The summons came at dusk.
Not through the usual ink-thread or pulse-glyph, but by courier. Human. Young. No shadow.
That alone should have been a warning.
The boy said nothing. Just handed Izen a folded scrap of parchment sealed with wax—not the Guild's insignia, but something older. A symbol made of two intersecting eyes, both shut, with a broken mirror between them.
Izen didn't open it immediately. He didn't have to. He felt it.
Not in his fingers or thoughts, but in the ache crawling beneath the glyph-thread on his arm. The Sovereign ink there had been quiet for two days—ever since the Vault incident—but now it throbbed with quiet urgency, like something breathing behind glass.
He stood in the narrow chamber the Guild had given him. It wasn't a cell, not quite, but it wasn't a room either. Walls of dusk-stone filtered the sun's dying light, painting the interior in flickering golds and bruised purples. The shadows on the walls moved differently here. As if watching, not resting.
Grinless hadn't spoken since the Vault.
He hadn't moved either.
But he was no longer curled in the corner like a pet.
He stood, now, in the middle of the room.
His shape—once playful, jittery, barely humanoid—was firming into something more exact. More… specific. The outline of his head was narrowing, elongating. Shoulders gaining structure. Limbs sharpening.
Becoming someone else.
Izen refused to acknowledge it.
He turned away and unfolded the note.
Only one line:
"The girl has remembered you."
No signature. No time. No location. Just that.
And it was enough.
He didn't ask permission to leave. Didn't wait for escort. He simply pulled the coat over his shoulders, looped the glyph-blade around his wrist, and walked.
The Sanctum's halls greeted him like a stranger.
Twice, the ink-lamps flickered as he passed. Once, he caught his own shadow moving a step ahead of him. A servant backed into a corner when he turned a bend. Her eyes widened—not in fear, but in recognition.
She whispered, "Callow," under her breath.
He didn't stop walking.
---
The girl from Duskwane waited in the Mirror Wing.
It was an architectural nightmare. A long, narrow hall built entirely of antique glass panes—some clear, some mirrored, others warped like frozen water. Every step echoed endlessly. And every reflection was slightly wrong.
Not by much. Just enough.
A wrong shoulder height. An extra blink. A smile when you didn't.
They placed her in the center room. The others were sealed. Watching cells.
Izen entered.
She looked exactly the same.
Silver-blonde hair. Pale, freckled skin. Bare feet. Shadowless.
Except now she wore a cloak marked with binding wards along the edges—protection symbols meant to suppress magic. The kind used on Null-tainted prisoners or rogue Echo-Touched.
She wasn't restrained.
But she didn't move.
She sat on a low wooden stool beside a silver basin filled with black water. Her eyes stared into it—not in trance. In expectation.
"I thought you said you couldn't remember your name," Izen said quietly, closing the door behind him.
"I didn't," she replied. "I still don't."
"Then what changed?"
"I remembered yours."
That stopped him.
He crossed the room slowly, careful not to let his own reflection distract him. The mirrors here could twist memory if stared into too long.
She glanced at him. Her eyes were calmer than before. Less afraid.
"It's not a name in the way people use it," she said. "It's not what they call you. It's what your shadow calls you."
Izen narrowed his gaze.
"Callow."
She nodded.
"You were part of the first Mirror-Trials. The Sovereign experiment before the Sundering was complete. They carved your identity into reflection. But when they pulled you out—" she paused, fingers trembling slightly—"something stayed behind."
He crouched.
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because that something is waking up."
She looked into the basin again.
"The Mirror remembers. But it doesn't forgive."
---
He didn't believe her.
Not entirely.
But part of him knew.
Because the glyph-thread on his arm hadn't stopped burning since he stepped into the Mirror Wing.
And because he hadn't seen his reflection blink once since entering the room.
---
The girl's voice changed.
Low. Measured.
"I saw your name carved into the Vault. I saw it again in the Null-Well beneath Duskwane. But that's not where it started. That's just where it leaked."
She dipped her fingers into the water.
The surface rippled.
Black. Thick. Inky.
A vision formed.
Not crisp like an Echo-Shard. Not floating like a scribed memory.
It was dull. Grainy.
But it moved.
A younger Izen—though not quite him—stood in a chamber lined with sigils. Ten shadows circled him. Not attached. Not bound.
Watching.
He spoke.
His voice echoed wrong, stretched thin by the reflective walls.
> "You gave me a name to serve. But I serve the shape beneath it."
He drew a blade made of mirror-glass.
Cut into his palm.
The shadows fled.
He smiled.
> "Callow isn't a name. It's an absence."
Then the vision broke.
The basin cracked down the center.
The girl flinched.
Blood dripped from her nose.
---
He grabbed her.
"What was that?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she looked behind him.
"I think it's too late."
He turned.
The mirror beside them had cracked.
Not with pressure.
But from within.
A hand reached through the surface.
His hand.
But not his skin.
Not his scar.
Not his reflection.
It beckoned.
Then pulled back.
The mirror sealed itself.
And in the silence that followed, his own shadow whispered—
> "You weren't the first."
