Veltharion, Shadow Hour (Unstable)
It began, again, with a mirror.
But this one did not reflect. It remembered.
Zara stood before it in the lowest vault beneath Veltharion's fractured asylum. Cracked stone cradled the mirror's iron frame, and firelight—no source in sight—glinted across its silver skin. But no image came. Only heat. Only weight.
She didn't see her face.
She saw a throne.
A scorched one.
Upon it sat a woman in white-ash armor, her eyes glowing like coals quenched too late.
"Zara of Now," the woman said. Her voice held a war in it. A silence louder than grief.
Zara's hand went to her blade, but it twitched. She had drawn it countless times. Yet this moment felt rehearsed.
"I know you," Zara said.
"You will," said the woman.
"I am Zariel, Queen of the Burning Mirror. And you are the last mistake I made."
---
Rahul was elsewhere.
In the Arcanum's Echo Hall, where echoes could be trapped like songbirds in cages of logic, he watched a version of himself walk.
Confident. Cold. Scarred across the mouth.
This Rahul didn't fidget. Didn't mumble. He moved with mathematical certainty.
He turned.
Smiled. The smile was wrong.
"Emotion is latency," the Other-Rahul said. "You wasted too much time surviving. I optimized."
A glyph pulsed in his palm.
Rahul felt his own heartbeat sync with it.
"You're not me," he said.
"Not yet."
---
Back in the mirror-vault, Zariel descended from her throne. With every step, ash lifted from the ground, suspended like regret in slow motion.
Zara stepped back.
"What is this? A vision? A curse?"
"A recursion," Zariel said. "You lived long enough to crown yourself. You survived the Ninth Collapse. You walked over Charles's body."
"That didn't happen."
Zariel nodded. "Not here. But it echoes forward."
She raised a gauntleted hand.
"The Shattergate fractures not time, Zara. It fractures outcomes. You and I are siblings by divergence. And the gate is leaking."
Zara's breath caught.
"So what do you want from me?"
Zariel did not blink. "To choose. Before the infection spreads. Before the other Charles wakes the Inkbound Throne."
"Choose what?"
The answer was soft.
"Kill Charles."
Zara flinched.
Zariel's face didn't change. "If you wait, I will have to. And I won't flinch."
---
Rahul touched the glyph burned into his own echo's palm.
It bled heat. Possibility.
"What happens if I reject you?" he asked.
The Other-Rahul cocked his head.
"Then someone else gets to wear the Hollow Eye."
And then came the knock.
Three soft taps. Not on a door. On the mirror.
A figure emerged.
Wearing no face. Only a mirror-mask shaped like the Hollow Eye.
The Mirror Walker had arrived.
And all versions froze.
It began, again, with a mirror.
But this one did not reflect. It remembered.
Zara stood before it in the lowest vault beneath Veltharion's fractured asylum. Cracked stone cradled the mirror's iron frame, and firelight—no source in sight—glinted across its silver skin. But no image came. Only heat. Only weight.
She didn't see her face.
She saw a throne.
A scorched one.
Upon it sat a woman in white-ash armor, her eyes glowing like coals quenched too late.
"Zara of Now," the woman said. Her voice held a war in it. A silence louder than grief.
Zara's hand went to her blade, but it twitched. She had drawn it countless times. Yet this moment felt rehearsed.
"I know you," Zara said.
"You will," said the woman.
"I am Zariel, Queen of the Burning Mirror. And you are the last mistake I made."
---
Rahul was elsewhere.
In the Arcanum's Echo Hall, where echoes could be trapped like songbirds in cages of logic, he watched a version of himself walk.
Confident. Cold. Scarred across the mouth.
This Rahul didn't fidget. Didn't mumble. He moved with mathematical certainty.
He turned.
Smiled. The smile was wrong.
"Emotion is latency," the Other-Rahul said. "You wasted too much time surviving. I optimized."
A glyph pulsed in his palm.
Rahul felt his own heartbeat sync with it.
"You're not me," he said.
"Not yet."
---
Rahul touched the glyph burned into his own echo's palm.
It bled heat. Possibility.
"What happens if I reject you?" he asked.
The Other-Rahul cocked his head.
"Then someone else gets to wear the Hollow Eye."
And then came the knock.
Three soft taps. Not on a door. On the mirror.
A figure emerged.
Wearing no face. Only a mirror-mask shaped like the Hollow Eye.
The Mirror Walker had arrived.
And all versions froze.
The fog curled at the edges of reality.
And through it stepped a woman crowned in fire.
Not real fire. Mirror fire.
Each flame mirrored a face—some hers, some not. Some older, some younger. Some screaming.
Zara didn't breathe.
She couldn't.
The woman before her looked exactly like her.
But the eyes were different. Queen Zariel's irises were glass. Not colored like glass—actual glass. Smooth, transparent, crystalline lenses that shimmered with heat but held no warmth. She didn't blink. She simply gazed through Zara, as if she were peering at a lesser version of herself.
Behind her, the world bled flame. Not fire that consumed—but fire that judged. The kind that held memory like a cathedral held echoes.
"I know what you think I am," Queen Zariel said, voice like iron wrapped in velvet.
