The first sign wasn't ships.
It was light.
A second sun rose above the eastern horizon, smaller, sharper, and wrong. It cast no warmth. It bled no shadows. Where it touched the sky, clouds curled back like burned parchment.
Ayélè called it what the city feared most:
"A mirror sun."
And Elias? He felt it in his bones.
This wasn't natural. This was a crafted thing. Someone had leapt and rewritten the laws of heaven.
From the outer watchtowers, they came into view.
Ships shaped like bones and mouths, sails made of reflective cloth. Each vessel bore a single emblem etched in dark crimson:
A twisted version of Roe's cipher.
Not just glyphs, but names Elias recognized. Lives from before. Lost threads. Other versions of himself.
The enemy weren't strangers.
They were echoes.
Ayélè stood beside Elias on the western parapet, her eyes tracking the horizon.
"You've seen this symbol before," she said.
"Yes. In Roe's world. On a wall covered in old codes. I thought it was a lie. But it was a memory."
"Yours?"
"No," Elias said quietly. "Darwish's. Maybe even someone older."
Ayélè turned to him, her voice hard.
"Then this isn't an invasion."
"No," Elias said. "It's a correction. A rival version of the world, being written over ours."
The first wave reached the shore by nightfall.
They wore masks shaped like beasts, horned cats, serrated birds, jawless hounds. Their weapons shimmered like heated glass. And behind them came the Archivists: hunched figures dragging mirrors on chains.
These mirrors weren't tools.
They were doors.
With each one planted in the earth, the land bent. Walls folded. Stones inverted. The city's reality was being pulled inward, torn by counter-truths.
Elias and Ayélè fought to reach the temple, where the heart-mirror still pulsed.
"Why do they want our mirror?" Ayélè shouted.
"They don't want it," Elias gasped. "They want to overwrite it. Replace it with their own."
"But why now?"
"Because they've found what they needed," Elias said.
And he remembered:
In Roe's time, a man had touched a broken mirror and screamed the name "Darwish."
That man had said, "The Watcher gave up on you."
They reached the chamber again, deeper now. Beneath even the vault of the first mirror.
There, in a vault carved from obsidian, they found another presence.
A boy.
He looked twelve. Maybe younger. But his eyes were ancient. And around his throat hung a thread of glass teeth, each inscribed with glyphs only Elias recognized.
"You're not one of them," Elias said.
"Not anymore," said the boy. "They used me to map the folds. I leapt too early. I shattered, but they caught the pieces. Built this invasion from my fragments."
Ayélè raised her blade.
"Who sent you?"
"He did," the boy said. "The other one. The one who broke the Watcher's first sentence."
Elias froze.
"Darwish?"
The boy shook his head slowly.
"No. Older. Before names. He has many faces. You've seen one in the mirror. He calls himself He Who Does Not Leap."
The idea shouldn't have been possible.
Every leaper Elias had met, Darwish, Rae, the burning man in the library, had always moved forward. Even if sideways in time, they still obeyed the mirror's law: leap, learn, die, leap again.
But this figure?
He refused the leap.
He watched, but never moved.
And from that stillness, he built a new order. A world that could overwrite others by anchoring them to his unchanging truth.
This was no longer a war of knowledge.
This was a war of authorship.
The battle outside reached the temple walls.
Ayélè led the defense, her armor laced with ciphers Elias carved into the plates. She fought like a fury, her every strike echoing with the power of half-remembered prayers.
Elias stood inside the sanctum, hand on the mirror, trying to force it to respond.
It didn't reflect anymore.
It pulsed.
A voice emerged, not the Watcher's usual whisper, but something deeper. Ancient. Familiar.
"You are not alone."
Elias fell to his knees. The mirror showed three faces:
Rae, still cloaked in temporal robes, her eyes sorrowful.
Marise, smiling, but her smile was torn at the edges, like she knew what he didn't.
And the Watcher itself, weeping black fire.
"One of you must leap," the mirror said. "And one of you must stay."
Ayélè burst in, bloodied, dragging the body of a fallen Archivist. The mirror behind her cracked again.
"They're using the child's memory to open a back door into this timeline," she said. "You have to close it."
"How?" Elias asked.
"You told me blood is a language. So speak."
Elias stepped forward.
The boy, the broken leaper—reached out, pressing his glass-thread necklace into Elias's palm.
"He watches you now," the boy whispered. "He fears what you might choose."
Elias pressed his bleeding palm to the mirror.
He didn't ask it to leap.
He didn't ask it to open.
He asked it to remember.
And the mirror, for the first time, showed him everything:
His first name.His first leap.The moment he stopped being a man and became a sentence waiting for punctuation.
And in that moment, Elias did not leap.
He rewrote.