By morning, the Core's pull had shifted from a whisper to a hum.
It pressed against Reven's mind like a distant echo calling from beneath ice, constant and just out of reach. Not a voice, not quite, but a rhythm—familiar and uncanny. As if something behind it already knew how he would answer, and was only waiting for him to catch up.
They left the ruins at dawn. The horizon glared, washed in hard, flat light, as if the world had bleached itself overnight. No clouds. No wind. Just the long, dry stretch of the salt flats ahead—white earth broken only by heat mirage and silence.
Lirien scouted from above. Kaela moved ahead of the group, steady and watchful, eyes rarely leaving the distance. Kaelex walked beside Reven this time, not speaking.
Until she did.
"You saw it last night, didn't you?"
He didn't pretend not to know what she meant.
"The corridor."
"The mirrors."
He nodded once.
Kaelex looked down at the sand grinding beneath her boots. "That's how it starts."
Reven's voice was low. "Is it the system testing me? Or Hollowlight trying to reclaim what it lost?"
She didn't answer because there wasn't one. By mid-afternoon, the landscape began to shift.
The salt broke into fractures. Thin, silvered lines spread across the flat terrain like veins in brittle bone. The horizon warped, bent inward. Heat didn't rise here—it sank. Time felt slower. Sound didn't echo.
They were entering the next site, but there were no ruins. No towers. No doors. Just a single object—half-buried in the salt. A mirror. Reven stopped short. Kaela lowered her hand to her blade, cautious.
Kaelex inhaled sharply. "I've seen this before. But never in the open."
Lirien landed beside them, folding her wings. "It's active."
The mirror was circular. Perfectly clean. Its frame was fused with alloy no one had used in five hundred years. No inscription. No mark of origin. But the moment Reven stepped forward, the salt around it shifted—subtle, like a breath drawn in reverse.
He looked down into the reflection and saw nothing. No sky. No earth. No him. Only a dark corridor. The same one from his dream.
Kaela spoke behind him, quiet. "Reven—don't."
But he stepped forward and the world inverted. He didn't fall. He unfolded.
Reality peeled back like silk, folding him into a geometry that didn't obey rules of matter or sequence. For a moment, his body forgot how to be a body. His mind spiralled—then realigned.
He stood on mirrored glass. Beneath it, the world spun like a slow clock. Ahead of him: the corridor. Endless. White. Seamless. And lining both sides: doors. Each labelled with his name. Each vibrating softly. Reven walked forward. The first door opened on its own.
He saw himself standing in the ruins of Emberfall, blood on his hands, the Flamecore inert. Alone. He watched that version of himself bury a body he didn't recognize—then fall to his knees as a city burned behind him.
The door closed. The second opened.
Reven stood in a Spire, not as a bearer—but as a warden. Regal. Terrible. His face etched in gold, his voice commanding. He wore a Flamecore like a crown, and when the rebels charged, he ordered the floor beneath them to collapse.
He didn't flinch. The door shut. More opened. More lives. More selves. Some had chosen mercy. Others ruin. One had refused the Core altogether. Another had become it.
Reven's breath shortened. Each reflection wasn't possibility. They were records. Paths taken. Choices made. Not all his, but all him.
And at the end of the corridor, A mirror. Black. Smooth. Breathing. He stepped toward it.
A voice spoke.
"Do you want to know who you are?"
Reven's hand hovered over the surface.
"I already do."
The mirror pulsed.
"Then why are you still running from it?"
He pressed his palm to the glass. It shattered. But no shards fell. Only silence.
When he awoke, he was lying on the salt. Kaela knelt beside him, one hand gripping his wrist, her expression carved from worry.
"You were gone," she said. "You walked into the glass and vanished."
"How long?"
"Two hours."
Reven sat up slowly. His chest ached—not from strain, but from memory. He looked down. The Flamecore pulsed faintly in his palm, but different now. Softer. More layered. As if it had inherited something it had been missing.
Lirien stood nearby, wings tight. "What did you see?"
Reven didn't answer right away.
Then he said, "Hollowlight isn't a code. It's a convergence. All the lives the system wrote off. All the versions it didn't choose. It's us. Everything the world didn't want to remember."
Kaelex stepped forward, her voice strange. "And did it recognize you?"
Reven stood.
"No," he said. "I recognized it."
He looked to the west—where the last three Cores waited, hidden, guarded, buried and smiled, faintly.
"I'm not running anymore."