The moon hung low like a tired eye, its silvery sheen filtered through the frost-clung branches of the elderwoods. Eira paced along the crumbling wall of the ruined watchtower, one gloved hand brushing the moss-damp stone. Behind her, the wind whispered in a tongue older than roads. She didn't understand its words, but it carried a rhythm—one that pulled at her memory like a thread catching in old cloth.
Tonight marked the first snow, and with it, the Reckoning.
She exhaled slowly, breath rising in pale clouds. A shard of obsidian lay heavy in her coat pocket, humming faintly with each of her steps. The shard was not meant to be here—none of them were. But after the fracture at Lake Lirien, she had learned that "meant to" rarely survived a proper confrontation with "had to."
"Still brooding?" said a familiar voice.
Calen's cloak swept the snow as he joined her. His face was lined in shadow, but the corners of his mouth tugged in amusement. The kind born of long roads and longer regrets.
Eira didn't look at him. "Do you hear it?"
"The wind? Or the shard? Or the fact that we're probably about to die?"
She smiled, despite herself. "All of it."
Calen's gaze turned to the treetops where a flock of mothhawks stirred. "Then yeah. I hear it."
They stood like that for a moment—two old ghosts waiting for a dawn they didn't trust. The watchtower had once guarded the veil between the Waking Lands and the Unseen Court. Now it guarded nothing. Or perhaps it still did, in a way no map could explain.
From the satchel at her hip, Eira pulled the glyph-burned vellum. The incantation scratched into its surface shimmered in pulses, responding to the shard's presence.
"The mirror will open soon," she said.
Calen's hand found hers. "And what will you ask it?"
"The truth."
He tilted his head. "And if it lies?"
Eira turned to face him fully, eyes colder than the wind. "Then I'll lie better."
The ritual circle hissed as snowflakes met the inked runes, steam rising in thin tendrils like ghosts reluctant to leave. Eira knelt within the sigils, bare palms pressed against the stone. Her breath slowed to match the tempo of the mirror's heartbeat.
Because it did have one, now.
The shard pulsed once, then again, each beat growing more confident. With each thrum, she felt herself unspooling—memories detaching from their moorings, drifting toward the center of the circle like feathers in reverse wind. Her mother's voice. The smell of sage and blood. The sound of a clock that had never ticked in this world.
Calen stood just outside the boundary, holding a flame-bell to guard her. His silhouette flickered against the tower's interior walls, taller than it should be, warped by the heat of the bell's fire.
"I don't like this," he muttered.
"You weren't supposed to," Eira said softly, voice hollow as the chamber itself. "This part isn't meant for liking."
The mirror shimmered into being—neither glass nor water, but a surface that devoured reflection. Her face did not return her gaze. Instead, a shape loomed in the depths: tall, robed in strands of silk and dusk, its face a shifting mosaic of every decision she had never made.
It spoke without mouth.
Why do you seek what must remain hidden?
"Because I am done surviving without knowing why," she answered.
The figure in the mirror tilted its head. Then you must trade.
"I know."
What will you offer?
Eira took a breath. "My certainty."
Behind her, Calen cursed. "Eira—"
But she had already pressed her hand to the shard. The mirror rippled, devouring the offering.
The chamber trembled.
The tremor wasn't just in the stone.
It moved through Eira's bones, down her spine, unraveling the seams of her understanding. The mirror pulsed brighter now, casting neither light nor shadow but a sense of exposure—like standing beneath a sky that had forgotten how to blink.
Images crashed into her mind.
The glint of her father's blade, not during a duel, but at the throat of a priest. The moment she first touched a mothwing glyph and felt it sing back. The day she'd left Calen behind in the Sylarian ruins with nothing but a map and a whisper of regret.
They were not memories.
They were possibilities.
She gasped, fingers clawing at the floor, unsure if she was trying to escape or anchor herself. A sob escaped before she could stop it, raw and jagged.
The mirror was not showing her truths.
It was showing her choices.
You came to know, the voice whispered again. Then know what could have been.
