The courtyard of the Academy's Inner Spiral was dead silent at this hour, but Lynchie stood barefoot on the dewed stone, the sky above riddled with constellations pulsing unnaturally bright. There was something electric threading through the world tonight. The leaves of the Mirror Tree shimmered like silver glass, refracting the stars not above, but within—as if the cosmos had bloomed upside down inside its boughs.
She didn't know why she was drawn here. Only that when she awoke from the dream of shattered syllables and burning echoes, her feet moved before her thoughts caught up.
A soft breeze carried the scent of cold iron and fading lilies. Lynchie closed her eyes. The spiral glyph still pulsed faintly on the back of her left hand, warm to the touch, as if responding to something older than the Academy itself.
"You're not supposed to be here."
Zev's voice, hushed but firm, came from the shadows beyond the Mirror Tree. She didn't flinch.
"And yet, you are."
He stepped into the starlight, arms folded, cloak fluttering gently in the wind. His eyes, always a shade too luminous, narrowed slightly.
"Something woke me," he said. "A pull. I thought it was the wards malfunctioning again. But now I think..."
She turned toward him, her expression unreadable.
"You think it was me?"
"No. Not you. What you're becoming."
The words lingered like frost. Her heartbeat thudded loud in her ears.
"Zev, what's happening to me?"
He didn't answer at first. Then: "You activated a First Spiral without incantation. Without contact. Do you understand what that means?"
"No. And neither do you."
His jaw tightened.
She stepped closer, and in the refracted glow of the Mirror Tree, their faces were only inches apart.
"Do you feel it too?" she whispered. "The Tree? The way it watches back?"
Zev hesitated. Then he raised a hand and touched the bark of the Mirror Tree. A glyph flared beneath his palm—not spiral, but angular, fractured. Not of the Spiral, but something else. Something... broken.
He pulled his hand back. "It shouldn't recognize me."
She reached out, touched the same spot. Her glyph pulsed in reply—spiral and smooth, then split subtly to echo his fracture-mark.
The bark glowed for a moment with both symbols intertwined, and from deep within the Mirror Tree, a low note rang out. Not music. Not voice. A resonance that shifted the bones, that scraped against time itself.
From the trunk, a seam opened—thin and vertical—and something glimmered behind it.
Lynchie and Zev both stepped back.
A dreamglow feather, drifting in defiance of gravity, slid through the opening. It hovered between them, held in some unseen tension.
"A fragment of a promise," Zev murmured. "To be fulfilled or broken."
Lynchie's hand moved toward it without thinking. But the moment her fingers brushed the feather, her breath caught in her throat—and the courtyard was gone.
She stood on a bridge of syllables carved in light, stretching into a sky of spiraling starlight. A thousand mirrored selves stood at different intervals along the path, each of them humming different truths. Each of them broken in their own way.
One Lynchie bled from the eyes. One wore a crown of black flame. One wept as she cast her dreambeast into a pit of writhing glyphs.
And one—the closest—looked directly at her.
"You can still choose," that self said.
And then, she woke on the courtyard stones, breath ragged, the feather gone.
Zev crouched beside her. His hand hovered near her cheek, but didn't touch.
"You're not broken. Yet."
Lynchie's voice came in a whisper: "What if I already am?"
Above them, the Mirror Tree shivered.