The mirror no longer whispered.
It showed.
Elias stood before the central shard, what was left of it, and watched as symbols unwound like threads in a loom. Only they weren't glyphs anymore. Not lines, not letters.
They were faces.
Rae.
Roe.
Marise.
And behind them, flickering in the deeper layer of the reflection, Kéon. Darwish. Even the scarred boy Elias had been in the world that burned.
The mirror was done encoding truth.
Now it wove it.
Ayélè didn't trust it.
After the Battle of the Fractured Hall, her once-regal composure had hardened. She no longer asked for answers. She watched Elias with the cold clarity of someone preparing to kill a god in case he blinked wrong.
But Elias had stopped lying to himself.
Each face in the mirror was a thread, braided into something larger, not a timeline, but a pattern. Rae the rebel. Roe the healer. Marise the dream-scribe. All connected by a force older than memory.
"They're not ghosts," Elias murmured.
"No," Ayélè said. "They're witnesses."
The city, once called Ilúmar, was no longer functioning as a place. It had become a cipher itself, its buildings, its bloodlines, its architecture all obeying mirrored rules. A kind of divine syntax. Every stone now felt like a syllable.
They found it in the east plaza: a basin filled with obsidian water. When Elias dipped his fingers in it, faces surged to the surface, not illusions, but imprints.
Rae holding a burning book.Marise crying ink.Roe staring down a soldier with her palms red and open.Elias, multiple versions, one leaping, one burning, one broken.
"The Watcher didn't just watch," he realized."It threaded us. Across time. Across leaps."
Beneath the Temple of Joining, in the vaulted chamber once thought to be empty, Elias and Ayélè uncovered the Loom.
It wasn't a machine. It was an organism, veins of glass and flesh pulsing with soft light. The architecture bent around it as if it had grown into the city. It spun nothing visible, but the air shimmered like silk.
A single phrase kept humming through Elias's mind.
"The city is not a place. It is a sentence waiting to be spoken."
At the Loom's center: a cocoon of mirrored surface. Not reflective now, but absorbing. When Elias touched it, he didn't see a face this time.
He saw a name.
His own.
But written in a language that burned as it was read.
When they left the chamber, the city above had changed again.
The people no longer trusted their neighbors. They whispered of mirror-sickness. Of "thread-broken" souls.
A child claimed to have seen their mother replaced by a hollow version. A priest slit their own throat, revealing a mirror shard embedded beneath their tongue.
It wasn't fear of death anymore.
It was fear of misalignment.
Of becoming not oneself.
Ayélè snapped.
"We have to destroy it," she said, gripping her blood-bound blade.
"You can't kill language," Elias replied, eyes still haunted. "Not if you're made of it."
The mirror no longer passively showed. It began to rewrite.
One by one, names of the city's sacred dead rewrote themselves in the Tablets of Remembering. Kéon's name appeared twice. Then three times.
Once as prophet.Once as betrayer.Once as child.
Ayélè grew quiet.
"What are you becoming, Elias?"
Elias didn't answer.
He watched as the mirrored basin shimmered again and this time, Rae's reflection turned to look at him.
Her eyes were not hers. They were Watcher's eyes.
And they blinked in reverse.
That night, Elias sat in the upper sanctum with the only object still uncorrupted by the mirror, the unfinished ledger from the catacombs. The Book of the Dead Unwritten.
He bled on it.
It opened again.
This time, it showed not futures, but choices.
Two paths:
One, in which the city fell and Rae never remembered him.
One, in which he stayed and let the mirror finish its sentence through him.
And in the margin, a note, one he didn't write, but recognized:
"Language is the first god. You are its last prayer."— Darwish.