The "S" symbol pulsed on the mirror's surface.
It wasn't ink or engraving. It was something alive, beating like a heart trapped in glass.
Sera stepped back. I didn't.
"Do you hear it?" I asked.
She shook her head.
But I did.
A voice—no, voices—started to leak through from the other side.
Whispers. In my language. In others. In none.
> "The script no longer holds."
"The fracture has remembered your name."
"Silence has a price."
—
I wanted to pull away, but the mirror held me. Not physically—mentally.
Like my mind had stuck to the image… a personalized warning.
And from within the static, a single voice rose above the rest:
> —Ryouhei.
My name.
Spoken warmly. Intimately.
Then:
—I knew you'd come.
—
"Who are you?" I asked.
The surface rippled. The image dissolved, and in its place appeared a face.
A woman.
The same one I'd seen in dreams before waking in Eclipsia.
Gray eyes, white hair, a scar running across her lip.
She wore the clothes of someone once sacred… now desecrated by merely existing.
And she was smiling.
> —I'm S.
And you… are the mistake we've been waiting for.
—
Sera tried to break the connection with a spell, but her magic bounced off the mirror.
As if it was already connected… to something greater.
"Why did you show me that throne?" I asked.
"Because some things can only be built on corpses," she said calmly.
"But also because… you have to choose."
"Choose what?"
> Which version of yourself the world will remember.
And which one you'll bury… in oblivion.
—
The glass cracked.
A red flash flooded the room.
And then—silence.
But the letter "S" remained.
Like a promise.
Or a threat.