The first thing Ren felt after stepping through the broken frame wasn't light, or darkness—
It was gravity.
Wrong gravity.
The world twisted sideways, then up, then inward—as if the mirror didn't lead to a place, but a pressure. His feet struck something soft but unyielding, and he staggered, pulling the girl with him as they both collapsed onto a surface that felt like velvet stretched over bone.
The sky—or whatever passed for it here—glimmered with broken reflections. Not stars. Not moons. But eyes.
Eyes shaped like crescent wounds, blinking open one by one above them, bathing everything in silver that dripped like liquid glass. They didn't shimmer. They watched.
And they didn't blink.
The girl—the Mirror's Rebellion—shivered in his arms again, but this time not from fear. Her breath was steady. Her eyes wide.
"They're… watching me," she whispered.
Ren sat up, holding her steady. "Then let them watch."
She blinked. "Aren't you afraid?"
He smirked faintly. "They've already seen what I am. Let's show them what you've become."
A sharp crack sounded behind them—like a whip made of stone—and Ren turned just in time to see the mirror frame collapse into dust.
No way back.
Only forward.
The terrain around them was a mix of the surreal and the skeletal. Ribs of ancient beasts jutted from the soil like monuments, their curves fused with silver vines and fragments of glass. The ground was soft but alive, pulsing faintly beneath his boots. Every step whispered.
The whispers weren't just noise.
They were words.
"The shard walks..."
"The Thorn breathes..."
"The Pane shivers..."
"Moon is broken…"
The girl staggered again, one hand clutched to her chest. "It's like they're pulling at me."
Ren turned to her, his expression hardening slightly. "You're not theirs anymore."
"I don't know who I am," she said, voice quiet.
"You said it yourself." He touched her temple lightly. "You chose to feel. That's more than most."
Above them, the eyes in the sky began to drip. Not water. Not blood.
But mirror fragments.
Each droplet hit the ground and grew. Shards twisting into tendrils. Tendrils forming figures. Silhouettes. Mockeries.
The first one rose tall—its body shaped like a woman cloaked in silence, her face cracked and flickering. A priestess?
No—a memory.
More shapes grew beside her. A man with Ren's jaw but no eyes. A child with her scream. A dozen figures stitched from reflection and repetition.
The girl gasped. "I know them…"
"They're fragments," Ren growled. "Not truth. Just what the mirror thinks you are."
The figures advanced slowly. Glitching. Juddering. Bleeding light.
Ren stepped forward, summoning the Thorn with a sharp breath. It burned from his ribs like a second spine, twisting out into his palm, crackling with ruin's heat.
"I'm not you anymore," he said, lifting the weapon toward the shambling mirror-priestess. "She's not you either."
The girl stepped beside him.
But this time—
She didn't tremble.
The first strike wasn't Ren's.
It was hers.
The Mirror's Rebellion, once just a girl with shattered eyes, raised her hand and called to something in the silver-drenched air.
And it answered.
A low pulse—like a heartbeat across broken glass—echoed through the Veins. The priestess-shaped fragment halted, twitching violently, as if trying to resist.
"I remember now…" the girl murmured, eyes glowing softly. "They weren't always watching. I was once part of them."
Her fingertips dripped with liquid reflection, and as it fell, it carved sigils in the air—ancient symbols Ren couldn't read, but felt burning against his skin.
The figures twisted, distorted—losing shape.
Ren raised the Thorn beside her, just in case. But he didn't strike.
Not yet.
The priestess lunged with a howl of fractal light—but just before reaching them, her body shattered into spinning petals of glass. The sound was like a cry being silenced by understanding.
The other reflections began to shake.
"No more," the girl said, her voice firm. "You were only what they made of me."
One by one, the mirror fragments faded—burned away by her will. She didn't destroy them. She released them.
Ren stood silently as the last one crumbled into powder. He stared at her, lips parted slightly. Not in shock.
But in recognition.
She wasn't just the Rebellion.
She was becoming something else.
"Who… are you?" he asked, half-whisper.
