Veltharion, 3rd Epoch. Shadow Hour approaches.
It began with a bell.
Not the deep, iron-throated gong of the royal quarter, nor the delicate, trill-like toll of a mourning tower. This sound was colder—like a thought being remembered too loudly. It rang not in the air, but beneath Charles's ribs.
He stopped mid-step in the ruined corridor of the old asylum. The cracked tiles underfoot didn't tremble. No glass shattered. But inside his chest, something resonated. A tone, perfect and unbroken, humming through his bones like an elegy only he was meant to hear.
"Do you… feel that?" he asked.
Zara, two steps ahead, turned. "Feel what?"
Her pink eyes sharpened. Then, her lips parted—not to speak—but to say something that did not belong to this moment:
"You've already opened it, Charles. We just haven't caught up yet."
The world paused.
Then flickered.
Like a scene caught between two projector reels—one familiar, the other… wrong.
Charles opened his mouth, but the air tasted of copper. He looked to Rahul, who was fumbling with his sketchbook, hands shaking. The paper had inked itself again. Another sigil. Another Hollow Eye. This one bled.
Rahul blinked. "It wasn't me. I swear, I didn't draw this—"
The bell tolled again.
This time, Charles's vision darkened—not like fainting, but like something overwriting sight.
For a breathless instant, he wasn't in the asylum.
He was somewhere darker.
Blacker.
A world without reflections.
And in that moment, something inside him whispered—
"You kept remembering the wrong world."
He stumbled back. His hand brushed a mirror on the wall. The glass, once fogged, cleared instantly—not with his reflection, but a boy. His own face, but younger. And terrified.
The boy mouthed: Run.
Zara stepped forward and caught his arm. "Charles, breathe. You're slipping."
"Into what?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she placed a palm against the mirror.
And the mirror—shimmered.
No. It remembered her.
Her expression twisted into one of unease as she murmured a name. Not Charles's. Not Rahul's.
"Zariel."
And then she jerked her hand back, like she'd touched fire.
Rahul's sketchbook burst into flame.
Only the ink burned.
Only the ink.
"Enough," Charles muttered, voice hoarse. "We're going deeper. The gate… it's calling."
No one asked what gate. They all knew.
The asylum had no stairs leading down. But it had a hallway that curved where it shouldn't. A hallway that led somewhere older than the building, older than the city.
The bell tolled again.
And this time… the ink on Rahul's skin rang with it.
The corridor didn't end. It folded.
Charles reached a dead end that wasn't a wall, but a mirror. Floor to ceiling, aged and fogged, the glass stood like a second world paused mid-breath.
But the air here was colder. Not in temperature, but memory.
The reflections didn't follow their movements. Charles stepped forward, his reflection remained still. He tilted his head—the Charles in the mirror tilted it the opposite way.
"This... isn't a mirror," Rahul murmured. "It's a memory."
"No," Zara said. "Worse. It's an option."
The mirror rippled.
Each reflection now moved with a different emotion.
One version of Charles wept. One grinned with blood-caked teeth. One had no eyes.
Then, a whisper curled into Charles's ear:
"Which one of you died?"
He backed away. His heartbeat outpaced the bell tolls, which were now echoing softly, impossibly, within the glass.
"Don't touch it," Zara warned.
Rahul didn't listen. He stepped closer, drawn to a face in the glass that wasn't his—but his sister's.
"That's not real," Charles snapped.
"She died five years ago..." Rahul whispered. "But she remembers me. Look—she's mouthing something."
In the mirror, the girl's lips moved.
"Run. They remember too much."
Then the glass cracked.
Just once. A thin fracture. As if reality itself had sighed too deeply.
"We need to leave this room," Zara said, her voice clipped. But even she couldn't stop staring at her reflection—not her current one, but the third pane over. That Zara wore white royal armor.
She whispered a name again:
"Zariel..."
Charles turned.
"Who is Zariel?"
But Zara didn't reply.
Because behind the mirror, someone knocked.
Three soft taps. From the inside.
A slow burn of dread pooled in Charles's spine.
Rahul's sketchbook fluttered again. Pages turning on their own, stopping at a blank sheet.
Ink formed.
A single sentence:
"You've already opened it, Charles."
Then another:
"I had to kill you."
And then:
"Because you kept remembering the wrong world."
The mirror's surface liquefied. Like ink dropped into water, the reflections blurred.
But only one remained clear: a Charles with no shadow, wearing a crown of the Hollow Eye.
He smiled.
And whispered:
"Welcome back."
The air tasted like iron. Not the scent of blood, but the memory of it — metallic, ancient, premonitory. A cold silence fell over Veltharion, the kind that came not from absence but anticipation. Somewhere, a child screamed — or perhaps it was the echo of a scream from another timeline. Charles's boots scraped over fractured stone, now glowing faintly with glyphs none of them had etched.
They had stepped beyond the Gate.
Or rather, through something deeper: a moment that had broken in half and kept bleeding.
Zara stumbled forward, hand pressed against her temple. "I just… remembered something I never lived. A man— he taught me how to fight. He said I had to survive the 'Ninth Collapse.' But… I never met him."
Rahul shivered. "Someone just whispered my name. It came from my mouth."
Before them stood a towerless clock. No arms. No numbers. Only a flat, circular face hanging in the fog. Around its base were shadows repeating movements — a woman holding a child, a man drawing a blade, a bird flying into a wall again and again.
