The mirror didn’t reflect anything. Not Kael. Not the room. Not even light.

It stood like a vertical pool of still ink, framed in cracked silver and scorched marble, leaning slightly as if exhausted from the weight of time. Dust spiraled in the stale air around it, and even that refused to settle on the glass.

Kael’s boots scraped softly against the stone floor as he stepped closer. Behind him, the abandoned sanctuary was silent—too silent. No rats. No wind. Just this mirror, humming low, like it remembered something.

He hesitated inches away, breath catching. His hand rose.

The moment his fingers brushed the glass, it rippled.

Like water.

Then burned.

Kael yanked his hand back with a hiss. Cold fire coiled across his palm where his skin had touched it—shimmering lines forming a faint circle, broken down the middle like a split sigil.

“What the hell—”

A whisper curled into his ear from nowhere and everywhere.

"Do you know what you carry?"

Kael froze.

The mirror pulsed. The mark on his hand answered with a soft glow.

Then, with a sharp, cracking sound, the glass shattered inward.

A breathless moment passed before he stepped through the opening.

The chamber behind the mirror wasn't built for the living.

It was narrow, suffocating. The air was dry but thick—like it had been sealed away for centuries. Jagged obsidian lined the walls, veins of red and silver pulsing faintly like dying embers.

Kael held his breath. Every step echoed in unnatural silence.

At the heart of the chamber, seven black stone pedestals circled a raised dais. One by one, he passed them. Each bore a sigil. Each one unfamiliar—and yet, part of him recoiled as if remembering something he had never known.

The pedestal at the center bore something different: not a weapon, but a crown.

Or rather, what was left of it.

A cracked circlet, edges blackened and warped by fire, its center etched with a sunburst now split down the middle.

Kael reached out.

The moment his fingers grazed it, visions hit him like a landslide.

A girl screaming as flames devoured a battlefield.

A boy standing alone before a burning city, shoulders trembling beneath a crown.

A voice crying out, “I was chosen… but not for this!”

Seven lives. Seven endings.

Each memory tore through him like a blade.

When it ended, Kael staggered back, gasping.

The circlet crumbled to ash.

And on the wall behind it, carved deep into black stone, were words written in an ancient dialect—yet he understood every syllable.

To the one who follows.

We were not chosen.

We were condemned.

His eyes dropped to the names beneath.

Six were scorched, erased by time or intent.

But the seventh... it still lingered.

Rhaen Kaelith.

His breath caught in his throat.

"...That's impossible." His voice cracked.

That name belonged to a story. A legend. His grandfather's bedtime tale about a mad king who vanished beneath the earth, chasing a voice no one else could hear.

Kael had always thought it was just that. A story.

So why was the name etched here?

The ember-mark on his palm flared. Pain bloomed, brief and sharp.

A shard of the broken circlet pulsed on the dais. Before Kael could step back, it lifted on its own—and drove itself into his hand like a needle.

Kael gritted his teeth, dropping to a knee.

The moment it embedded, the chamber shuddered.

Dust fell from the ceiling.

The whisper returned.

"Don’t seek the Crown.

It remembers who broke it."

He ran.

The passage trembled as the stones began to collapse inward. The moment Kael dove back through the shattered mirror's frame, the entrance sealed behind him with a solid clang—as if it had never existed.

The mirror, now whole again, showed only his reflection.

Dust-covered. Wide-eyed. Marked.

Kael stared at his palm. The sigil still burned there.

He’d found answers.

But they came with more questions.

“I was never the first…” he whispered. “And I won’t be the last.”

Far away, in a cold citadel drowned in fog and shadow, another mirror began to ripple.

And somewhere… someone else opened their eyes.