Chapter 27: The Memory Hunter
The mirror-cloaked figure didn't walk—it glided, as if the ground itself bent forward to meet its steps. Its presence pulled at Isabelle's thoughts like a gravity well, distorting her sense of time, memory, and meaning.
Isabelle stepped protectively in front of Rowan, her breath ragged. "Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head, and the mirrored veil rippled, showing flashes—Isabelle, bleeding under a winter moon; Rowan, bound to a burning wheel; Nox, drowning in ink. These were not just memories—they were potential outcomes.
"I am the one who ensures the Archive is never emptied," the Hunter said in a voice made of every version of her father she had ever known. "I guard the grief you would trade away. I ensure the wheel turns."
"You feed off it," Rowan snapped, stepping beside her. "You need the loop."
The Hunter's reflection twisted, and the surrounding Archive reacted—corridors constricted, memories shrieked, and pathways dissolved into static. The Hunter raised a hand, and a ripple of forgetting surged toward them.
"Run!" Isabelle shouted, and they bolted down the only path still glowing.
But it wasn't a corridor—it was a moment.
They found themselves suddenly in a village square neither had visited before, but both recognized. The smell of wet iron, the shrill echo of a bell. A crucible point in one of their past lives. Rowan stumbled.
"Wait, this—this is where I died in Cycle Twelve."
"And I watched it happen," Isabelle said slowly. "That's when I stopped trusting anyone."
The Hunter had forced them into memory itself—a trap built from their own past.
"Split up," Isabelle whispered. "He can't fracture both of us at once. Find an anchor."
As they parted, Isabelle slipped into a narrow alley that blurred at the edges. The villagers, only half-formed, stared with unblinking eyes. She reached into her pocket, praying the Archive had left her one gift.
The locket was still there.
Inside it was not a photo, but a shard of mirror—cut from the same material as the Hunter's veil. A reflection she could control.
She held it up as the Hunter appeared again at the alley's end.
"I remember you now," she said. "You're not just the cycle's enforcer. You were me, once."
The Hunter paused.
"A version of me who gave up. Who became the cage instead of breaking it."
The mirror shard in her hand pulsed. The Hunter stepped closer, slower now.
"Every time I forget, you grow stronger," Isabelle whispered. "But this time—this time, I choose to remember."
She flung the shard into the Hunter's veil. It shattered, not with a sound, but with silence.
The Archive shook.
From across the memory-village, Rowan shouted her name.
She ran toward him. The sky above peeled open like old film. The memory dissolved, and they landed once again in the present, gasping, their hands still clasped.
The Archive faded into mist behind them.
The path ahead was no longer just glowing—it was real.
But Isabelle's vision blurred, her knees buckled. "I left too much behind…"
Rowan caught her, but his face was pale. "You didn't leave it. You burned it."
From the distance, Nox's voice returned, weary and amused. "Welcome to the real war."