.

  He looked around. Nothing green left. Nothing growing. Just dry stalks and the memory of chlorophyll.

  “Why this place?” he asked. “There’s nothing alive here.”

  She tilted her head, just a little. “Exactly.”

  He waited.

  “I don’t need the garden,” she murmured. “Only the roots.”

  Her voice cracked on the last word. Just a little. Like something in her was splintering under the weight of what it carried.

  He reached out, touched her hand gently. She flinched, almost imperceptibly.

  “I can feel the Echoes getting louder,” she whispered. “They’ve stopped pretending.”

  “They never hid from you.”

  She shook her head. “I meant from the world.”

  He sat with that. Let the silence settle. The kind of silence that wasn’t empty. It hummed with tension, like everything unspoken had weight.

  “You’re changing, Vael.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you still remember who you are?”

  He stared at her hands. Dirt under her nails. Skin like paper stretched over wire.

  “I remember what I promised,” he said finally.

  She nodded, slow. “Then don’t break.”

  That night, the sky cracked open.

  Not a metaphor. Not a dream.

  The real sky. The dome—engineered, supposedly unbreakable—split like glass under pressure. Just for a second. A blink. But it was enough.

  Vaelian was on the rooftop when it happened. Alone. Thinking too loud in his own head.

  He dropped to his knees before he understood why.

  Above him, the sky shimmered—then tore. Light poured through, but not the bright kind. Not sun. It was familiar in the way nightmares are familiar—like something that knew his shape before he had one.

  The tear hummed. Pulsed. Looked at him without eyes.

  And he saw himself.

  Not the version in the mirror. Not the soldier or the weapon or the thing trying to hold together.

  Something else.

  Something becoming.

  His tongue split on his teeth, and the taste of blood grounded him. His fingers scraped raw against rooftop gravel.

  And then it was gone. The sky stitched itself back together like it hadn’t broken at all.

  But the hum remained. A low vibration under the skin. In the teeth.

  By the time the sirens started, he was already moving.

  The briefing room was wrong.

  Too quiet. Too calm. Like everyone was trying too hard to pretend they weren’t scared. The kind of fear that’s been rehearsed. Tucked into uniforms and protocol.

  Vaelian stood in the back. No one told him to leave.

  Holograms flickered in the center of the room—readings, energy patterns, topographical scans. All stuttering. All inconclusive.

  “It’s Thalyss,” someone whispered.

  “No. It’s past Thalyss.”

  He closed his eyes.

  They were both right.

  Thren caught him in the lower corridor after the debrief. No rank. No pretense.

  “You felt it,” she said. Not a question.

  He didn’t respond.

  “You saw it.”

  Still nothing.

  She drew in a slow breath, like she was organizing her fear into folders.

  “If you’ve been mirrorwalking without clearance—”

  “I didn’t walk,” he said. “It walked to me.”

  Her face cracked, just a fraction.

  “That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “None of this is.”

  He walked away before she could answer.

  Back in his quarters, the new mirror was still whole. Issued last week, still smug about it.

  He took off his shirt. Stared.

  The Twin Mirror mark had spread. Threads of black and white wrapped down his ribs now, twisting. Breathing.

  He pressed his fingers to it.

  It pulsed.

  Behind him, a second shadow flickered in the glass. Then disappeared.

  That night, he wrote a letter.

  Not on a console. Not in dataform. Just ink and paper. The way Lysara liked it. The way things felt more real.

  Lys,

  I saw something tonight.

  Not something. Me.

  Another me. Or what I might become.

  It wasn’t angry. That’s what scared me most. It just… looked at me. Like it had already lived through everything I’m still trying to survive.

  It felt familiar. Like bones remembering how they broke.

  You once said the cost of survival is forgetting the shape of your own shadow.

  I think mine learned to walk without me.

  —Vael

  He didn’t seal it. Didn’t hide it.

  Just left it on the nightstand. Too close to the edge.

  The next morning, the lights didn’t come on.

  Aether pulse: dead.

  Backup grid: flickering, like breath caught in a throat.

  People started to panic. Softly. Carefully. The way you do when you’ve been trained to.

