They called themselves the Mirror Rebels.
Not soldiers. Not saboteurs. Just thinkers who knew how to listen between the lines. Archivists, linguists, former students who remembered a name that was buried. And one of them—Lyra Finn—had known Caelum before the fire stitched his soul shut.
She found an essay.
Old. Half-burned. It bore phrases that now danced across protest banners—but written in a different tone. Softer. Human. She traced the metadata. Traced the memory. And found a name.
Not Caelum.
Not Dross.
Just the person who was sacrificed before the pact ever began.
Lyra gathered her team in an abandoned observatory, stars spinning above like conspiracies. "Caelum isn't who they think he is," she said. "He's not a revolutionary. He's a revenant."
They began digging deeper.
And Caelum felt it.
Through whispers caught in algorithmic patterns, spell-encoded alerts, and dreams that flickered wrong. Something was coming. Not just dissent.
Recognition.
That night, he stared into the mirror—no devil. Just him. And for a moment, he saw the version of himself they'd found. The one who used to hope instead of raze.
He touched the glass.
It didn't shatter.
But it didn't forgive either.