There was no sky.There was no ground.There was only the leap and the pain of remembering everything at once.
Elias hovered inside a moment that should not exist.
The Watcher was silent now. No riddles, no bargains. It was merely present, its form smeared across a thousand mirrored shards that swirled around Elias like planets.
Each shard showed a life:
A young Rae in a garden, touching a flower that withered in her palm.
Roe as a child, drawing sigils in sand, unaware that they summoned.
Marise bound in a glass tomb, her heartbeat counting down.
A man with Elias's eyes, but older, broken, building something he feared.
The shards began to spin faster. They were collapsing inward, folding into his skin, into the mark over his heart, now a blazing cipher, no longer static but pulsing like a second organ.
He screamed.
The mirror was inside him now.
He fell into heat.
Stone cracked beneath him. The world shook with artillery. Above, the false sun still blazed, a sphere not of light but of reflected agony, suspended over the broken skyline like a watching eye.
Elias gasped.
He was still Kéon and also not. His body was both burned and reborn. His skin held the memory of fire, but his mind, his mind, was clear.
He had leapt alive.
And now, he remembered it all.
No more forgetting. No more "waking up" in another life.
Elias had threaded himself through time, and he was still Elias.
Ayélè was gone. He knew that instinctively. Not dead, but... removed. Her presence was like a song now buried beneath silence.
The Temple of the Mirror had collapsed. The enemy soldiers, those time-shifted agents of the rival empire, were dragging survivors through broken gates.
But Elias saw them now.
They were leapers, too.
Not just travelers through space, but echoes, shaped by their own mirrors, their own Watchers.
And among them was one he recognized.
Darwish.
He stood on a balcony above the dying city, clothed in the same black veil he wore in Rae's timeline. But now he was younger. Or older. Or possibly neither.
Darwish raised a hand. The army stopped moving.
"You leapt conscious," he called down to Elias."You cheated the weave."
"You were already cheating it," Elias replied."I just stopped losing."
Darwish smiled.
"Then let's stop playing with knives. Come. There's something you need to see."
They climbed through ruin, up the broken spine of the city's central tower.
Darwish spoke little. But Elias noticed the symbols etched into the walls as they ascended: same cipher language, but inverted, mirrored in script and shape.
Finally, at the tower's summit, they entered a room without ceiling, open to the burning sky.
And there it was:
The true mirror.
It was massive, a disc the size of a cathedral dome, levitating over an obsidian plinth. Around it swirled fragments of time: rain in reverse, trees growing and un-growing, cities blooming and crumbling in seconds.
"This is the one they all echo," Darwish said."The First Mirror. The wound left by the Somnarch when it broke time."
Elias stepped closer.
His cipher mark burned white-hot. The mirror shimmered in response.
"Why did it call to me?"
Darwish's expression darkened.
"Because it needs a new host. One who can hold time together without unraveling."
"That's why the Watcher chose me."
Darwish shook his head.
"The Watcher doesn't choose. It feeds. And you've fed it well, Elias. But it's starving now. The next leap isn't travel. It's transformation."
From his belt, Darwish drew a blade of mirror-glass, its edge humming with light.
"We can end it," he said."We shatter the First Mirror. We burn the parasite from the weave. We go back to silence."
Elias stared at the blade. At the mirror. At the threads of Rae, Roe, Marise flickering through it like ghosts.
"If we destroy it," Elias asked, "what happens to them?"
"They die," Darwish said, too calmly."And they stay dead. Not fragments. Not loops. Gone."
"And if I take its place?"
"You become the cage. The dream that dreams the rest. You burn forever. But they live."
Elias didn't speak.
The mirror opened. Its surface turned to flame—not fire, but memory, layered and spiraling like a galaxy.
He looked at Rae's image. Then Ayélè's.
Then at Darwish.
And he made his choice.
Elias stepped into the mirror.
And for the final time, he did not die.
He became.
His skin turned to glass. His blood to cipher. His breath to wind across centuries.
The Watcher screamed as it was sealed inside him.
Every timeline he had touched rethreaded, restored, sung back into harmony, through his body, now a vessel, now a living mirror.
The false sun flickered.
And then, it went out.
Somewhere, in a city long forgotten, a child looks into a shard of black glass.
It shows him a man made of flame and mirror and flesh, whose name was once Elias.
And the shard speaks, softly:
"Your turn."