The door closed behind her with a slow, mechanical sigh—its whisper louder in the silence Lynchie now stood in.
The room was unlike anything she'd seen before, even in dreams fractured by memory and myth. Ancient, circular, and pulsing faintly at its walls with veins of gold and pale blue light. Etchings spiraled upward, almost alive, crawling along the stone like vines—but each was a rune, archaic and forbidden, its language older than the current cycle of stars.
Lynchie didn't move. She couldn't.
There, in the center of the chamber, hovered a mirror.
No frame. No stand. Just suspended. Rippling. As though reality hesitated around it.
She had no idea how she'd arrived at this place—this pocket dimension sealed beneath the east wing of Aetherion's older sanctum. She remembered the pull… a sensation like breath drawn from her ribs, like something ancient reaching out and yanking her from the waking world.
Now it stood before her. And the mirror pulsed.
It showed no reflection.
"Is this—" she whispered aloud, more to stop herself from sinking into the growing quiet than out of curiosity, "—one of the Rift Echoes?"
The term was rare. A myth passed down through whispered tomes in forbidden archives. The Rift Echoes were said to appear in rare places where time refused to obey, where dimensions thinned and peeled like fruit, revealing hidden pulses beneath the rind of the world.
Lynchie stepped forward.
And the mirror changed.
Suddenly, it no longer shimmered with liquid silver—but black. Pitch. A deep, oil-dark surface that sucked the light from the room. And then—
Her reflection appeared.
But it wasn't her.
Not entirely.
Her face—yes. Her skin. Her eyes. But older. Worn. And the wings.
They were folded behind her back, great silver-feathered spans lined with sigils of flame and lightning, and her eyes were… wrong. One glowed violet. The other gold. She—no, it—smiled.
Lynchie froze, heart pounding.
This was a projection. A prophecy. Or worse.
Then the reflection opened its mouth.
No sound came. Just breath. A ghostly exhale that fogged the mirror and etched words in frost across the dark glass:
"Find me before they do."
The words vanished.
Lynchie stumbled back. The pulse in her ears thundered louder than any combat horn. Before she could breathe—before she could even scream—a shadow passed over her from the dome above.
Something else had entered the chamber.
And it wasn't alone.
The air changed. Grew thick. Hungry.
Behind her, a sound like cracking ice and grinding teeth scraped the air.
She turned.
From the dark corners of the room, voidlings began to form—slender, fragmented creatures born from dream and memory, shaped by fracture lines in reality.
Their eyes were blank. Their bodies… wrong.
One of them opened a jaw that was too wide, too thin.
It shrieked.
Lynchie's body moved before her mind did, instincts trained by years of field combat and instinctual flares. A glyph circle exploded beneath her feet—silver and teal. Her arm surged with latent energy.
She didn't remember drawing the sigil.
But her blood did.
"Get back—" she hissed, even as she stepped forward.
The nearest voidling lunged. Its claws reached for her chest.
She spun.
The glyph flared.
A pulse of sound—no, language—ripped from the seal at her feet and slammed into the creature with a resonant boom, disintegrating its form into fractal ash. The others hesitated, twitching as though uncertain.
They sensed it now.
She wasn't what they thought she was.
She wasn't prey.
Lynchie gritted her teeth, heart thundering. Her fingers trembled, not from fear—but recognition.
The glyph she'd just summoned?
It wasn't taught at the academy.
It wasn't from this realm.
And worse—it belonged to her sister. The sister who had died five years ago in a sealed mission to one of the Splinter Realms.
"No…" she whispered, voice cracking.
Above her, the mirror pulsed once more.
The face returned. This time, it bled tears of light.
And the words etched again.
"They have breached the first Veil."
A second glyph ignited beneath Lynchie. Her eyes widened as she recognized the seal's form. Not celestial. Not abyssal.
Something older.
A dimension she'd never studied.
And it was calling her.
Then, from the shadows, a voice murmured behind her ear—
Low. Ancient. Male.
"Awaken, Lynchie Regino. The Pact is broken."
Darkness rippled outward from the mirror.
And the Rift… opened.