His body was cold.
Not in the way that meant sickness or even death. This was a deeper cold—the kind that reached inward, into places not meant to be touched. Like something inside him had gone still… or gone missing.
Kyle's eyes opened to grey.
Dust hung in the air like smoke suspended in amber. The vaulted ceiling above him, once a mosaic of polished stone and golden inlay, was fractured—massive veins running through it like cracks in an egg. Daylight didn't pour through. It oozed—dim, filtered.
He sat up slowly.
His shoulder screamed. His ribs ached. His jaw clicked unnaturally and took a moment to realign. But he was moving. He was… alive.
Next to him—
"Mirai."
Her name escaped in a rasp.
She lay a foot away, curled slightly, blood still drying along her side where the dagger had entered. Her face was pale but peaceful, eyes closed, lashes casting faint shadows. Her breath came in slow, shallow draws.
Kyle's chest tightened.
"I stabbed her."
He didn't need the voice inside to say it. It had gone silent—like a door closed from the other side. But the echo of it lingered, coiled beneath his ribs like a question he was too ashamed to answer.
He moved closer, placing two fingers to her neck. Pulse: faint but there. He took off his cloak—torn and scorched, but thick enough—and wrapped it around her carefully, pressing the folds to her side to stem any unseen bleeding.
Then he stood.
The world tilted.
His balance was off. Every step felt too light, like gravity didn't trust him anymore. His hands trembled, but it wasn't weakness. It was dissonance. His body responded, but not with his timing.
The hall was nearly unrecognizable.
What had once been the heart of Sanctum Magna—the gleaming central atrium with its pillars, arches, and ceremonial gates—was now a war relic. Entire sections had caved inward. Benches were splinters. Wall glyphs flickered—some erratic, others dead. Blood had dried in strange spirals across the floor.
And yet, no one had arrived.
No rescue.
No staff.
No Guardians.
Just silence.
And the mirror.
It stood at the far end of the atrium, still cracked, still humming faintly. A wound in reality.
Kyle stepped toward it.
One foot at a time.
The mirror's surface didn't reflect him. Not accurately. His shape was there—slender, slightly hunched, pale—but the eyes weren't right. They glowed even here. And behind them, in the mirror-world, something else stood. Watching.
It wasn't a trick of the light.
It blinked.
Kyle recoiled.
The humming intensified.
"Kyle."
The voice didn't come from the mirror.
It came from the walls.
No—it moved through the walls. A layered murmur that made the hair on his arms rise. Arcane lines flickered faintly along the marble. The school's enchantments—permanent and old—were activating. Not defensively. Not protectively.
In recognition.
"Kyle. Vessel. Heir."
He turned in a slow circle. No one was there.
His breath misted. The air was too cold now. The scent of sulfur and iron returned. Whatever had happened in the ritual hadn't stayed contained to the circle.
It had bled into the school itself.
He glanced back toward Mirai. Still breathing. Still unconscious.
A hiss whispered behind him.
He spun.
Nothing.
Then movement—subtle. A ripple in the light. A shadow flickering along the far column.
Not a person.
A shape.
Tall. Thin. Slightly hunched. Its eyes mirrored Kyle's new one—glowing blue rimmed in black.
But its face was a mask of old bone.
Kyle took a step forward—
—and the shape vanished.
No sound. No trail. Just gone.
He backed away, shaken, heart thudding.
Behind him, Mirai stirred.
A weak groan.
He rushed to her side.
"Hey. Hey—don't move too much. You're okay. You're okay."
She opened her eyes, squinting against the light. Her lips were cracked. Dry. Her voice, when it came, was a ghost of itself.
"You… stabbed me."
Kyle swallowed. "I know."
A long pause.
"Wasn't… very nice."
He gave a strained laugh. "No. It wasn't."
She shifted slightly, flinching at the pain. Her hand pressed weakly to her side.
"Did you get him?"
"Almost," Kyle said. "Tepes… got away. Some portal opened."
Mirai's eyes drifted closed again, briefly. Then open.
"You look… different."
Kyle didn't respond.
She reached up slowly, brushing a lock of his white-streaked hair.
"You kept your promise."
He looked away. "Barely. I'd lie if I said I even remember it now."
Then—footsteps.
From down the west corridor.
Boots on marble.
Finally.
Kyle stood, placing himself between Mirai and the sound.
A light bloomed from around the corner.
And voices.
Real ones.
But he didn't relax.
Not yet. Not anymore.
The boots grew louder.
Kyle didn't move. His stance was protective, shoulders squared, eyes fixed on the corridor entrance where the echo twisted into the dark.
Mirai shifted behind him, half-sitting with the cloak still pressed to her side. She watched his silhouette—how he didn't flinch, didn't blink, how his hands hovered, ready to fight again.
Even now. Even broken. Even afraid.
The first figure to emerge from the gloom was Professor Iskra.
Her long black coat fluttered around her as she stepped through the broken arch, wand already raised, pupils narrowed to slits from the lighting shift. Her expression was unreadable—calm, but wary, like someone preparing to defuse a cursed relic without knowing how it works.
Two other faculty followed: Professor Gellar and Archivist Vane, a mute whose floating lexicon glyphs hovered near his hands like orbiting moons.
Iskra's eyes swept the atrium—the blood, the broken pillars, the mirror. Then—Kyle.
And her breath caught.
The wand dropped just slightly.
"Kyle," she said.
His name landed awkwardly. Uncertain.
He didn't respond.
Iskra stepped forward carefully, motioning for the others to remain behind.
"What happened here?"
