Finn ran.
Not from the chamber itself, but from the voice.
A thousand names had spoken in unison, each one a truth he had buried. Versions of himself called out across the Inkchamber. Some shouted. Others pleaded. A few laughed. None of them lied.
He reached the threshold just as the last echo faded. The door reappeared behind him, smooth and blank. No handle. No seam. He knew it would not open again.
He turned his face to the tunnels, breathing in the cooler air of the outer corridors. The ache in his chest had dulled, but it was not gone. Cassor's mark still pulsed faintly, a reminder he had been named.
Above him, the Archive loomed in silence.
The reader stood in a hall of glass.
This wing of the city had once been devoted to the mirrortellers, a guild dissolved before her birth. But the glass still stood. Tall panes shaped into words that shimmered at noon and whispered at night. Here, names could not be read aloud. Only reflected.
She held the scroll she had unsealed earlier. The one with three red names.
Two were crossed out now. The ink had faded to silver. Their owners had been lost to the city's rewriting.
Only one name remained.
Her own.
She stepped into the mirror chamber.
Each pane caught her reflection, but none of them matched. In one she was a child. In another, a warrior. In one she held a crown she had never seen. In another, she bled ink from her palms.
She stepped closer to the central glass.
It was blank.
Her reflection did not appear.
Instead, words began to form.
We gave you the name.
You hid the cost.
Return what was mirrored.
She opened the scroll.
It burned.
The name on the page twisted, curling into a spiral she could not read. Her hands shook. The mirror pulsed with light.
Then, a voice not her own whispered her name.
And behind her, the glass began to crack.
The reader turned.
Cassor stood at the far end of the hall, hands clasped behind his back, red robes gleaming with wet ink.
"You were never meant to read," he said. "Only to reflect."
"I chose to remember."
"You chose to rewrite."
The mirror shattered.
And between them, the name she had hidden her whole life bled into the air, turning back into sound.
It was not a name of peace.
It was a title.
And the city would soon remember what it meant.
Light scattered across the floor in fractured arcs. The shards of the mirror did not fall like glass, but floated. Each piece shimmered with half-seen memories, scenes only she could see. The reader took a single step forward and the shards recoiled, forming a wide circle around her.
She looked down and saw not herself, but a child.
A girl with ink on her tongue, reciting verses she had never read. Her voice high and hollow. Her audience unseen. She watched the memory of herself complete the ritual that had given her the first name, the one she now bore like armor. Not a gift. A collar.
Cassor watched her silently.
"You bound me before I knew how to refuse," she said.
"We preserved you," he replied. "What you are, what you were meant to be, cannot exist unbound. It is too dangerous."
"To whom?"
"To us."
The reader glanced again at the scroll. The spiral had stopped spinning. It now formed a single word. One she did not recognize but understood all the same.
Mireth.
She whispered it aloud.
The hall darkened.
Cassor flinched.
"You have no idea what that means," he said, voice flat.
"I know it's mine."
"That name is an instruction. A pattern. It cannot be carried without consequence."
"And yet I'm still here."
The mirror shards drew closer, forming symbols in the air. Not sentences. Commands. They rotated slowly, casting ghostlight across the reader's face.
Cassor stepped forward. "If you speak it again, you will rewrite not just yourself, but what was written around you. The people. The Archive. Even him."
She looked at him with quiet fury. "Then let the Archive adjust."
She raised the scroll.
Cassor moved.
Faster than she expected.
But not faster than the name.
She whispered it again. Mireth.
The scroll burst into flame.
Not fire, but language. Entire paragraphs lifted from its surface and twisted in the air. A voice not hers and not his echoed through the broken chamber.
Not one name.
Three.
The First Reader.
The Unmarked Scribe.
The Mirrorname.
Cassor stopped. Ink bled from his cuffs. His lips trembled.
"You remember," he said, but there was no pride in it.
"I never forgot," she answered.
Behind her, the mirrors reformed.
They showed one face now. Hers.
Not a child. Not a queen. Not a weapon.
Just a woman.
Whole.
Cassor stepped back. The walls began to hum.
"You will burn the Archive to ash," he said.
"No," she replied.
"I will make it see."
She walked forward, past the shards that glowed with language. Each footstep struck the floor like punctuation. The old scroll crumbled in her hand, the last of its meaning swallowed into her breath.
Cassor retreated toward the far archway. He was trembling.
"You think this will free them?"
"I think freedom began when you stopped being believed."
"You were a name we made."
"And now I'm the sentence you cannot erase."
The mirrors trembled. One cracked again. Then another. But this time, it wasn't collapse. It was alignment.
A pattern reformed.
And the reader, once a ghost in her own history, stepped into its center.
For the first time, the Archive bent toward her.
And waited.