Ayla didn't sleep that night. Not that she really slept anymore—hadn't, not since she was eleven—but after the tower, after the second letter, after the silent message etched in the mirror-glass, even the pretense of rest was gone. Instead, she studied the symbol. Again. Again. Again. A crescent moon, tilted backward like it was watching her. She checked every spirit book hidden behind her legal files. Every cursed sigil, death cult, lost language—nothing matched. It wasn't written history. It wasn't lore. But it felt familiar. Not like something she'd read. Like something she'd dreamed. As a child. As a baby. Maybe even before she was born.
By morning, she was back inside Noctra's underground archive—the sealed floor below the city that no one entered but her, and the dead. It smelled like old wax and unspoken memories. She lit the silver flame lantern and stepped into the dark. "I need something old," she whispered. "Before names. Before cities." The silence shifted. One ghost stirred. Vellin—the archivist. Once a monk. Then a grave robber. Now both. He appeared in smoke, humming a hymn that didn't belong to this world. "You called me from forgetting," he said. "What do you seek?"
Ayla drew the crescent symbol into the dust. Vellin recoiled like it burned him. "That's not for the living to know." "Then I'm not asking as the living." Time folded in on itself as they worked. Hours passed. Pages turned. Wax cracked. Candlelight blinked like an uncertain pulse. Eventually, Vellin found it. A scrap of parchment sealed in bone wax, its language older than the oldest tongue Ayla knew. And there it was. The symbol. Exactly as she'd seen it. Beneath it, six words in spirit-tongue:
He Who Owns the Glass, Owns the Dead.
The translation hit something deep inside her. Glass. The elevator. The man. She remembered—his reflection had been too sharp. Too clear. Ghosts didn't reflect like that. Mirrors bent around the dead. Refused to hold them. But not him. The glass hadn't resisted him. It obeyed. She looked up from the parchment. "Vellin… have you ever heard of someone ghosts can't pass?"
For the first time since she'd bound him to the archive, the ghost looked afraid. "There are stories," he said. "Of one. They call him the Monarch of Mirrors. The Glassborn. The one who sees without being seen." "Is he alive?" "No. But he's not dead, either."
She left the archive with more questions than answers, the words still echoing through her bones. Glass Monarch. A name she hadn't known until now, but one that felt like it had been waiting for her all along. He knew her name. He marked her tower. He was watching.
And far from the city, in a room carved from obsidian and light, eight men sat around a crescent-shaped table. One of them, cloaked in grey and shadow, tapped a single finger against a black-glass folder. Inside: photos of Ayla. Buildings she'd touched. Paper she'd signed. Letters she hadn't known were being tracked. "She's moving faster than expected," someone whispered from the dark. The cloaked figure didn't answer. He simply reached for his glass, drew a crescent moon in the condensation with the tip of his finger—
And smiled.
End of Chapter 7