The silence in the observatory was thick as snow.
Elara stood before the celestial mirror—once whole, now fractured, its silver shards humming with dark resonance. Each piece whispered to her, not in words, but in echoes—memories that didn't feel like hers. Moments out of time. Faces she'd never met, lips she'd never kissed, deaths she'd never died.
And yet, they were all hers.
Cassian reached for her shoulder, but her eyes were locked on the glass.
"She's coming," Elara murmured. "Or maybe… I am."
Cassian didn't pretend to understand. He just stood beside her. "Then let her come."
The attack hit at dusk.
Stormwake's outer gates cracked beneath a rain of star-glass arrows. No trumpet. No war cry. Just shadow-cloaked soldiers pouring from the fog like ink bleeding through fabric.
And at their helm—her.
The Mirrorborn.
Same face. Same voice.
But her presence was wrong. Every movement was too graceful, too rehearsed. Her smile was precision, her stare a blade. She didn't walk—she glided, as if gravity had struck a truce with her vanity.
"Hello, me," she called up to Elara, standing on the upper terrace. "Have you considered switching sides? You'd look stunning in crimson."
Elara's breath caught. It was like seeing herself through a cruel, perfect filter. One where doubt didn't exist—and neither did mercy.
Cassian stepped forward, sword drawn. "You're not her."
The Mirrorborn tilted her head. "Aren't I? We share blood. Bone. Every stolen heartbeat."
Then she raised her hand.
The soldiers surged forward.
Stormwake fell into chaos.
Kaelen led the defense at the western wall, his twin blades flickering with lightning. Lyra called the winds to scatter the star-glass projectiles. Cassian was everywhere—deflecting, commanding, protecting.
Elara stood still.
Until the Mirrorborn reached her.
They met in the ruined garden of the ancients—where petals bloomed once every eclipse. Moonlight bathed the cracked stones, and the air between them shimmered with too many truths.
"You don't belong here," Elara said.
"I do. I was here," the Mirrorborn whispered. "Before you stole it."
"What?"
"I was the thread you chose not to follow. The Elara who stayed in the old world, who never loved Cassian, who accepted the stars' first prophecy. I was erased when you rewrote the Pact."
Elara's heart pounded. "That wasn't my intention."
The Mirrorborn smiled. "Intent is a luxury only the victors afford."
She raised her mirror-blade.
Elara summoned her own.
And the duel began.
It wasn't just swords.
They fought with memories.
Each clash brought flashes—alternate timelines Elara had never lived, but remembered. One where she'd become a priestess of the Coil. One where she died at the meteor site. One where she married a man she'd never known, and bore a child whose name echoed now in her bones.
It was disorienting. Terrifying.
The Mirrorborn was stealing her sense of self, one slice at a time.
"You don't deserve any of this," the reflection hissed, pressing Elara to the ground. "You flinch from power. You fall in love with liabilities. You let them make you weak."
Elara's hands trembled.
But then—
She remembered Cassian's voice.
Not during battle. Not during prophecy.
But in the quiet, when he brought her tea after nightmares. When he told her stories of stars he couldn't name. When he whispered, "I believe in you," with no audience to hear.
She smiled.
"You're wrong," Elara said. "It's you who's missing something."
She rolled, twisted, and drove the blade into her reflection's side.
The Mirrorborn screamed—but not in pain.
In surprise.
The Mirrorborn shattered—not into blood or bone—but light.
Scattered fragments of her dissolved into the sky, streaking like reversed shooting stars.
Cassian reached her just as she collapsed.
"You did it," he said.
"No," Elara whispered. "I did something. But not all of her is gone."
She held up her hand.
Her fingers shimmered—half solid, half starlight.
Cassian's eyes widened.
"She marked you?"
"No." Elara looked to the sky. "She became part of me."
That night, as the moon turned silver again, Elara sat alone beneath the sky.
She had won the battle.
But the war inside her had just begun.
Because if her choices could birth reflections—
—then what else had she rewritten without knowing?