She turned to Calen, but his eyes were wide—not at her, but the figure now standing behind her.
A woman in a dress made of moths, each wing beating in slow cadence. Her eyes were moons. Her mouth was a silence that tasted of honey and ash.
"My name was Sytherel," the woman said, though no voice carried it.
Eira rose unsteadily. "You're one of the Bound."
"I was the first," Sytherel replied. "And you are the last."
The mirror behind them cracked.
The crack ran like a fault line through the center of the mirror, and as it splintered, so too did the chamber's warmth. The flame-bell sputtered. Calen's grip on it tightened, but the fire recoiled from the air itself—as if afraid.
Sytherel moved without sound, without step. One moment behind Eira, the next at her side, her presence threading into the room like ink in milk. Her hand, long-fingered and translucent, brushed the shard in Eira's pocket without touching it.
"This fragment does not belong to you," she said.
"I know," Eira whispered. "But I need it."
Sytherel regarded her, tilting her head in a way that made time feel optional.
"What you need is rarely what you want to carry."
Eira reached into her coat, drew the shard out. It bled cold light, casting a pale geometry on the ruined floor.
"If I give it to you," she said, "do you vanish?"
Sytherel smiled, and the moths that made her gown shifted, revealing glimpses of starlit lakes and dead gardens. "No. I become."
Eira hesitated.
Calen stepped forward, his voice low. "Eira, think."
She did.
She thought of the wars, the hollow victories. The way her hands never stopped shaking, even on quiet days. She thought of a girl once promised to the Crown of Thorns who had chosen exile instead.
She handed over the shard.
And Sytherel began to unravel.
But not into nothing.
Into song.
The mirror shattered completely.
The song rippled through the air—wordless, for it needed no language. It filled the cracks in the watchtower, danced along the glyphs, and kissed the very breath from Eira's lungs. Not stealing it—changing it.
She could feel the weight leave her bones.
Calen dropped to one knee, shielding his eyes as the glow intensified. The moths now circled the room like stars flung from an overfilled sky, each wingbeat echoing with the memory of something nearly lost.
Then: silence.
True silence.
No wind. No fire. Just the sound of the world pausing to listen.
Where Sytherel had stood, there now hovered a single, massive moth, its wings etched with the mirror's broken runes. It flapped once—twice—and then ascended through the open roof, vanishing into the night.
Eira exhaled.
Her palms were scorched with the memory of holding too much.
The mirror was gone.
The shard, too.
But in its place remained a sigil, burned into the stone—a glyph of Becoming. One that hadn't been seen in a thousand years.
Calen rose slowly. "You alright?"
Eira nodded. "No. But I will be."
They left the tower together, footprints already fading behind them in the snow. Above them, the stars stirred, as if blinking for the first time in ages.
And somewhere, far beyond what maps could name, the Reckoning began.
The journey back through the elderwoods was quieter than before—not because the wind had ceased, but because Eira had stopped straining to hear meaning in it.
Calen walked a step behind, as he often did when her thoughts were heavy. It wasn't silence between them, not really. It was a knowing. The kind shared by soldiers after a battle not yet named.
A fox crossed their path. Pale, with eyes like ink. It paused, watching Eira with the stillness of old magic. Then it disappeared into the trees, no sound but a twitch of branches.
"Another omen?" Calen asked.
Eira shook her head. "No. Just a witness."
He nodded, understanding too well.
As dawn kissed the edge of the horizon, they crested a hill overlooking the Valley of Hollow Bells. The valley lived up to its name—silent, save for the toll of wind brushing through brittle grasses. Below, the last of the frost clung to the stones like memory.
Eira reached into her satchel and drew out the vellum, now blank. The glyph had transferred, burned into the tower. But she kept the parchment.
To remember what she had traded.
"What now?" Calen asked.
Eira turned to him, weary but whole. "Now we wake the ones who've forgotten how."
And as they descended into the valley, the first bell rang—not by wind or hand, but by the will of something newly born.