The shadow didn't move.
Not in the way normal shadows did—by mimicking the host, by stretching to meet angles or light. No, this one waited. Stood still as Izen moved. When he took a breath, it didn't. When he clenched his fists, it watched.
And now it whispered.
Not aloud. Not in echo-thread. Not even in his mind.
It whispered in mirrors.
Every reflective surface since that moment in the Mirror Wing began to respond to him. Not with image, but with remembrance. Like they'd seen him once before—somewhere far back in time—and were struggling now to put his face into context.
As if the world was remembering a version of him that no longer existed.
Or had never fully been erased.
He staggered out of the chamber, coat billowing behind him, the girl's scream still echoing faintly behind his ears. The crack in the basin hadn't just shattered water. It had sent a pulse through the Mirror Wing.
Other glass surfaces were beginning to twitch.
In the hallway, his reflection in the floor tiles blinked before he did.
He didn't look down again.
---
By the time he reached the inner Sanctum stairs, the glyph-thread on his arm was pulsing uncontrollably. The ink no longer shimmered—it burned. It scrawled. Changing shape like it was writing over itself, erasing, rewriting, translating itself into languages he didn't know but recognized.
At the base of the stairs stood the masked man.
Waiting.
He held no scroll, no weapon, no stance of authority.
Just understanding.
"You opened the Mirror," he said calmly.
"It opened itself."
"Semantics." The masked man tilted his head. "It knew you."
"What was that thing?"
"A memory."
"Of what?"
The masked man paused.
"Of who you were."
That didn't help.
Izen stepped closer. "Say it plainly."
"I can't. Because you were erased. Every record. Every echo. The only piece left of you was the one Lyrell sealed—and even she couldn't destroy it. She hid it in ink so old the shadows forgot how to read it."
He gestured at Izen's arm.
"But it found its way back."
---
They walked in silence toward the inner chambers.
The Vaults had changed.
Stone walls that once hummed with old bindings now flickered with static shadow. Glyphs faded in and out, like half-remembered spells. Cracks in the floor glowed faintly, not from light—but from reflection.
Izen reached the archive chamber.
Inside, the journals had begun to bleed.
Not ink. Not blood. Something in between.
Pages stuck together like scabbed parchment. Glyphs slipped off the surface like peeling bark. Shadows danced across spines.
He walked between the rows.
Books whispered.
Not in Sovereign script or Echo-speech.
In mirror-syllables.
Backwards. Unspoken. Understood.
He turned a corner.
And there it was.
The Mask.
Not the same one from before.
Another.
Same shape. Same crack. Same mark etched across the brow.
Callow.
He picked it up.
No glyph triggered.
No anchor broke.
But as he touched it, his vision shifted.
---
He was elsewhere again.
This time… not an echo-memory.
Not a preserved scene.
Something deeper.
He stood in the courtyard again—but now it was raining ink. The buildings were half-submerged in water. The sky above was split in two. A mirror above. The world below.
And standing in the center of it all—unmoving—was himself.
Or something that had once been himself.
Cloaked in ink. Armorless. Eyeless.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Not watching.
Just waiting.
He approached.
The figure didn't react.
He circled it slowly.
The thread on its arm was identical to his own—but completed. No breaks. No burned runes. Just a single, whole glyph that shimmered like a ripple through time.
The name Callow etched in ink that bled forward and backward.
He reached out.
And the figure finally spoke.
> "I waited for you."
Its voice was his—but hollowed. Filled with memory residue.
"Who are you?" Izen asked.
> "I'm what they cut out."
> "The part of you that remembered what you were."
> "What they couldn't kill."
He stepped back.
The figure turned, slowly.
> "You asked why the mirror cracked."
It raised one hand.
Pointed upward.
> "Because it forgot you."
> "And now that it remembers—"
> "You must decide."
---
He woke.
The mask in his hands.
Behind him, the masked man stood quietly.
"You saw him," he said. Not a question.
Izen nodded.
"What was he?"
The masked man didn't reply for a long time.
Then, very softly:
"The first Sovereign."
---
The girl was gone from the Mirror Wing.
Vanished.
No signs of resistance. No broken bindings. No echo-pulse of escape.
Just gone.
Her cell was empty, basin shattered.
The only thing left behind was a drawing.
Etched with her finger on the wall.
A single image.
A tree.
No roots.
Its branches were made of names.
All of them half-erased.
At the bottom was one word burned into the stone:
"Reaver."
---
That night, Grinless spoke again.
He hadn't moved in hours. Days.
But as Izen sat in silence, the journal unopened in his lap, the shadow shifted.
Not toward him.
Toward the wall.
It raised one hand.
Drew something with its finger in the ink-slick stone.
The same tree.
And beside it:
"If you don't remember soon, someone else will."
Izen stared.
Not at the tree.
At the way Grinless's body moved.
Not fluid.
Not flickering.
Not even human.
But like someone remembering how to be him.
And then—
The shadow laughed.
Not in madness.
Not in joy.
But with something worse.
Recognition.