The world was quieter when she stopped resisting.
Orryn had fought it once. She remembered clawing against the pull, against the voice whispering in her marrow. But each time she resisted, it hollowed her a little more, as though peeling away pieces of herself until only jagged shards remained.
Now she let it guide her, and the silence was almost beautiful.
She walked barefoot through the fog, her feet uncut by sharp stones, her skin untouched by the rot that gnawed at everything else. The mist parted for her like a curtain, reverent. In its folds she saw faces—hundreds, thousands—echoes of those already taken. They whispered her name. Not Orryn.
Mirror.
Her fractured eye burned, shards of light bending and twisting inside it like broken glass catching fire. When she closed her eyes, she still saw them: the sisters she had once been part of. Nysera cloaked in restless shadow, Seliora cloaked in fragile light. And herself, the piece caught between.
Triplets. One soul split three ways.
But the island had never wanted three. The curse had always demanded balance—darkness, light, and the shadowed glass between. Too much weight on one side, and Thalyssra cracked. Orryn was the crack.
She remembered the day it began.
The night of blood-red moon. The first time she saw her reflection splinter. She had been thirteen, kneeling at the abbey's broken altar, when the mirror appeared. Not glass—water, still as polished obsidian. She had leaned closer and seen her own face staring back with two different eyes. One hers, the other bleeding shadow.
The reflection had smiled when she did not.
"Do you want to be whole?" it had whispered.
And she, too frightened to answer, had nodded.
The mirror had split her then. Not her flesh, not her bones—but something deeper. She had staggered back, vomiting black water, while the reflection stepped out of the pool and merged with her. Since that day, she had carried two voices inside her head. One was her own. The other was the island itself.
Now, standing on the cliffs above the village, Orryn could still hear that voice.
They will not save you. They will not understand. But I do. I always have.
She closed her eyes. "They're my sisters."
They are the blade and the balm. You are the wound. Which survives—the wound, or the ones who try to close it?
She shivered. For a heartbeat, she felt like a child again, clutching Nysera's hand as Seliora laughed in the fields. Back then, they had been inseparable, three pieces of a single heartbeat. But even then, hadn't she always been the strange one? The one who lingered too long at the graveyard, staring at reflections in the pond, listening to whispers no one else heard?
The wound had always been there. The mirror had only revealed it.
"Orryn."
Her head snapped up.
Seliora stood at the ridge, her lantern glowing faintly despite the fog's hunger. She looked so much like their mother in that moment Orryn's breath caught. And behind her, Nysera—the scowl, the restless shadows, the sharp suspicion in her silver eyes.
Triplets. Fractured and jagged, facing one another across a chasm of time.
Orryn's lips curved. She let the mirror's voice lace through her own as she spoke. "You heard the bells. The island is waking."
Seliora stepped forward, her hand outstretched. "Come back to us. Please."
Orryn's fractured eye flared, spilling a jagged reflection across Seliora's glow. "Do not beg me."
The fog writhed at her command, shaping itself into half-born wraiths. They dragged themselves forward on hands too long, mouths stretched too wide, eyes hollow. Their screams were the screams of the villagers already consumed.
Nysera's shadows surged up like a shield, cutting them down in bursts of black steel. Her voice was a blade. "She's lost."
"I'm not lost." Orryn's smile thinned. "I'm found."
Seliora shook her head, tears gleaming. "No. This isn't you. This is the curse speaking."
Orryn tilted her head. "Isn't it? Or was I always this? The part of us that didn't fit. The flaw in the weave. The Mirror."
The voice inside her swelled, wrapping around her like silk. Yes. You are the Mirror. Without you, they are nothing but extremes—light without shadow, darkness without balance. You complete them. You surpass them.
Her fractured eye burned hotter. She pressed her palm against it, trying to hold it in.
For a moment, she faltered. For a moment, she wanted to run to Seliora's light, to Nysera's fierce protection. To fall into their arms and let them hold her the way they had when storms rattled the shutters of their childhood home.
But then she remembered Mother's face.
The way her corpse had turned toward Orryn, pulled from the grave by her own fractured magic. The way Nysera's eyes had filled with horror. The way Seliora had whispered her name like it was both prayer and curse.
No. There was no going back.
"I am not your sister anymore," Orryn said softly.
Seliora's voice broke. "You are. Always."
Nysera's shadows lashed forward like a whip. "Enough!"
They clashed.
Fog and shadow and light tore into one another, the cliffside shaking beneath their fury. Wraiths screamed, dissolving beneath Nysera's blade-like darkness and Seliora's burning touch. Orryn let the mirror surge through her veins, summoning reflections from every drop of mist. Dozens of her own faces turned toward her sisters, each one whispering one must fall.
And yet—even as she fought them, even as the mirror's power seared her blood—Orryn felt the crack inside her widen.
Because a part of her still wanted to believe Seliora. A part of her still wanted to stand beside Nysera.
A part of her still wanted to be Orryn.
The rest of her wanted to be free.
The battle raged until the cliff's edge split. Stone crumbled, plunging into the sea. The fog pulled back, not defeated but waiting, patient. Orryn stood on the brink, her fractured eye dimming, her breath ragged. Her sisters stood across from her, light and shadow both flickering, both shaking.
The mirror's voice coiled through her. Choose, Orryn. Wound, or heal. Crack, or whole. One must fall.
Her lips parted. For the first time in years, her own voice—hers alone—broke free.
"I don't want to fall."
The fog swallowed her before they could answer.