The city bled.Not from war. Not yet.But from memory.
Its streets no longer led where they once had. Walls sighed. Statues changed expressions. Names of the dead reappeared on living tongues. The cipher had awakened in full and it was hungry for sacrifice.
Elias knew what it wanted.
And what it would take.
It began in the ritual chamber beneath the old observatory, where no stars had been seen for centuries.
Ayélè stood before the mirror basin, her blade drawn, not in anger, but in certainty. Her hand was steady. Her eyes were fire.
"The Watcher wants us to interpret it," she said. "Not obey. If it's using blood to write its will, then I say we write back."
Elias offered his hand before she asked. Not out of bravery, but resignation.
She didn't hesitate.
The blade slid across his palm, and the blood fell into the mirrored surface below, where it didn't splash, but sank, like ink into paper. Symbols bloomed. Not the old glyphs. These were new.
One pulsed with heat. Another with memory.
Then a third: the same symbol etched on Elias's skin in his last leap. A cipher of interruption, the sign that once unmade a future.
"It responds only to you," Ayélè said quietly.
"Because I don't belong here," Elias whispered. "I'm not written in this world. I'm a correction."
And then the basin began to drain.
Stairs spiraled into shadow, behind where the mirror had stood. Neither Elias nor Ayélè had ever seen the passage before—not even in the ancient blueprints or blood-charts. It was hidden not by architecture, but by syntax, a place the city didn't allow to be spoken of.
The passage was tight. The walls were warm. It felt like walking through the lungs of something alive.
After nearly an hour of descent, they reached it.
A circular vault, older than the city itself. A temple beneath temples.
At its center: the first mirror.
It was cracked, but alive. Not made of silver or glass, but of something deeper, obsidian laced with veins that pulsed red. And around it: symbols burned into the stone not with tools, but with will. The earliest cipher. Primal. Pre-human.
And in front of it, waiting, was a figure.
The figure wore no robe, bore no crown. But the air around them bent, refusing to touch them fully.
They spoke without mouth.
"You've brought your blood. At last."
Ayélè stepped forward, blade raised, but Elias held her back.
"Who are you?" Elias asked.
"I am the echo of the first who leapt," it said. "The one who saw that time could be revised. I did not succeed. I became the lock."
Elias stared. He knew that voice.
Not its tone, but its cadence. Its logic.
It sounded like Darwish.
"Are you him?" he asked.
"No," said the echo. "He came later. I was before Darwish. Before the Watcher found its name. I was the stutter in time's first sentence."
The echo gestured to the mirror. It flickered, and Elias saw something terrifying:
Himself.
But not Kéon. Not the Elias from Rae's time. Not the burned boy.
This version of Elias was empty-eyed. Consumed. Standing in a city that no longer had ground, only mirrored sky. And speaking one word:
"Unwrite."
The echo turned.
"You are the Watcher's language now. But blood is its ink. If you wish to change the sentence, you must pay the price of authorship."
Ayélè moved to intervene, but Elias stepped forward.
"What does it want from me?"
"Not your death. Not this time. Something rarer."
The echo raised a mirrored shard. It showed a vision, Elias as a child, before any leap. Laughing. Holding hands with a girl whose face he could no longer recall.
"Your name," the echo said. "The sound you first answered to. Give it up. And the mirror will listen."
Ayélè shouted, "No!", but the chamber itself had stilled.
Elias reached out, hand bleeding anew, and touched the shard.
The vision of the child warped. Blurred. Then vanished.
Something inside him unspooled, like a thread being snipped.
He could no longer remember what his mother had called him.Could no longer summon the name whispered to him in dreams.
He had no name now.
And the mirror accepted the sacrifice.
Its surface burned open like an eye.
And revealed the past.
The chamber filled with visions, each too fast to grasp, but each true:
A queen in chains carving the first glyphs into her skin.
A blind child dreaming of cities not yet built.
The Watcher, not born, but assembled, from the minds of those desperate to undo regret.
Elias, again and again, in different bodies, each fighting the pull, each losing a little more.
"You are not a man," the echo whispered. "You are a revision."
Ayélè caught Elias as he fell to his knees.
He was still bleeding.
But now the blood wrote words on the floor.
One sentence, over and over:
"The first leap was not a choice."
Back in the upper world, the invasion had begun.
Ships with mirrored sails. Soldiers wearing masks shaped like animals. And on their banners: a symbol from Roe's world, a glyph Elias had seen before.
Another traveler had come.
And they had brought the wrong kind of mirror.
Ayélè and Elias stood at the temple gates, the city behind them quivering like a held breath.
"The mirror wants us to leap again," Elias said.
"Then why hasn't it taken you?"
"Because this time," Elias said, "it wants me to stay. It wants me to choose."