Chapter 9 - The Mirror Dawn
Dawn that morning did not arrive in the usual way. It came like a face in a black glass—sudden, sharp, and impossible to look away from. The Thermals lay quiet beneath a thin sheet of mist, but Rian felt an internal weather change before the sun had cleared the ridge. The ash-root in his chest twitched as if someone had touched the tip of a buried root.
He had learned now not to panic when the root stirred. Han's Threefold Breath, Seris's Moonlit Sutra—these had been taught to steady the thing inside him, not to deny it. But steadiness is not the same as certainty. Today, the pull had a shape. It called him inward, as if a door that was only ever slightly ajar had been thrown wide.
"Don't go to the mirrors," Han said in the hush before they gathered. His voice carried the weight of an old superstition and a teacher's caution. "Not yet. Dreams that come from shards are loud. They wake what they touch."
Rian had not intended to find a mirror. He had only gone to the small bathing pavilion at the edge of the hot-springs to practice breath before the others rose. The pavilion was simple: a wooden frame, a shallow pool of steaming water, and a slab of obsidian set like a window into the world. People used the obsidian to check their hair or line their eyes before market days. It was not a mirror as one put on a dressing table. It was a piece of black stone smoothed by weather and time.
He knelt by the water and drew breath. He let the Moonlit Sutra pull the root into a careful, listening loop. The ash-seed hummed, patient. The world outside the pavilion narrowed to steam and the steady exhale of a single bird.
Then the obsidian took him.
It began not with light but with a pressure at the base of his skull—the kind that meant a memory was trying to find purchase where the mind had not left room for it. Rian's hand went to his chest without thinking, feeling the cord at his wrist like an anchor. He closed his eyes and breathed as Han had taught him: four in, two hold, six out. He invited, he did not force.
When he opened his eyes, the obsidian no longer reflected the steaming pools. It showed a room of ash and twilight—a breadth of darkness stitched with fine rays of dying starlight. The air inside the stone smelled of iron and paper and something like frost on the tongue. For a second it was not an image but a portal, patient and patient-making.
A figure stood in that space. The silhouette was familiar in the way grief can be familiar: a place you have been before though you have no map to it. The figure wore a cloak like oil-slick night and a crown of thin metal that hummed faintly. When it turned, the face that the obsidian showed was neither wholly old nor young—features sharpened by command. Pale skin, a mark at the temple like a burned crescent, and eyes that were an impossible gray—like the inside of a cloud split by lightning.
The figure spoke, but not with the obsidian. The words landed straight into Rian's chest as if thrown by a hand that knew where his ribs made room.
"Awaken, Ashborn," the voice said—soft, intimate, older than speech.
Rian's mind stumbled. It knew the words. He had heard them in the Sovereign's echo and the nameless throne, but this time they were coated with remembering. The voice carried a name beneath it, a name like a belt upon a tunic, and for a span he tasted it like an old spice: Eryel.
The figure stepped toward him—not through the stone exactly, but the sensation was the same as walking up a stair you forgot you had—one step, then another. Rian's hands went clammy. He remembered nothing of this 'Eryel' as if a page had been torn from his book and left in the wind. Yet the memory had weight. Not knowledge, but a tug toward a center.
"You remember the throne," the figure said. "You remember the ash-balance. Remember also the cost."
The obsidian showed, then, a myriad of flickers—battlefields where stars had fallen and men had knelt on ash, halls whose ceilings dripped like night itself. Images pressed to Rian's mind like a warning and a caress at once. He felt the shape of the Sovereign's decisions as one feels the cold hands of a ruler—decisive, irreversible.
He tried to speak and found no voice. The figure on the other side—Eryel—smiled, but a smile that was a thin wire of history.
"You do not remember fully because you wished not to," Eryel said. "You sealed the memory into a seed to keep the world and yourself whole. But the seed remembers—you are its custodian."
Rian's breath hitched. He had known, in some private corner, that his past was not gone. The mirror-dawn—this obsidian's vision—showed him the edges. He wanted to fight it, to say that the throne was a dream like any other and he would not be bullied by ghost-powers. But the voice inside him—older, colder—whispered something he could not shake: You were sovereign. The simplicity of the phrase was like a knife: true and brutal.
"Why show me this?" he asked. When the words left his mouth, they tasted like the inside of a hollow bone—hollow but resonant.
Eryel's eyes softened then, if such a face could soften. "Because there are those who will know the seed's taste. Because the Houses do not hunt power without maps, and they have maps. Because you awaken faster than the plan allowed." The figure's hand, when extended, did not touch him but rather hovered like an outline. "I was yours—once. Not in the smallest way. Not as a servant. A general—no, a friend, who bent my sword to your command. We called each other by names that cut like anchors."
At the word friend, the obsidian freed a different sensation: warmth and an ache that moved through Rian's belly. For an instant he smelled smoke-lilac and copper and a man's clean aftershave—odors that could not exist in Dustford and yet existed now in his mouth like contraband.
"You expect me to believe strangers," Rian said, more to the obsidian than to Eryel. His own voice sounded thin within the pool-house.
Eryel's expression flicked—pride, sorrow, something like apology. The obsidian's surface shimmered and pulled closer a single flash: a battlefield where Rian—older, taller, armoured in ash-sheen—stood on a dais and pointed at lines of men who moved as though directed by the boom of a bell. Eryel knelt at his feet with a banner planted in blood and dust. Men cheered. The throne behind them rose like a dome of black glass. Rian felt the memory as if it were a wound he had conceded to someone else's hand.
