The lecture dome of the Astral Theory wing shimmered with a refracted light that wasn't entirely the sun's. Crystal-paneled walls whispered star-language when struck by focused thought. At the center floated a slow-turning gyrosphere of enchanted glass, orbiting silver glyphs inscribed with spiral runes. It was here the day's instruction unfolded, but Lynchie stood apart, more drawn to the echoes than the words.
She'd barely slept since the arrival ritual. Dreams came in fractured verses, and when she woke, remnants of the Trial still clung to her skin—a dusting of luminous threads only she seemed to see. Professor Aevarra, the academy's foremost Chrono-Astrologist, addressed the class, her voice deliberate, crystalline.
"Today, we project our reflections into the Astral Mirror—not for vanity, but for truth. Only through confrontation with the self can we chart the astral path."
Lynchie hesitated before stepping forward, drawing curious glances from classmates seated on floating benches of levitating stone. Among them, she felt Zev's gaze sharpen from across the dome, and another—faint, flickering—from above.
The Mirror was a circular pool of still air, suspended in runes. As she approached, the glyphs adjusted to her presence, responding to the Spiral Glyph pulsing just beneath her collarbone. The professor raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
Lynchie exhaled and stepped into the center. The moment her feet aligned with the mirror's core, time folded.
Her reflection did not mimic. It watched.
The girl staring back had the same tangle of dusk-honey hair, the same scar near her left temple—but her eyes were slit like a dragon's. They burned with argent fire, and behind her, a halo of fractured constellations spiraled slowly. Lynchie reached out.
The reflection moved first.
It whispered in a dozen tones, each echoing some dream Lynchie barely remembered. Words fragmented into concepts: birth without name, echoes denied silence, the watcher who never watches alone.
And then—a second voice. One she had heard only once before.
Her brother's.
Not the voice he spoke with, but the one from everywhere. The one she had glimpsed in the fractured halls of the Trial—resonant, sorrowful, amused, infinite.
"You are not merely a thread," it said. "You are the loop. You are the return."
The mirror cracked—not physically, but astrally, and all around her, the lights dimmed. Students began murmuring. The glyphs flared. Professor Aevarra stepped back, whispering a containment charm, but the Mirror ignored her.
From the reflection's spiral-halo, a single star-thread curled out and touched Lynchie's brow. In that moment, a memory that was not hers bloomed: a ruined city beneath a dying sun, and at its center, a tree weeping starlight.
She staggered.
The second echo was not a sound but a weight, a name-less knowing that settled behind her eyes.
Someone, somewhere, whispered: "She hears the Glyph. The Spiral opens."
The Mirror stilled. The reflection vanished.
Lynchie turned, breath short, pulse erratic.
And Zev's expression—usually aloof, mildly sardonic—was unreadable.
"We need to talk," he said.
But another voice had already whispered through the Mirror.
One Lynchie would come to know as the second echo of a name that had no beginning—and no end.