Chapter 17 — The Mirror's Eye
The shard lay motionless under the lamplight, as if waiting. Isabelle hovered over it, heart thrumming like a warning drum. She touched the etched word — Awaken — and the air thickened. The silence wasn't empty. It listened.
Suddenly, the world bent inward.
Her vision blurred, tunneled, then inverted. She was falling. Not through space, but through time.
And then she was standing in candlelight.
The room smelled of lavender, myrrh, and old stone. Robes brushed her skin — not the modern coat she'd worn, but ceremonial fabric, embroidered in gold. Before her stood a circle of hooded figures. One spoke:
"Sister Elira, your soul bears the memory. You must not forget."
The name echoed in her skull. Elira. Not Isabelle.
A man stood at the center, arms bound, eyes wide with terror. Isabelle — no, Elira — held a mirror in her gloved hand. The ritual was mid-process. She remembered this moment.
She remembered stopping it.
She'd stepped out of the circle. Had whispered:
"We are not gods. We cannot bind a soul without cost."
The memory cracked. Heat surged behind her eyes. She dropped the mirror — both in the past and now — and screamed.
Reality snapped back like a rubber band.
She lay on the floor of her inn room, gasping, sweating. Blood dripped from her nose. The shard of mirror pulsed once, then cooled.
A memory had awakened — but not completely. She knew her name from a past life now. Elira. And she knew that the cycle hadn't started with her death.
It had started with her choice.
A knock came at the door.
Maeve.
"You went back, didn't you?" she asked without preamble.
"I saw… something. A ritual. I stopped it."
Maeve's voice dropped. "Then they're already hunting you again. That choice — it echoes. Every time you resist, the loop tightens. But there's a way out."
She handed Isabelle an old map. Charcoal markings circled a monastery ruin far into the hills.
"They called it the Eye of the Mirror," Maeve whispered. "If the mirror began there… maybe it ends there, too."