Kyle opened his mouth—and stopped. He felt it, like a rope tightening across his throat. Not magical. Psychological.
What could he say?
I fused with an entity that has been speaking to me in my head for weeks. The same entity that seemed to have been buried beneath the arcane lattice of your beloved academy.
I begged it to help me, and now it's part of me?
He settled on: "Tepes did this."
A safe truth. Partial.
Iskra crouched beside Mirai and checked her pulse. She didn't comment on the wound, nor on Kyle's bloodied hands.
"Gellar," she said. "Get a med unit here. We need a stabilizer and transport field."
The professor tapped her sigil and vanished down the corridor.
Kyle took a slow breath.
Then Vane stepped forward.
The Archivist stared at him, silent.
The floating glyphs began to rearrange. Not just text—judgment. Kyle's eyes locked onto them and understood, without knowing how:
Psychological damage.
Unknown mana presence.
Damage: medium.
"What is he doing?" Kyle asked, his voice colder than intended.
Iskra stood slowly. "Vane's assessing the aftershock of the circle. He's… thorough."
Kyle's lip twitched. "Thorough feels like a kind word for this."
The glyphs rotated again:
Power density exceeds acceptable bounds.
Entity presence detected.
Psychological uncertainty: high.
Kyle stared at Vane, suddenly aware that his shadow no longer matched his body. It curled differently. Moved subtly when he didn't. Mirai hadn't said a word. Neither had Iskra.
But he saw it—in her eyes.
Fear.
It wasn't pronounced. Not wild-eyed panic.
But fear, quiet. Controlled. Academic.
Like she'd seen this before.
Or read about it in a sealed volume not meant for mortal minds.
"Where is Luwen?" she asked finally.
"Escaped," Kyle answered. "Used Chris as a shield. He wasn't alone. I don't think he ever was."
Iskra nodded once.
"And Tepes?"
A pause.
Kyle's expression darkened.
"Same story. A portal. I nearly had him."
Iskra didn't respond.
Behind her, the glyphs rearranged again:
Merge depth: unknown.
Host consciousness: present.
Containment status: uncertain.
Kyle stepped forward.
The glyphs scattered violently—sensing his proximity. Vane took a visible step back.
"I'm done being measured," Kyle said. "I saved her. I saved your school."
"You did," Iskra said.
But her voice was too even.
Too careful.
Kyle's jaw tightened. "And now? You're wondering whether I should've lived through it, right?"
That hung in the air like iron.
Iskra didn't deny it.
She looked at Mirai instead.
"She'll live," she said quietly. "Thanks to you. But that doesn't mean this is over."
"I know."
He meant it.
Because as the adrenaline faded, and the cold in his bones gave way to the warmth of bleeding power, he realized something else.
The entity hadn't gone silent.
It was listening.
It was learning.
And so were they.
Everyone was watching. It all felt like an orchestra playing around his life.
As the med team arrived, Iskra and Gellar began retrieving the remaining injured students. They told Kyle to wait.
Iskra left to oversee Mirai's transfer. Vane had vanished, his runes flickering into nothingness like burnt paper. Gellar was on her way back with the field team.
Kyle was alone.
Not really.
The mirror was still there.
Cracked. Towering. Half its surface darkened like dried ink, the other warped as if someone had pressed a molten face against it and it had tried to remember what it looked like.
He stepped toward it.
His boots made no sound. Even the rubble beneath his feet seemed to part for him, warping slightly underfoot, as though unwilling to interrupt his approach.
The closer he came, the more wrong the world became.
The light bent. His breathing echoed in another room.
When he stood before the mirror, it still refused to reflect him properly. What it showed was a version of himself that was... dislocated. Like watching a video feed slightly off-sync. The Kyle in the glass blinked a moment too late. Moved a hair too soon. And behind that version, in the mirror's impossible depth, something stood.
Kyle stared at it.
A silhouette. Long-limbed. Draped in something between armor and robes. Its head bore antler-like spikes of light—or bone. Or both. Its eyes—no. Not eyes.
A single pupil, drifting from side to side across a featureless face, like an orbiting lens caught in amber.
He took a breath.
It took one with him.
Then the glass rippled. The cracks pulsed.
And the mirror spoke.
Not aloud.
Into him.
"Who are you?"
His stomach dropped.
"You are not a son. Not a student. Not a vessel."
"You are inheritance. Forgotten. Buried. Awoken."
Kyle whispered, "What do you mean?"
The mirror pulsed again.
His reflection lifted a hand—not his, not quite—and placed it against the glass.
Kyle mirrored the gesture, his own fingers pressing the cold, uneven surface.
"The name you carry holds no life.
The power you carry is borrowed.
The thing you fear most is real.
Do you wish to know who you are?"
Kyle's throat dried.
His mind screamed.
But his lips parted. "Yes."
The mirror darkened.
And a single word slithered into his bones—not language, not sound, but meaning.
A name. Alien and heavy.
And somehow, it fit.
His head swam. His knees buckled. For a moment, the world blinked out, and he was falling, into the mirror, into shadow—
"Kyle!"
The real world snapped back.
He turned. Iskra stood across the atrium, her wand glowing faintly. Two robed medics hovered beside a stretcher carrying Mirai, her face pale, still unconscious.
Kyle's hand dropped from the glass.
Behind him, the mirror was silent. Dark.
But not dormant.
Iskra's gaze flicked from his hand to the mirror, then back to him.
"You should come with us," she said.
There was no warmth in it.
No invitation.
Just the sound of someone trying very hard not to be afraid.