The sky above the glacier had returned to its pale, endless stillness. But something beneath it had changed.
Cael hadn't moved in minutes.
He still knelt in front of the obelisk, staring at the now-dormant glyphs. The cold bit into his bones, but he felt distant from it—like sensation itself had thinned, like a film between him and the world had been peeled back, and what lay underneath wasn't meant to be seen.
Mireth crouched beside him. "That wasn't your first brush with reflection-warp."
Cael shook his head. "No. But it's the first time it looked like me."
She studied his face, her expression unreadable. "Do you know what you called?"
He hesitated. "Not entirely. A name. A possibility. A thread in the weave that was cut but not burned."
Mireth's tone sharpened. "You invoked a dead glyph. That's not a spell, Cael. That's a statement of being. Language that predates consent."
Cael met her eyes. "Then why was it carved here?"
Silence. The wind howled faintly again, alive once more.
She stood and looked out over the ice. "There are whispers—old lore that the first Sealers didn't build the Fracture's barriers with magic alone. Some used presemantic commands—glyphs not tied to language, but to intent. To reality's bedrock."
"Truth carved directly," Cael murmured.
Mireth nodded. "Yes. But that kind of glyph burns whoever uses it. It doesn't care about will or morality. It only asks: 'Do you exist strongly enough to impose?'"
Cael rose slowly. "I didn't impose. I mirrored."
"That's worse," she said flatly. "It means it mirrored you back."
A long silence stretched between them.
They both knew what it meant.
The Void wasn't just reacting to Cael. It was remembering him.
They made camp that night near a cliff overlooking a valley of broken ice.
Mireth had ignited a small Essentia-fueled brazier, the flame blue and cold, but stable. She didn't speak as she heated a ration pack, but her eyes stayed on him.
Cael sat apart, sketching.
Not glyphs. Just motions. Circles within spirals, lines that didn't close—trying to replicate the shapes he had seen etched into the obelisk without invoking them.
They wouldn't stay still.
No matter how he drew them, the lines rearranged when he looked away. A glyph would twist its spine, another would split like a cracked shell. His notebook pulsed faintly under his fingers with invisible weight.
Mireth finally broke the silence.
"Do you know why I agreed to guide you?"
Cael looked up. "Because of the contract?"
She scoffed. "The money was good, sure. But no. I've escorted other mages, scholars, hunters. Most treat this world like it owes them answers. But you… you're afraid of the right things."
Cael blinked. "The right things?"
"You're not scared of dying," she said. "You're scared of understanding something that shouldn't be understood. That's what keeps you human."
He fell quiet. Then: "And if I stop being afraid?"
"Then I'll kill you," Mireth said evenly, staring into the fire. "Or try. Before you open a door none of us can close."
He didn't laugh. Neither did she.
Later that night, Cael dreamed.
But not of Earth. Not of his old life or the lab or the terminal that had collapsed into light.
He dreamed of glyphs breathing.
He stood in a white void—not Void Essentia, but something rawer. A pre-space.
A sea of floating glyphs surrounded him, rotating slowly, shifting shape—not in visual terms, but semantic ones. Their meanings changed with each pulse, like thoughts trying to speak themselves.
In the center was the same figure he had seen at the obelisk.
His other self.
The mirrored Cael—skinless, glyph-crowned, empty-eyed—stood unmoving.
But around him was a circle of other figures. All humanoid. All faceless.
And each bore a different Relic.
One with a beast-shaped helm crowned with tusks.
One whose limbs shimmered with mechanical Essentia circuits.
One cloaked in vines and starlight, their hand glowing with solar blood.
One in jagged armor, their face obscured by a mirrored visor of smoke.
One barefoot, draped in runes of time, eyes closed as if listening to echoes.
One with wild eyes, perched atop a massive skeletal beast.
Each figure stood at an angle Cael couldn't fully see—as if looking at them directly would erase them.
They weren't present. Not yet.
But they were connected.
The mirrored Cael slowly turned to him. No expression. Just a single glyph forming on his palm. It read:
"ONE CHOICE SEALS. ONE CHOICE FREES."
Cael jolted awake, gasping.
He looked at his hand.
And the glyph was burned into his palm—not physically, but in mana.
An echo that had followed him back.
The next morning, Mireth noticed it immediately.
"You touched it in the dream, didn't you?"
Cael didn't answer.
She rolled her eyes. "Of course you did."
And yet—there was no malice in her tone.
Only inevitability.