Chapter 28: The Iridescent Vale
The map shimmered with heat as Nox rolled it across the broken altar. "This is it. The Iridescent Vale—what's left of the seventh anchor."
Rowan frowned. "The Vale's unstable. It's not a place, it's a… consequence."
"Exactly," Nox said, folding his arms. "The Order buried one of their control roots deep in there. We pull it up, we sever a whole cycle sequence."
Isabelle traced the symbol on the map: an ouroboros unraveling. Her pulse quickened. "Then we go in."
The team assembled at twilight. The Iridescent Vale, visible from the ridge, looked like a valley wrapped in smoke and fractured light. Time stuttered at its edges—crows flying backward, trees growing and dying in seconds. A warning, and a lure.
"It'll twist you," said Mareth, the last of the Order's defectors, joining them in her dark robes. "The Vale feeds on contradiction. You'll see things that never were—but could have been."
They entered together.
Within moments, the world bent.
Isabelle found herself walking beside her mother—not her real mother, but one who had lived. Who had raised her. Who had taught her to break mirrors not to escape, but to create new paths.
Rowan vanished. In his place was an older version of himself, blood on his hands, eyes full of regret.
"You're not real," Isabelle whispered.
"No," the phantom replied. "But I'm you when you fail again."
A pulse of pain radiated through the Vale. Isabelle dropped to her knees.
Stay anchored. Remember the mission.
She reached into her coat and clenched the broken compass Rowan had handed her days ago—a symbol of direction without fixity. It pulsed with warmth.
Somewhere ahead, Mareth's scream broke the fog.
The team reconvened near the anchor point: a great mirrored obelisk embedded in a lake of still fire. It reflected not their bodies, but their futures—some triumphant, some monstrous.
"The Order uses this place to reinforce their predictive models," Nox said grimly. "They don't just watch us—they shape us."
Rowan raised a hammer etched with runes. "Then let's break their lens."
They struck together.
The obelisk cracked.
Reality rippled. The Vale began to collapse, not destructively—but liberatingly. Light poured through rifts, not blinding, but clarifying.
As they fled the shattering landscape, Isabelle looked back one last time. She saw the illusionary mother still standing in the fire.
"You're not real," she whispered.
The woman smiled. "No. But you are."