The palace didn't sleep, not really. It shifted.
By day, courtiers danced through marble halls, smiling behind fans and flattering lies. By night, the walls whispered and Elara had learned to listen.
She stood by the cracked mirror in the servant quarters, candlelight flickering over her face. It wasn't her reflection that held her attention. It was the runes beneath the glass. Faint, almost invisible unless the light hit just right. Ancient symbols for "fire," "betrayal," and… "split."
This mirror had once hung in her old chambers. She recognized the design etched into the frame roses wrapped in chains. But Thalia's quarters shouldn't have it. Someone had moved it here, deliberately.
She pressed her palm against the cold glass.
It shimmered.
A surge of warmth rushed up her wrist, tingling like static. Then a flash not of memory, but of someone else's thoughts. Someone with her face. Someone wearing her crown.
The impostor.
Elara yanked her hand back, heart pounding. "That's how she sees," she whispered. "Through me."
Suddenly, the door creaked open.
"Elara Thalia whoever you are," Corven said, slipping inside without ceremony. His cloak was soaked from rain, his eyes sharp. "You left a trail. Someone nearly saw the runes you activated in the west chapel."
"I didn't touch anything," she snapped. "Not since the archives."
He raised a brow. "Then someone is trying to mimic your magic. Or draw you out."
She stepped back from the mirror. "What do you know about mirrors that store memory?"
Corven hesitated. "More than I want to. The Order of the Eternal Flame used them to create copies of minds fragments of people. Sometimes whole personalities. Dangerous magic. Banned centuries ago."
"Copies?" she repeated, feeling the breath leave her lungs. "So she… the impostor… she could be"
"Built," he finished. "Constructed from a shard of you. A version with different choices."
A silence bloomed between them. Rain pattered against the stone outside, but inside, everything was still.
Elara whispered, "What if the version they created… is better? Stronger?"
Corven looked at her then, not with pity, but with something sharper. "Then let her win. And make sure you're the one who made her bleed for it."
She nodded, fists clenched.
There wasn't time to unravel everything. The Equinox Festival was approaching the same date tied to her original execution. The nobles were returning from their provincial estates. A royal banquet was scheduled in two nights. And rumors were already spreading that "the Princess" her impostor would attend.
Elara had to act before then.
The next morning, she found herself summoned to the west wing kitchens. Madam Winne was red in the face, snapping at flour-covered assistants.
"You! Thalia!" she barked. "Her Highness has requested special assistance in meal prep. Go to the east hall. And don't touch anything."
Her Highness.
The impostor.
Elara kept her head bowed as she moved through the corridors. But as she passed a side hallway near the atrium, a familiar face blocked her path.
Lady Lysara. Older. Sharper. Her braid coiled like a crown of gold thorns.
"You there," Lysara said, eyeing Elara. "You're new."
Elara's pulse stuttered. "Yes, my lady."
Lysara tilted her head. "You look familiar."
Before Elara could answer, a shriek echoed from the gallery above.
A crowd rushed forward. Something had happened.
Elara pushed her way through nobles and servants until she saw it: a tapestry had been torn from the wall. Underneath it, drawn in ash and chalk, was a symbol the phoenix crest of House Ravaryn.
But it had been defaced.
A line had been carved through it, blackened with soot. Beneath it, three words scrawled in blood:
"We remember fire."
Gasps spread like wildfire.
Elara's blood ran cold. That phrase… it had been etched into her prison cell before the execution. Only someone involved in her death would know it.
Someone was sending a message to the impostor, or to her.
That night, Elara met Corven again in the old conservatory, long abandoned and covered in ivy. He held a strip of parchment, rain-damaged but legible.
"It was slipped into my room," he said. "Sealed with wax a phoenix crest with a sword through it."
Elara read the note.
"When the false queen rises, the fireborn must fall.
At the Equinox, one dies again but not the same one twice."
Her hands trembled.
Corven said, "You're not the only one planning something. There's a rebellion inside the rebellion now."
Elara looked up sharply. "Then we use it. Let them strike first — and we catch the impostor in the crossfire."
Corven nodded. "There's just one problem. The queen's shadowguard already knows someone's impersonating royalty. But they think it's you."
The floor seemed to tilt under her.
"Then I'm not hunting her," Elara whispered. "She's hunting me."
A noise glass breaking.
They turned sharply.
A mirror on the wall had cracked, spider-webbed from within.
Not from impact.
From magic.
From memory.
A voice whispered through the conservatory, low and female and almost, almost hers:
"You can't kill what you've already become."
Elara backed away slowly.
Corven raised his blade, but the whisper had already faded.
In its place, etched across the broken glass, a new symbol pulsed:
A mirror split down the center, one side flame, one side frost.
The symbol of the Mirror Rebellion a faction not born of Elara… but of what she might have been.