"Not strangers," Eryel said softly. "Not wholly. I am what you left behind. We were the council of the Nameless Star. The Sovereign was not a single will, but a design—an architecture of command. You were the fulcrum."
The obsidian offered another image: not a throne, but a ledger. Names written in a tiny, almost indifferent script. The ledger closed with a snap.
"You sealed yourself to break the world's hunger for you," Eryel continued. "You asked to be scattered. You chose the ash-root to keep the heart alive and yet small. You chose to be born again in a place like Dustford to learn what the world was when it had room to breathe."
Rian felt cold. The idea that he, a boy who had known only the cracking of a failing roof and the metallic cough of his mother, had once chosen to tear himself apart like a broken pot and plant pieces of himself across the land—this was too large and small at once. It fitted like a mistake.
"Why are you here?" Rian asked. "If you were—if you are—what you say. Why come now?"
Eryel's face hardened as if the mirror had turned toward something he did not wish to look at. The obsidian answered with a single, terrible vision: a seal made of iron and ink and a council's stamp, the Registry's slow wheel grinding on paper. Men in cloaks bending over parchments. The House of Varr's red spiral inked across a document.
"They have found the threads we left," Eryel said. "The Houses are younger than memory but smarter at maps. Varr smells a pattern and calls it kin. The Registry wakes, and with it the law that eats will. If you remain a child under the Grey Line—if the Registry's pen stamps your fate—then the seed we planted may be dug up and sold, or bound to someone else's hand. I come to warn you and to ask one thing: remember what you were, long enough to choose not to be it blindly."
Rian's chest tightened. The ash-root pulsed, not in hunger now but in recognition. The Moonlit Seed he had been growing felt like a cup being held to a fire. The obsidian's vision had given him a history; it had given him a responsibility. Yet with the history came another sensation—grief for lives he could not feel and a terror of decisions he had made and not yet elected anew.
"You say I chose this," he said. "Why would I choose to make myself small? To lose everything I was?"
Eryel's smile was tired. "Because power is a living thing. You once learned that the world reacts to power in hunger, not respect. The choice was a cruelty made by one who loved the world more than himself. We bound you to a new life so you would not break the cosmos again."
A small, impossible softness hovered on Eryel's lips as if a private joke had been shared and was being mourned. "And now the wheel has started turning again. You will need allies who remember and enemies who forget nothing."
Rian watched the obsidian until the image blurred at the edges, the steam over the pool making the throne flicker like a mirage. He wanted to ask a thousand things—the shape of vows, the names of comrades long dead, the promise that he could undo the past. He had a million wants, but the obsidian had its own pace. Memories arrived in folds; knowledge was handed like bread. The mirror would not be a fountain to drink from all at once.
"Will I remember everything?" Rian asked, voice small.
Eryel inclined his head. "Not now. The seed cannot bear a harvest all at once. It will show you pieces—tools, names, techniques—and then ask you to choose their use. But know this: when the memory comes, so will the temptation to return to the throne's old comfort. When that moment comes, remember why you chose to break yourself."
Rian's breath hitched. The image of the throne in the obsidian—black glass, ash-filigreed—burned like a brand across the inside of his eyelids.
"And what of you?" he asked, surprising himself. "Do you stand with the throne or against it now?"
Eryel's eyes were as clear as glass. "I stand where you asked me to stand. That is the burden and the mercy of a general's oath. I was your blade. Now I am your mirror. I will remind you of what you were, and I will help you destroy what you cannot bring yourself to cut. But be warned—old things do not forgive easily."
The obsidian's surface cooled. The room returned: the steaming pool, the thin bird on its branch, the simple wood of the pavilion. Rian's palms were damp. The ash-root had stilled into a small, steady hum.
When he rose from the pool his legs felt unsteady, as if the earth had shifted beneath them. The obsidian reflected only the carved wood beam now, ordinary and patient.
Han found him on the path back to the outpost. The old man's face had the same softness it had before the mirror but with deeper lines. He did not ask what Rian had seen. Instead he placed a hand on Rian's shoulder—a teacher's touch—and said, quietly, "Mirrors tell truth badly sometimes. They are like knives—useful and dangerous. Tonight, we will bind with ash and breath. But keep one thing: do not let the crown in your dream smell like comfort. Power sounds like finality. Do not let finality be your home."
Rian nodded. He did not know if he could keep that promise. He only knew he had seen a piece of himself that ached in a way the present could not soothe. He had met Eryel: a name and a shadow, a man who claimed to have been his friend and who now stood ready to remind him of what had been and what might be again.
As the outpost prepared for the day, a runner came in from the east, breath ragged.
"Dispatcher from the Registry," he panted. "Varr's petition filed. They request formal hearing before the Council in two fortnights. Legal envoy already on the road."
Two fortnights.
The mirror had shown him the past and the runner had ticked off the future like a metronome.
Rian felt the seed in his chest flare—small, like a caught ember ready to bloom.
He had days before ink and law might try to turn him into a ledger entry.
He had memories beginning to stitch their way into him, and in those stitches lay both danger and salvation.
He listened to the ash-root hum and, for the first time since the stone had shown him a throne and a name, he felt something like resolve.
The Mirror Dawn had given him a shape of a past—and the knowledge that the future would ask of him what the past had once demanded: a choice.
To be continued