  By noon, the sky flickered again.

  This time, it didn’t open.

  This time, it hummed.

  And somewhere far beneath the city—in the root tunnels under the Verge—something answered.

  Vaelian stood at the edge of the breach where the Verge had collapsed inward—like the ground had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale. Buildings half-swallowed. Metal curled inward. Roads twisted like fabric left in the rain too long.

  The pit stretched deep. Deeper than it should. Lined with Aether rot, slick and pulsing. Structures that didn’t make architectural sense curled along the sides—bridges that led to nowhere, staircases that looped inward on themselves like intentions left unfinished.

  The Echoes circled the rim.

  Not attacking. Not speaking. Just watching. Dozens of them. Maybe more. It was hard to count when some had too many limbs and others none at all. All shapes. All faceless.

  None of them moved toward him.

  Except one.

  It was small. Boy-shaped. Wore the outline of a child. But where the face should’ve been—nothing. Just void. A hole that didn’t reflect light.

  It hovered closer, stopping just short of arm’s reach. Still. Quiet.

  And then Vaelian felt it.

  Not words. Not sound.

  A thought pressed into his skull like a thumb against soft clay.

  Which part of you is still real?

  He staggered back like the air itself had punched him.

  The Echo didn’t follow.

  Didn’t have to.

  It had already reached him.

  He didn’t speak for three days.

  Not to Thren. Not to Lysara. Not even to himself. Words felt too thin to carry what had been carved into him.

  Instead, he trained.

  Alone.

  He ran combat drills until his hands blistered. Then bled. Then stopped bleeding. Threw himself against hard surfaces just to feel the impact. Hit the reinforced simulator until it sparked under his weight.

  The last time he’d been in this room, he’d burned a hole through the floor.

  This time, he didn’t crack.

  But he didn’t sleep either.

  The mark stayed silent. But he could feel it… watching. Measuring.

  And maybe—just maybe—that’s what he was doing too.

  Lysara showed up on the fourth day. She didn’t knock. Just opened the door and stepped in like she owned the air around him.

  She carried a bundle of cloth under one arm. Dropped it on the bed.

  “You missed signal flare drills,” she said. Her tone was flat, but fraying. Like she was trying to keep the edge out of it and failing.

  Vaelian wiped sweat from his face. “Didn’t feel like being around people.”

  She didn’t comment. Just nodded toward the bundle. “I made it for you. A while ago.”

  He picked it up.

  A scarf. Woven grey and black. The fabric was soft, worn. Not synthetic. Real cloth. Expensive. Old.

  “Why now?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You’re fading,” she said instead.

  “I’m still here.”

  “No,” she said, more sharply. “You’re leaking.”

  He turned to face her, slowly. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “When I feel you—really feel—you’re not a thread anymore. You’re a knot. Tangled. Pulling in ten directions at once.”

  He stayed quiet.

  “You’re unraveling,” she said. “And you think silence makes it noble.”

  He almost laughed. But didn’t. His throat was too dry.

  “What do you want me to do, Lys? Weep in the mess hall? Show the cadets their monster knows how to fall apart?”

  “You’re not a monster.”

  He scoffed. “A weapon, then.”

  “You’re my brother.”

  That stopped him.

  Neither of them spoke for a while.

  The scarf sat between them on the edge of the bed, like a truce nobody trusted.

  “You’re the only one who calls me that,” he said finally.

  “I’m the only one who means it.”

  That night, the dreams came worse than before.

  Not dreams, exactly. More like someone else’s memories projected inside his skull.

  He was on fire.

  He was underwater.

  He was laughing in a voice he didn’t recognize.

  Then—

  A figure.

  Cloaked in black. Masked in something pale—bone or something older. Holding a shard of mirror like a blade.

  And a voice, soft and terrible:

  Choose.

  He woke to sirens.

  Again.

  Another breach. This time at the Primary Core.

  That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

  Triple-locked safeguards. Null-fields. Protocols that dated back to the founding of the Tower itself. Untouchable.

  Until now.

  Vaelian arrived within seven minutes of the alert.

  The entire level was already swarming—containment crews, black-robed Custodians, people trying not to look directly at the thing that had happened here.