Zara swallowed. "You're not real."
"Real is recursive," Zariel answered. "Every step you take toward survival, I've already taken. And every step you don't take... ends in his death."
She raised a hand. Zara flinched. But Zariel simply pointed to the mirror beside them.
Charles lay in it.
Or a version of him.
He was still breathing. Barely. Blood—no, ink—seeped from his eyes like tears.
"He opened the Shattergate, Zara. You know what that means."
Zara didn't reply.
"It means," Zariel continued, "he's a wound in time. A bleeding thought. And he will infect this world, the way he infected mine."
Zara shook her head. "He saved me."
"He'll kill you."
"No."
"He already has."
Zariel turned. Her reflection remained frozen.
"He doesn't remember it yet. That's the danger. The memory is dormant. When he recalls what he did—you die."
Zara took a step back.
Zariel did not follow.
"If you wish to live," Zariel said, "kill Charles before the Shattergate wakes again."
---
Elsewhere.
Rahul walked a corridor he didn't remember entering. It was lined with mirrors, but none showed him.
Instead, they showed the same man, over and over—himself, aged. Hardened. Dressed in sleek battle-worn armor, scars carved with surgical precision.
This Rahul did not sketch. He calculated.
This Rahul did not flinch.
He stood in the archway of fractured obsidian, his silhouette sharp against the chaos of twisted time-light flickering behind him. The Hollow Eye glowed faintly on his chest, but it wasn't ink or cloth. It was part of him, like a second heart fused to the skin.
He looked exactly like Rahul—same storm-gray eyes, same wiry build. But something was wrong.
His expression was clean. Surgical. No tremble in his fingers, no ache in his breath.
Not like the Rahul beside Charles and Zara, who clutched his sketchbook as if it were the last thing keeping him from vanishing into fear.
"You don't know what you are yet," Future-Rahul said, voice measured and smooth. "But you will."
The current Rahul swallowed. "What did I become?"
Future-Rahul smiled faintly. "The thing that couldn't be erased."
He stepped forward. Each footfall left behind a brief echo, not sound, but image—a faded memory of his motion lingering in the air.
"Where's Zariel?" Charles asked, scanning the mirrors along the corridor. Every surface shimmered with spectral fog. Shadows danced behind the glass, some familiar, most wrong.
Future-Rahul paused. "She's making her decision."
The corridor split, silently. Like a ribbon of thought being sliced down the middle.
Charles felt it first—a gravitational shift in memory. Zara's presence blinked out like a candle in a thunderclap.
She was gone.
Rahul turned. "Where is she? What did you do?"
"Nothing," Future-Rahul said. "This place listens. It knows whose truth is louder. She followed hers."
---
Zara stood in a chamber of molten reflections.
A throne room of heat-hazed glass and whispering ash. Fire did not burn here—it remembered. The pillars were charred statues of warriors who had once knelt, then risen, then fallen again, over and over.
On the throne sat Zariel.
Same face. Same bones. Same voice. But the soul behind her eyes was scorched.
Zariel wore no crown, only a band of black-iron etched with the sigil of a broken mirror. Her armor was plated memory—scraps of forgotten battles fused into crimson sheen.
She did not rise. She did not speak at first. She only watched Zara with a gaze like molten judgment.
"You're me," Zara said, sword half-drawn.
"No. You are the possibility I abandoned."
Zara flinched.
Zariel's voice was cool and smooth, like cooled glass. "You chose love. I chose survival. One of us became Queen."
Zara stepped forward, eyes narrow. "And what did you lose?"
Zariel smiled.
"Everything I wanted. Everything I didn't deserve."
Behind her, the walls shimmered. Scenes bled through—a hundred Zaras dying in a hundred ways. A battlefield. A temple. A prison. Each time, she had chosen something other than power. Each time, she had lost.
"Why show me this?" Zara whispered.
"Because the Shattergate doesn't open a door. It fractures a decision."
Zariel finally stood.
She stepped toward her past self, slow and deliberate.
"You still have time to kill him."
Zara's throat tightened. "Who?"
"Charles."
A silence followed. Not emptiness, but potential.
"You don't believe me yet," Zariel said. "But you will."
A mirror behind the throne cracked.
From the fracture, a figure emerged.
Tall. Silent. Wearing the Hollow Eye not as sigil—but as a mask.
Its surface was not smooth, but alive. Watching. Reacting.
The Mirror Walker had come.
The Mirror Walker stood still, unmoving, yet its presence warped the vault around it. The reflective walls quivered as though reality itself was doubting its own memory. Its mask—the Hollow Eye—was not a mask at all but a living surface, shifting faintly like something breathing beneath glass.
Zara instinctively drew her blade. The air around her hummed, tense with paradox.
The Mirror Walker tilted its head. A slow, unnatural motion. Not curious. Not hostile. Merely... observing.
Zariel stepped forward, her boots clinking on the obsidian floor. "You shouldn't be here," she said.
The Mirror Walker turned toward her. Still silent.
Zariel's hand hovered above the hilt of her blade. Her expression remained calm, but her voice dropped into a whisper made for Zara alone.
"It doesn't answer to time or memory. It answers only to recursion."
