The shadow detached itself from Corvin Thornevale at precisely three minutes past midnight.
He didn't notice at first. The candlelight in his study flickered as it always did, casting familiar shapes across the walls of his modest apartment in the Greyveil District. Rain drummed against the Gothic windows, each droplet catching the amber glow from the street lamps below—those old iron things that still burned whale oil despite the Umbral Regnant's decree that all Umbrafell modernize.
Corvin was twenty-six, though the lines around his eyes suggested older. Dark hair, darker clothes, and the kind of pallor that came from spending too many nights reading forbidden texts about things that should stay forgotten. He worked as an archivist in the Grand Athenaeum, cataloging dreams and memories that others had sold or lost.
It was tedious work. Safe work.
Tonight, he was studying a peculiar entry—a journal fragment from someone who claimed to have seen the Heart of Night before it shattered. The handwriting spiraled into illegibility toward the end, as if the writer's mind had come undone.
"The shadows know what we forget," the final line read. "They remember everything."
Corvin reached for his tea and froze.
His shadow on the wall wasn't mimicking his movement. It remained still, one hand raised as if signaling him to stop. He blinked. The shadow waved.
The teacup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the hardwood floor.
"Christ," he muttered, then remembered that old gods had no power in Umbrafell. Only the Cores mattered here. Only the fragments of the shattered Heart.
The shadow peeled away from the wall entirely—a dark silhouette with his exact proportions but moving with fluid independence. It pointed toward his mirror.
Corvin's apartment had three mirrors, as all homes in Umbrafell did. The Law of Three Reflections was sacred here: one mirror to see yourself as you are, one to see yourself as others see you, and one to see yourself as you fear to be.
The shadow pointed to the third mirror—the Truth Glass, they called it. The one most people covered with cloth.
Corvin had never covered his. Arrogance, perhaps. Or the scholarly assumption that he had nothing to hide from himself.
He approached the mirror slowly. His shadow didn't follow. Instead, it remained by his desk, watching.
The reflection showed him—but not quite. This Corvin was thinner, paler, with eyes that held depths of exhaustion he hadn't admitted to himself. But it was the figure behind his reflection that made his breath catch.
A woman stood in the mirror's version of his study. She wore a gown of midnight silk that seemed woven from pure darkness, and her face was partially obscured by a veil of living shadow. Only her eyes were clear—silver, bright, and filled with desperate urgency.
"You're not supposed to see me yet," she said, and her voice came not from the mirror but from the shadow that had detached from him. "But the Regnant knows. He's already sent them."
"Sent who?" Corvin's voice cracked. "What are you?"
"A memory," the shadow-woman said. "Of someone who loved you in a life you haven't lived yet. The threads are tangling, Corvin Thornevale. Past and future are bleeding together in Umbrafell, and you're the knot where they meet."
A sound from outside—church bells tolling an alarm pattern. Three short, two long, three short. The Shade Alert. It meant Shadeborn were loose in the district, hunting.
"They're coming for you," the woman said. "The Umbral Regnant wants what's inside you. What you don't even know you carry."
Corvin stumbled backward. "I'm an archivist. I catalog dead people's memories. I'm nobody—"
"You're the last son of House Thornevale," the shadow-woman interrupted. "Your bloodline held the Umbra Core for three centuries before the Purge. And the Core remembers you, even if you've forgotten it."
The bells grew louder. Closer. Windows shattered somewhere down the street, followed by screams that cut off too quickly.
Corvin's independent shadow moved to the door, pressing itself flat against the wood as if listening. Then it turned to him and made a sharp gesture: They're here.
"The archives," the woman in the mirror said urgently. "Section Omega-Black. Forbidden histories. There's a door that doesn't appear on any map—you'll know it when you see it. It leads down. Go deep, Corvin. So deep the Regnant's reach can't find you. Find the first fragment. Find Umbra."
"I don't understand any of this—"
"You will. When you touch the Core, you'll remember. You'll remember all of it. Three lifetimes of memory locked in your blood."
The door exploded inward.
Three Shadeborn poured through—living darkness given barely-human form, with too many joints in their limbs and eyes like holes punched through reality. They moved like smoke and spoke in whispers that bypassed ears entirely, planting words directly into the mind.
The Regnant calls you home, little prince. Come back to the throne you abandoned.
Corvin's shadow lunged at them—not attacking, but expanding, spreading across the floor like spilled ink. The room plunged into absolute darkness. In that darkness, he heard the woman's voice one last time:
"Run, love. I'll find you in the next life. I always do."
Hands grabbed him—not Shadeborn hands, but something solid and warm. His shadow, pulling him toward the window. They went through together, glass and all, falling three stories into the rain-slicked street below.
He should have died. Should have broken every bone. Instead, his shadow cushioned the fall, spreading beneath him like a dark cushion before snapping back to its proper place at his feet.
Corvin ran.
Behind him, the Shadeborn poured from his apartment window like smoke from a chimney, their whispers chasing him through the gaslit streets of Umbrafell:
You can't hide from your own shadow, little prince. You can't run from what you are.
But Corvin ran anyway, his independent shadow racing ahead to scout the path, while the mirror in his abandoned apartment showed the shadow-woman watching him go, one hand pressed against the glass, mourning a future that hadn't happened yet.
The Grand Athenaeum loomed ahead through the rain—a massive Gothic structure of black stone and darker secrets. Corvin had worked there for five years. He knew every corridor, every locked room, every section the public was forbidden to enter.
But he'd never been to Section Omega-Black.
Until tonight, he hadn't known it existed.
The bells tolled behind him. The Shadeborn whispered his name. And somewhere deep beneath the city, in a chamber that had been sealed for three hundred years, a Core of living darkness began to pulse with anticipation.
The last son of House Thornevale was coming home.
Whether he wanted to or not.