  He didn’t ask permission.

  No one stopped him.

  The hallway leading to the core was… wrong. Sound warped. Gravity slouched inward. Time felt rubbery.

  And the floor—glass. Not metal. Glass that shimmered with faint Aether pulse, too warm under his boots.

  At the breach site, the core housing itself had twisted open like a mouth trying to scream. Not broken. Not melted. Reversed. Like someone had turned the timeline backward and folded it inside out.

  It pulsed.

  Faintly.

  And sang.

  Low and distant. Like a lullaby you didn’t know you remembered.

  He knelt beside it. Touched the edge.

  And in the reflection—

  The cloaked figure again.

  Same mask.

  Same stillness.

  No eyes.

  Just knowing.

  Thren met him outside the vault.

  “You’ve seen it,” she said. This time not afraid. Just… resigned.

  He didn’t deny it.

  She pulled him into a side hall. Voice low. Tense.

  “The Council’s in free fall. They think Kaelthar infiltrated the core grid.”

  “He didn’t.”

  She squinted. “You sound sure.”

  “I saw something else.”

  She froze. “The figure.”

  He met her eyes. “You’ve seen it too.”

  A pause.

  Then she nodded.

  “For weeks now. In dreams. Reflections. Corners of my vision.”

  He exhaled through his nose, sharp. “It’s not from Thalyssar.”

  “No,” she said softly. “It’s older.”

  They stood for a long time in silence. The kind that felt like it came from somewhere deeper than them.

  Behind them, the core flickered.

  Their shadows stretched too far.

  And didn’t quite come back the same.

  Later that night, Vaelian stood on the observation deck, staring out across what used to be the Verge District. Smoke rose from the ruins in slow spirals, curling upward like it wanted to return to something it had lost.

  Below, lights flickered weakly in the skeletal remains of buildings. Power grids stuttering. Shadows too long to be cast by anything honest.

  He watched without blinking.

  His reflection stared back at him in the Aetherglass. Pale. Thin. Unmoored.

  He reached up and touched the glass. Half-expecting it to ripple.

  It didn’t.

  “You were stronger, once,” came a voice from the dark behind him.

  He didn’t turn.

  “You were quieter,” he muttered.

  The Echoform drifted into view beside him—barefoot, silent, shaped almost like him. Almost. The grin too wide. The voice too clean. Edges blurred like smoke on water.

  “Are we fighting again?” it asked, almost bored.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Good,” it said. “I’m not here for that.”

  They stood together for a while. Watching. Not speaking.

  “You’re breaking,” it said eventually. “We can feel it.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll choose soon,” it said. “Whether you mean to or not.”

  “I know.”

  The Echo tilted its head.

  “Will it be her?”

  Vaelian turned sharply. “Don’t.”

  The grin didn’t fade. “You dream of her dying. Different every time. Sometimes you kill her. Sometimes she saves you. Sometimes you beg. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’re already someone else.”

  He lunged, grabbed the thing by its collar. It let him.

  Its body was smoke. But it let him hold it.

  “I said don’t.”

  The Echo’s eyes changed. They weren’t his anymore. Not even close.

  “You still think this ends with a sacrifice,” it whispered. “But what if the only way forward is to become exactly what you’ve tried not to be?”

  He released it.

  His hands shook.

  The Echo didn’t vanish. Just stepped back into the shadow it had come from.

  As it disappeared, it said:

  “You were always the fracture.”

  The next morning, he watched the sunrise through a hairline crack in the dome.

  Not real sun—just projection grid light stitched together by failing Aether code. But it was enough to make his chest ache.

  He thought of Lysara.

  Of Thren.

  Of the boy in the training ring who didn’t flinch fast enough.

  Of Kaelthar.

  Of the masked figure in the river.

  And mostly, he thought of the river itself.

  The one that ran backward.

  He didn’t know which direction he was heading anymore. Forward. Backward. Inward.

  Maybe it didn’t matter.

  Maybe all rivers end the same way.

  In his palm, the mark pulsed softly. No pain. No threat.

  Just… invitation.

  And this time, he didn’t flinch.

  He didn’t look away.

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