The chamber had no floor anymore.
Or ceiling.
Only reflections peeling themselves up from the marble, stepping into the air as though gravity belonged to them.
Ashling's reflection was first. It wore her shape, her scars, but its eyes were Keiran's grey. The anchor's pulse answered it instead of her.
Nyrelle's double came next—inkless, immaculate, a Concordium archivist in full regalia. Her mirrored self carried scrolls that whispered like snakes.
Lys's reflection was clad in gleaming ceremonial armor, the crest on his chest radiating firelight. In its hand was a sword longer than Lys had ever lifted.
They did not lurch forward like puppets. They moved with certainty, every step careful—like people walking down paths they had already traveled once before.
Nyrelle whispered, "The Spire's given form to the lives we could have lived."
Ashling's double smiled faintly. "Not could have. Should have."
The doubles walked backward.
Every step they took un-wrote something in the chamber—erasing inscriptions, bending walls, dimming the floating words until they dissolved.
Lys cursed under his breath. "If they keep moving, there won't be anything left of this place."
Nyrelle's double spoke, voice precise: "Which is the point. Without the Spire, the anchor has no stage to complete its cycle. Give it here. Spare yourselves the collapse."
Ashling gritted her teeth. "That anchor doesn't belong to you."
Her double tilted its head. "Doesn't it? Tell me, Ashling—do you even know which of us has it now?"
The anchor's beat faltered.
For the briefest moment, Ashling felt hollow inside, as though the weight had been pulled out of her chest. Her reflection lifted a hand, and its sternum pulsed with twin moons.
Keiran's whisper tore through her skull:
"Do not let the Spire decide for you."
The doubles lunged.
Lys met his armored reflection blade-for-blade. The clash rang wrong—too loud, like the echo of a bell carried through bone. Sparks hung in the air, refusing to fall.
Nyrelle wove sigils against her archivist-double, but the scrolls countered every line of ink with perfect reversals, twisting spells back into her own hands.
Ashling faced herself.
Every strike her double made wasn't aimed to kill—it was aimed to take back. Each motion siphoned something invisible from her: the smell of Trenhal's rain, the warmth of Keiran's laugh, the burn of her own choices.
With each stolen fragment, her reflection grew clearer, more solid.
Ashling staggered. For a heartbeat, she wasn't sure which side of the mirror she was on.
"Keiran!" she gasped aloud. "Show me what's mine!"
The anchor responded with a surge—not words this time, but a memory.
His hand over hers, steadying a blade. The weight of that trust.
That moment had never been hers to give away.
She clenched her fist. The anchor flared inside her chest—twin moons burning through the false one's skin.
Her reflection screamed. The sound wasn't pain. It was erasure.
And Ashling felt every stolen fragment rush back into her.
Across the chamber, Lys and Nyrelle were faltering.
Lys's reflection pressed him into the air, sword at his throat.
Nyrelle's double drowned her under layers of rewritten spells, ink tightening around her limbs like chains.
Ashling raised her hand, anchor blazing. "Enough!"
The chamber trembled. Reflections across the walls rippled, blurring into uncertainty.
The doubles faltered.
Keiran's voice filled the chamber—not a whisper, but a roar:
"The past does not decide us. We do."
The false selves collapsed backward into the marble. The chamber spun again, floor and ceiling snapping into place with a thunderclap.
Silence.
Only the door of unraveling text remained, steady now, waiting.
Lys wiped blood from his lip, breathing hard. "If that's what the Spire throws at us first…"
Nyrelle shook her head, pale but standing. "That wasn't the Spire. That was us. The Spire only writes in reverse—we're the ink."
Ashling touched her chest. The anchor pulsed steady again. Real. Hers.
The door's letters shivered, rearranging to form a sentence they could all read:
The vow remains. Enter, or let it be forgotten.
Ashling stepped forward. "We enter."
The door opened.