There was no staircase. There was no floor.
Ashardio stepped, and the world folded sideways. Not shattered — rearranged.
He blinked and found himself suspended in a hall of reflections, each surface a mirror, each mirror breathing — fogging and clearing as though inhaling his thoughts. They pulsed in slow rhythm, a heartbeat too ancient to be his, yet one that matched his spine with uncanny precision.
One mirror flickered.
A memory — he knew it before it formed.
Kaelith laughing as she tossed a sunstone across a river.
His younger self catching it, smiling like he hadn't yet tasted sorrow.
But the moment fractured before completion — the water ran black, the sunstone cracked, and Kaelith's eyes hollowed as she whispered:
"You left me before you ever met me."
He staggered back. Another mirror rippled.
His mother, in a crimson dusk, whispering to an unseen figure:
"He must never learn of the tether. Not yet."
Her face shimmered… and shifted. For an instant, it wasn't her. It was Kaelith. Or Lyreth. Or someone older. Or him.
The room laughed. Or perhaps it sobbed.
A dozen mirrors lit up at once — not with memory, but futures.
One showed a field of corpses — Celestials, Guardians, Mortals alike — and Ashardio standing at the center, black-winged and expressionless.
Another showed him weeping as he held Kaelith's lifeless body, covered in runes that screamed like trapped birds.
Yet another vision flickered with impossible clarity:
He sat on a throne — but not the Thirteenth. A throne without name. A throne built from broken laws and swallowed time.
The voice returned — not the one from before. A new one. Feminine. Or perhaps it mimicked what he most trusted.
It said:
"You are not who you remember.
And memory is not what happened — it's what you survived."
He turned, and every mirror now showed a version of himself —
One laughing. One killing. One screaming. One turning away from Kaelith. One never born at all.
The floor was gone. The concept of up was a lie.
One mirror — and only one — bled.
A single crimson tear trickled down the glass.
It whispered not in words, but in feeling:
Despair that hadn't yet arrived.
Love that would never be spoken.
A child — his child? — reaching toward him in a world wrapped in ash.
And behind the child, a black sun cracked open like an eye.
Ashardio reached for the bleeding mirror.
As his fingers touched it, the entire chamber convulsed like a beast dreaming in agony.
His memories — both real and implanted — collapsed inward like dying stars.
And somewhere in the real world, far above, a celestial began weeping uncontrollably for reasons she could not name.
In the dark:
A voice not of the present, not of the past,
but of the inevitable, whispered:
"You were never meant to survive the story you were written into."
And with that, Ashardio fell into the truth.
Not down.
Not up.
But inward.