"What does it want?" Zara whispered.
"Not what. Who."
A ripple tore through the mirror chamber. Not an explosion—more like a question. One that demanded an answer from every cell of existence.
Zara saw her reflection twitch independently.
Then the Mirror Walker raised its hand.
Not toward Zara.
Toward Charles.
---
In the other corridor, Charles reeled backward as a pulse of white light surged through his spine.
He gasped.
Images flooded him—memories, but not his. A battlefield drenched in ink, not blood. Zara, kneeling beside his corpse, whispering a name that wasn't his. A child calling him "father." Rahul burning a book filled with screaming letters.
The pain wasn't pain. It was remembrance.
He fell to his knees. In his palm: a sigil drawn in flickering fire.
He'd seen it before—in a dream he never remembered having.
"This isn't memory," he choked. "This is recursion."
Future-Rahul appeared behind him. "You're catching up."
Charles looked up. "To what?"
Rahul's eyes glowed faintly. "To who you weren't supposed to become."
The wall to Charles's left cracked open like splitting skin. Beyond it: not a room, not a tunnel—an idea. Suspended in black fog, tethered by memory.
Charles stood.
"The Shattergate isn't a place," he said. "It's the moment that broke us."
---
Back in the mirror-vault, Zariel stepped between Zara and the Mirror Walker.
"You've shown enough," she said firmly.
The Mirror Walker didn't move.
Instead, its mask shimmered.
A single sentence appeared on its face.
Identity is what survives the forgetting.
Zara stepped closer. "Why me?"
The mask pulsed.
Another sentence appeared.
Because you haven't chosen yet.
Behind them, the mirrors shattered—slowly, like ice melting in reverse.
Each shard held a different Zara.
One who betrayed Charles. One who died for him. One who crowned herself Queen. One who never fought at all.
Zara dropped to one knee. Her blade clattered beside her. She couldn't breathe.
Zariel stared at the Mirror Walker. "You're not a messenger. You're a record. A ledger."
The Mirror Walker turned its head toward her.
And nodded.
Then it stepped back—into the mirror from which it came.
And vanished.
---
Above Veltharion, the skies cracked.
A single line, like a fissure in glass, spread across the heavens. Lightning bloomed from it—not with thunder, but with silence. Time didn't stop. It paused. Like a breath caught between inhale and exhale.
Civilians in the outer sectors screamed. But no sound came.
In the Royal Tower, Magister Vareth stared into a crystal orb bleeding ink. "The recursion is accelerating."
His aide turned, trembling. "What do we do?"
"We don't," Vareth said. "We remember."
---
Charles stood inside the fracture now. The others couldn't see him.
Here, the world had no floor. No sky. Only potential.
The Shattergate pulsed before him—no longer a door, but a wound in the shape of a question mark.
He reached out. Not with his hand. With his belief.
Who am I if I remember everything?
The Gate whispered back.
Then you become no one.
Zara's voice echoed faintly through the rupture. "Charles? Where are you?"
He turned. Behind him—Zara. The real one.
She looked pale. Ash on her boots. Her sword hung limp at her side.
"Did you see her?" Charles asked.
"I was her."
A beat.
"Did you kill me?" he asked.
Zara didn't answer.
The Shattergate pulsed.
Every silence is an answer.
Charles looked at her, tears in his eyes. "Don't lie. Not here."
Zara shook her head. "I haven't yet."
The fracture pulsed brighter now, pushing outward like a heartbeat.
Rahul appeared at the edge of the space, dragging his fingers through threads of suspended time.
"We have to leave," he said. "Before the recursion cements."
"We can't," Charles said. "Not yet."
"Then what?" Rahul snapped.
"We remember. Together. We choose."
---
The city of Veltharion trembled.
Not from force. But from choice.
Every citizen dreamed the same dream:
A mirror cracking. A name they'd never heard. A bell tolling not above—but within.
The Crowned Queens of Saphrelis awakened from their shared trance. The Ink-Eaters stirred in their parchments. The Dream Cartographers burned their maps and began again.
Because something had changed.
Because someone had remembered.
---
Back in the vault, Charles reached out to Zara.
Their fingers brushed.
The recursion bent.
The mirror did not shatter.
It cleared.
Inside, they saw not reflections.
But possibilities.
Zara held his gaze. "What now?"
Charles looked up.
"Now we forget... on purpose."
She blinked. "What?"
"The only way forward," Charles whispered, "is to leave behind what they're trying to make us become."
He turned to Rahul. "Burn the sketchbook."
Rahul froze. "What? No. This is—this is me."
Charles said nothing.
He only looked into the mirror, and whispered:
"If you see yourself clearly enough... it stops being you."
Rahul hesitated.
Then set the book down.
The flame that erupted from it didn't burn.
It released.
One by one, their reflections faded.
Not erased.
Set free.
---
In the sky above, the Shatterline cracked again.
Then sealed.
And for the first time in years, the Shadow Hour ended.
Zara turned to Charles, eyes damp. "You okay?"
He didn't answer.
He smiled.
And said:
"I don't know who I am. But I know who I'm not."
Behind them, the mirror began to hum.