The letter had no seal.No signature.Just a single sheet of parchment, slipped beneath my door sometime after midnight.
The ink shimmered faintly—not magical, but reactive, like it had been waiting to be seen.
If you wish to know who buried the first truth, come to the oldest mirror before first bell. Alone.
I didn't tell Serena.Not because I didn't trust her—But because something about this message felt like it wasn't meant to be shared.
The oldest mirror stood in the west wing's ruins, sealed off after the fire two decades ago.Students called it cursed. Professors called it condemned.I called it familiar.
My footsteps echoed down the crumbling stairwell.Torchlight barely held back the dark.At the corridor's end stood the mirror: tall, cracked, silver dulled with time.
But it didn't reflect me.
It reflected a figure—cloaked in dusk and shadow, face veiled behind a mask of carved obsidian.
"You are not the only one chasing truth," they said.Their voice was ageless. Calm. Neither male nor female.Only… old.
"Then who are you?"
"A remnant," they said. "Of what was silenced. Of what you now stir."
They extended a hand—within it, a shard of glass.Etched with the same rune I'd seen on the final page of 1098-AR.
My breath caught.
"Tell me what it means."
"Not yet," they replied."
"First—tell me why you still want to know."
I unfolded the letter. The symbol on the page shimmered—
the same one I had seen etched in the tribunal archives.
Beneath it, three words glowed like coals in the dark:
"Echoes ascend."
My fingers tightened around the parchment.This wasn't a threat. It was an invitation—proof that someone else knew.Someone watching from a vantage point above the storm we were trapped in.
If I didn't move first, I'd already lost.