The sky above the city of Halka was a bruised violet, marbled with thunderclouds that never rained.
Elias walked beneath it in Kéon's aging body, draped in ceremonial layers of indigo and ash-gray cloth. Behind him, two drummers kept rhythm with his footsteps, low and slow. Ahead, the warrior woman from the temple led the way in silence, her armor clicking softly with each movement. Her name, he had learned in whispers, was Senjata.
The name meant "weapon," but the people called her something else when they thought he wasn't listening:"The Blade Without a Hilt."
"Where are we going?" Elias asked her at last.
Senjata didn't turn. "To where the city ends," she replied. "And the true Halka begins."
They passed beneath a gate carved from bone-white stone, flanked by two massive statues, serpent-headed beings with outstretched wings and hands full of human eyes. The air grew cooler. The scent of ash gave way to something earthy… and older.
Soon, the stonework beneath their feet changed. The polished obsidian gave way to broken tiles, patterned in strange glyphs Elias almost, but not quite, recognized. As if they came from a dream long forgotten.
"What is this place?" Elias murmured.
"Where the first memory was carved," Senjata said. "And where you spoke the Second Sentence, many lifetimes ago."
"The second what—?"
She held up a hand, stopping him.
They stood before a massive pit, descending in perfect spirals deep into the earth. Along its inner walls, staircases wound downward, narrowing with each rotation. Flickering blue torches lined the way, but the light didn't reach the bottom.
It felt more like a throat than a staircase. And Elias had the uncanny sensation that they were not descending into ruins, but into something alive.
They walked for what felt like an hour, past glyphs and murals so ancient the stone flaked when they passed. Each image showed a version of Kéon or someone like him, standing before the mirror. Sometimes robed in glory. Sometimes in chains.
"Who painted these?" Elias whispered.
"The ones who remembered," said Senjata. "And the ones who couldn't forget."
"And what's down here?"
"Answers," she said flatly. "And watchers."
At the lowest tier, the spiral opened into a massive cavern. A temple long-since collapsed stood in the center, built around a glowing pillar of stone that throbbed like a heartbeat. Roots grew into its base like veins. Its surface was marked with carvings identical to the ones that appeared on Elias's mirror, symbols that burned behind his eyelids even when he blinked.
Senjata knelt and pressed her hand to the ground. A low vibration answered. From the shadows beyond the broken temple, they came.
Shapes.
Bent.
Walking like men but wrong in all the places that mattered, too many joints, faces blurred by ritualistic masks of obsidian and bone. Some crawled. Some swayed. One wept softly as it dragged a long silver cord behind it, threading it through its own chest again and again like stitching a wound.
Elias flinched.
"What—what are they?"
"The Yaran. Witnesses. Rememberers," she replied, standing without fear. "You created them, Kéon. Or at least… the first one did."
"I'm not him," Elias said sharply.
"Then prove it. Walk the hollow memory."
They entered the ruins. At its heart was a circle of stone, perfectly carved. Elias stepped into it, drawn by a force that pulsed from the ground upward through his bones.
Then everything shifted.
The world peeled.
The stone dissolved to ash, the temple restored in the blink of an eye, now shining, perfect, alive. The Yaran were gone. The cavern now teemed with people chanting in a long-forgotten language. And before Elias stood Kéon.
Not his reflection. The real one.
Younger. Stronger. His eyes glowed silver. He wore a crown of mirrored glass and held the relic in both hands, except it wasn't a mirror now, but a blade. The kind meant to sever.
"You opened the mirror," Senjata's voice echoed beside him, though she was no longer there. "You cracked it so that others could leap."
"No," Elias whispered. "I haven't done that yet."
The vision shattered.
He was on his knees again, sweating. The temple had returned to ruin. The Yaran stared.
Senjata crouched before him.
"You are not Kéon," she said. "But something in you remembers him. Which means the Watcher does too."
"Why does that matter?"
"Because it's hunting again."
She pressed something into his hand, a shard of obsidian, warm and pulsing.
"We're already in the teeth, Elias. You just haven't realized we're being chewed."