The cracked mirror no longer reflected the room.
Instead, it showed a place outside time.
An altar of ash.
A sigil wrapped in thorns.
And chains—endless, rusted chains—dangling from a ceiling too high to see.
Kairo didn't breathe.
Didn't blink.
Because behind the altar, something was standing.
Something shapeless, draped in cloaks of shadow and memory.
It didn't speak.
But the room began to tilt. The floor felt like it was slipping out from beneath him.
> "Kairo," Lyra said, her voice sharp. "What is that?"
He didn't answer.
Because if he spoke, the mirror might listen.
---
It wasn't his first time seeing the Room Without Time.
When he was seven, it appeared in a dream—a room filled with whispering statues and a ticking sound without a source. He forgot the dream the moment he woke up, but the fear lingered for years.
Now it was real.
And it was responding to him.
Or rather—to the Fourth Seal awakening inside him.
The room wasn't a memory.
It was a prison.
A place where the pieces of himself that had been cut away were still being held.
---
He stood.
Walked slowly toward the mirror.
Each step made the image inside ripple, like he was stepping on old names and fractured identities.
Then something shifted.
Inside the mirror, one of the chains twitched.
And with a sickening snap, it broke.
---
Elsewhere...
In the city of Eldholt, the Grand Bell rang at an hour it never rang.
At the exact moment the chain snapped, all seven of the academy's prayer bells tolled—despite no one pulling the ropes.
A monk dropped to his knees.
A sorceress fainted.
A machine that had been dormant since the War of Glass came to life and began humming a single word:
> "Heir... Heir... Heir..."
---
Back in the dormitory...
Kairo stumbled backward. The mirror went dark.
Then shattered.
Not exploded—but shattered inward, like something had pulled the shards into the void.
Lyra didn't scream, but she did reach for her dagger.
> "You're not sealed anymore," she said. "Are you?"
Kairo was silent.
He looked at his hands.
They weren't glowing. No markings. No flames. Just hands.
But inside—he could feel the shape of something old, something incomplete.
The Fourth Seal wasn't power.
It was knowledge.
Specifically, knowledge of how to access the Room Without Time.
> "One of the chains has broken," he murmured. "That's not supposed to happen yet."
Lyra backed up, bumping into a floating lantern. It spun, then dimmed.
> "How many chains are there?"
> "Twenty-four."
> "How many are left?"
> "Twenty."
She froze.
> "You already broke four?!"
Kairo turned away. Picked up a cloth and wrapped it around the mirror frame, binding it in place with a rune-etched cord.
> "I didn't break them," he said. "They're... breaking on their own."
---
They left the room an hour later. Not because they wanted to, but because the dream-walkers had started appearing in the halls.
Not as ghosts.
But as students.
Their faces blank.
Their eyes mirror-silver.
Each one walking slowly, methodically, toward the center of the academy—where the Wellspring Tree grew.
> "Something's drawing them," Lyra whispered.
> "No," Kairo corrected. "Something's calling them."
---
In the library courtyard...
The head librarian stood despite his bleeding eyes.
He spoke in a voice layered with three tones:
1. His own.
2. A voice of wind through iron.
3. A voice that sounded like pages being torn in reverse.
> "The Fourth has stirred. The Room has been touched. The Echoes... will follow."
---
Night fell.
And when it did, the sky over the academy turned purple-black. No stars. No moon.
Just the burning outline of a lock in the heavens.
As if the sky itself had been sealed once—and now, it too was starting to crack.
Kairo stood by the wellspring basin, staring upward.
> "They're going to find me now," he muttered.
> "Who?" Lyra asked, still beside him, arms folded tight.
He didn't answer.
Because in truth, he didn't know who would come first.
The ones who sealed him?
The ones who forgot him?
Or the ones who never stopped watching?
---
Flashback: A memory that never happened
He stood in a throne room of iron and mist.
He was older. Eyes deeper. Voice colder.
And there were twelve figures kneeling before him, their backs tattooed with his name.
> "You bound yourselves to me," he had said. "You made me your axis. Now you will suffer my chains."
The memory ended before it began.
And yet—it left behind a scent.
A taste.
A fear.
---
The next morning, the sky had returned to normal.
But the Wellspring Tree had changed.
Its leaves were falling.
Each one etched with the name Kairo, written in a hundred scripts.
And at the base of the trunk, a word had burned itself into the wood:
> "Bearer."