The city no longer slept.
Elias walked through a corridor of fractured statues, each one half-buried in the soft soil. Their faces were serene, but their eyes had been carved out, an old form of blind reverence, or warning. The walls whispered as he passed, not in words, but in suggestion. Shadows that didn't quite move, light that didn't quite shine. Something ancient had been reawakened.
He reached the center of the city: a domed chamber, high above its cracked floor a disk of black glass, smooth and familiar. The mirror. Or maybe a mirror, it's twin. Unlike the one he carried, this one was massive, wide as a cartwheel, embedded in the earth like a monument. Its surface was dark and still.
The mirror in his satchel thrummed with rising intensity, as if answering a call.
Elias stepped closer.
Without warning, the mirrored monument ignited, lit not by flame, but by symbol.
L.
The glowing letter carved itself across the mirror's surface in a language too precise for any living hand. A letter that pulsed. Then another, smaller and almost shy, etched in red beneath it:
E.
Elias dropped to one knee as the heat from the symbols seared into his chest, not skin, but soul. The same symbols flared to life on the smaller mirror in his possession. For the first time, they bled. Real blood, not his own, ran down the frame and dripped into the earth.
The mirror began to spin.
From the center of the glass, the surface shimmered and Rae appeared.
Not in flesh. Not a vision. Something stranger.
She hovered there like an echo caught between reflections. Her skin was pale, translucent like smoke. Her eyes locked on Elias's with the grief of every life unlived. Her lips moved.
No sound.
Just a single word formed in silence:
"Laurele."
Elias recoiled.
It was his name.
His real last name.
Something long-buried, not by time but by design. A memory scrubbed clean by the Watcher, by the mirror, by whatever machine powered this cursed loop of time.
"Why now?" he asked aloud, not to Rae, but to whatever force listened. "Why did you take it from me?"
Rae's form began to flicker, dissolve, burn into the glass like ash on ice. But just before she vanished, a final gesture:
She pointed.
Not at the mirror.
But at himself.
At the symbols now etched into his skin, carved by the Vodou spirits, burned by the city's walls. A cipher. A message. And now, part of a word.
He understood then: his body had become the key.
And every pain he had endured was a letter.
The mirror's glow faded. The blood evaporated. Rae was gone again.
He dropped the mirror and screamed, but no one heard.
Not even the gods beneath the soil.