Charles touched the clock.
Everything inverted.
The sky flipped — sea-black and pulsing with slow lightning. Buildings decayed, reversed, and reformed in fast succession. A mage casting a defensive barrier screamed as the spell consumed him backward in time — dying days before he was born.
The Shadow Hour had begun.
In the upper districts, the Royal Guard mobilized. High Magister Vareth, clad in golden vein-etched armor, led the Timebinders, elite mages whose chronomantic powers could slow entropy or trap memories in crystalline loops. They moved with grim resolve, aware their mission had already failed in a timeline they hadn't lived yet.
"Reality loop breach confirmed in Sector Twelve. Civilians experiencing memory bleed," one guard shouted.
"Deploy Eschaton Tethers! Cost is irrelevant!" Vareth snarled.
Three mages unspooled shimmering ropes — memories of their own childhoods — and hurled them into the clock's epicenter. The sacrifice anchored fragments of Veltharion's time, momentarily stabilizing the collapse.
But the paradox had already multiplied.
Charles fell to one knee, nose bleeding ink. The Other Charles had vanished, but his presence lingered like a splinter behind Charles's eye.
Zara placed a hand on his shoulder. Her touch grounded him, for a second.
"This is not a place," Charles murmured. "This… moment. It's where I broke."
Zara nodded, not fully understanding. "Then we fix you. Before it spreads."
"No. We're not here to fix."
He stood, voice cold and clear.
"We're here to remember what I had to forget."
In the cracked reflection of a window beside them, Charles's reflection smiled — but he didn't.
Then, a whisper. From his own mouth. But he hadn't spoken.
"What have you forgotten to forget?"
The hour had no shape. No hands. No face.
Just a presence.
It slid across Veltharion like a shiver beneath the skin of time. Glass cracked without sound. Shadows stretched backward. Somewhere, a spell was cast and unwound before it left the mage's lips.
And then, there were two.
Charles stood on the rain-polished obsidian floor of the ruin beneath Veltharion—but another Charles now faced him. Not mirrored. Not inverted. Real.
This second Charles was dressed in charcoal-black robes embroidered with the sigil of the Hollow Eye—not etched but pulsing, as if alive beneath the fabric. His expression wasn't cruel. It was patient.
Too patient.
Zara froze. Her hand hovered near her blade, but she didn't draw it. The silence was too heavy. The rain above had stopped, yet water still ran down the walls, defying gravity.
Rahul blinked rapidly, his lips mouthing numbers. But they no longer aligned with his fingers.
The second Charles smiled faintly and said, "I had to kill you."
The original Charles did not move.
The second Charles stepped closer. "Because you kept remembering the wrong world."
And with that, the sigil on his chest opened.
Not figuratively. Not symbolically.
It opened.
Like a third eye tearing itself into existence, a vertical wound split across the Hollow Eye emblem—and it blinked. Inside it was a glimpse of something not made for words. A room that contained none of the current universe's laws. There were chairs made of regret, tables that wept, and a mirror that didn't reflect but instead judged.
Charles staggered back, eyes wide. He clutched his coat like it might hold him together.
"You never understood," said the other Charles. "Memory is a resource. But identity? Identity is a weapon."
Rahul suddenly gasped, falling to his knees.
"The sigil…" he whispered. "It's in me."
Zara stepped forward. Her blade finally drawn, but trembling. "What do you want from us?"
The second Charles tilted his head. "I want nothing. I'm already you. The version that survived the Shattergate. The one who remembered what needed to be remembered."
Rain began to fall upward. Each drop hung in the air like punctuation marks of an ancient sentence.
The floor fractured. Not physically—no. Conceptually.
Reality buckled. A rift opened behind the other Charles. Inside it: echoes. Dozens of Charleses, each bearing a different scar, different eyes, different fates. Some burned. Some wept. One smiled as he bled ink from every pore.
Zara stepped beside the original Charles. She didn't look at him. She looked at the other Charles, and quietly said, "He's not you. He's what was made of what was taken from you."
That broke something.
The sigil twitched.
The other Charles frowned for the first time.
"Interesting," he said. "In this version, she still believes in you."
A clock with no numbers began to toll in the city above. Twelve chimes, then thirteen, then none. The Shadow Hour climaxed.
Time unraveled.
Charles stepped forward.
His hands shook. His eyes burned.
"You think you remember what matters," he said, voice hoarse. "But you forgot what forgetting costs."
The other Charles smiled sadly.
"Then let me show you."
He snapped his fingers.
And the world split but not like glass.
More like thought.
Veltharion vanished, and in its place unfolded a corridor built from decisions never made. Doors lined either side, hundreds of them. On each, a plaque: "If you had turned left." "If you had never met her." "If you had died in the womb."
Charles stood in the center, breath catching.
Across from him, the other Charles—older now, his voice layered with echoes—spoke without moving his lips.
"Every lie you tell yourself builds this place. Welcome to the Archive of Regret."
Behind Charles, Zara gripped her blade, but even the metal seemed uncertain, rippling at its edges.
Rahul muttered, "There are… more versions of me here than I've ever been."
A door creaked open by itself. Inside, a room flickered—a boy locked in a classroom that never burned, smiling beside a father Charles had forgotten existed.
"You begged to forget him," the other Charles said softly.
"Now he begs to be remembered."
From every door, whispers began:
"Choose."
"Choose."
"Choose."