She turned to him. "I was part of the Pane. A caretaker. A voice. A reflection… But when I first saw you, I cracked."
He swallowed.
She continued. "You weren't like the others. You didn't reflect. You broke the image. You bled into me, Ren."
The air buzzed at the mention of his name, like the world was listening.
She stepped closer. "That's why they're afraid. You're not supposed to exist here… and I'm not supposed to change."
He looked into her eyes—still fractured, but now glowing with purpose.
"So what now?" he asked.
"We find the Moon." Her expression sharpened. "The real one. The one that broke the Pane. That's where the true memory is sealed."
"The Fractured Moon…" Ren muttered.
"Yes," she nodded. "And if we don't reach it first, something else will."
He tilted his head. "Who?"
She paused.
And then she whispered:
"The Shard-Keeper."
The Veins of the Fractured Moon pulsed again, the landscape shifting as if the world had heard her name.
And somewhere deep beneath the mirror-skin ground—
It awoke.
Ren felt it the moment her name was spoken—the shift.
Not just in the landscape, but in the air, in the weight of the world around him. The Pane wasn't just cracked anymore.
Something was emerging through the fracture.
The girl—no, the Mirror's Rebellion—stood beside him, watching the Veins beneath them darken into veins of obsidian light. Her expression was unreadable, yet solemn, like someone standing at the edge of a grave that once belonged to her.
"She's coming," the girl whispered.
"Who is the Shard-Keeper?" Ren asked, fingers tight on the hilt of his Thornblade.
The girl's lips parted slowly. "She's what the Pane sends when thought isn't enough. She doesn't protect the world... she preserves it. In stillness. In silence."
Ren frowned. "So she's like… a guardian?"
"No." Her eyes darkened. "She's a jailer. The one who gathers the fragments that try to feel. Like me."
And then—a sound.
A deep, resonant click, like a key turning inside a ribcage.
From far below, the Veins of the world split open in one long, perfect line, revealing a dark corridor. Liquid light bled upward, and a figure began to ascend.
She moved like she was stitched from moonlight and rules.
Her face was hidden beneath a porcelain mask—blank, save for a vertical crack down the center. She didn't walk. She floated inches above the mirrored ground, long black robes whispering behind her like spilled ink.
The Shard-Keeper.
The girl behind Ren took a step back instinctively.
"She's already marked me," she whispered. "I can't fight her."
Ren stepped forward instead.
The Shard-Keeper stopped. The mask tilted. A thousand eyes blinked open across her robe, each one swirling like little galaxies.
She spoke without moving her lips.
"You were not carved. You were not chosen. Return to reflection, or be removed."
Ren gritted his teeth. "No."
The eyes narrowed.
"An anomaly speaks. How quaint."
Her hand extended—a finger longer than it should be, ending in a glass talon. A tendril of mirror-light lashed out, striking toward Ren. He dodged, blade drawn—but it wasn't enough.
The light grazed his shoulder. The wound shimmered.
Ren gasped—not from pain, but from what he saw.
A memory. Not his own.
– A world of still mirrors.
– Thousands of reflections of the same girl, repeating the same motions over and over again.
– And above them all, the Shard-Keeper, watching silently, unmoved, uncaring.
She had been resetting her. For eons.
Ren staggered, gripping his side.
But the Mirror's Rebellion caught him. "She's trying to overwrite you," she warned. "To reflect you."
"She'll have to try harder," Ren said through clenched teeth.
He surged forward—blade flashing, Thorn glowing.
The Shard-Keeper moved like glass breaking in reverse—every motion perfect, every angle wrong.
They clashed. And the air screamed.
Meanwhile, far beyond the battlefield…
On the other side of the Pane, in the waking world—Ren's mirror in his room began to crack again.
Someone on the other side was watching.
Someone who knew what was happening…
And had been waiting for this exact moment.
A girl with silver hair.
A reflection of someone who shouldn't exist anymore.
And she whispered:
"Found you again, Ren. Just wait for me…"