Rain tapped steadily against the tinted windows of the SpiritRail as it sliced through the skyline of Natalia City — a ghost of a metropolis built on secrets, steel, and spectral energy.
Neon runes pulsed and blurred across the glass, reflecting in violent shades of violet and blue, painting the woman in seat 13A like a stained-glass phantom.
Natalia Taylor didn't flinch when the lights flickered. She never flinched.
To most, she was a story. A whisper. A curse parents invoked when children asked too many questions.
But Natalia was no myth. She had simply vanished — into shadows, blood, and a silence that stretched a century long.
And now she had returned.
Her face, pale and sharp-edged like marble, turned toward the station approaching outside. The SpiritRail slowed with a hydraulic groan as Kim Plaza Station loomed into view. The name still stood carved in gilded stone, untouched by time, untouched by shame. She scoffed silently.
It should have burned with him.
Exactly one hundred years ago, on this day, she had stood over Mayor John Kim as he bled out beneath the vaulted dome of City Hall, his fingers twitching against polished marble, unable to reach the scepter that had given his family centuries of rule.
One cut. One night. A dynasty shattered.
But Natalia hadn't killed for revenge or politics — not entirely. She had killed for truth. And the truth was this: the Kim family were monsters.
Elegant monsters, well-dressed and smiling for the press. But monsters nonetheless.
The Kims had built their fortune on the backs of enslaved spirit-bound people — captured in raids, shackled by cursed sigils, sold into labor camps beneath the city. They'd made deals with demons, sold off sacred land to profit-thirsty guilds, and buried anyone who dared speak against them.
She had once been one of their pawns — a mage prodigy plucked from the slums and promised a future in exchange for loyalty. What they hadn't told her was that loyalty to House Kim meant complicity in torture, war, and genocide.
She had found the truth in the dungeons beneath their estates — rows of chained spiritkin, eyes hollow, magic drained, branded with the Kim sigil like livestock. Children.
John Kim had laughed when she confronted him.
"They are not people, Natalia," he had said, fingers stained with gold dust from his latest ritual. "They are fuel."
That night, she bathed City Hall in red.
She hadn't looked back since.
Until today.
A single note had brought her back to Natalia City, sealed in blood-wax and delivered by an arcanist with no name:
"Your reflection walks the city. She smiles with your face."
The train hissed to a stop. Natalia stood.
Clad in a long black coat marked with faint shimmering sigils, she walked off the train and into the storm. Her boots splashed against spirit-soaked cobblestones, each step echoing like a whisper of judgment.
Kim Plaza had changed — newer lights, polished roads, fewer guards — but the air still reeked of old lies.
Knights in void-forged armor patrolled the perimeter. Mages hawked bottled lightning, illusions, and charmed weapons to oblivious tourists. A banshee sang in an alley nearby, her voice shattered and lovely, ignored by all.
And then Natalia saw her.
Across the street, framed by the golden light of an old bookstore — The Binding Vow — stood a young woman.
Laughing.
Laughing with her face.
Natalia froze, every muscle locking. Her mind, sharpened by a century of blood and betrayal, snapped into instinct.
The girl's hair — chestnut, identical. Her build — nearly the same. But there was softness in her posture. A warmth in her eyes.
No… not identical.
Natalia never laughed like that.
She began to cross the street, coat trailing behind her like a shadow. But just as her boot touched the curb, the ground beneath her feet exploded.
A demonhound — six feet tall, half-spirit, half-rotted flesh — erupted from the sewer grate with a roar that shattered nearby lights. Its eyes glowed with infernal runes, saliva dripping like tar. It landed on all fours, baring razor fangs, and lunged toward the crowd.
Screams tore through the street. People scattered. Mages tried to summon shields, but the creature was too fast.
The girl on the bookstore steps turned. For a brief second, her eyes locked with Natalia's. There it was again — that strange flicker of recognition. That eerie familiarity.
Time seemed to slow.
Then the hound struck.
But not her. It turned toward a child cowering behind a fountain.
Natalia moved.
Faster than the eye could follow, her coat flared and her hand whipped out. Spirit runes ignited down her arm in blue fire as she drew a blade — silver, ancient, and humming with bound energy.
She whispered a single word. The blade shimmered.
And with one slash, the demonhound split apart mid-lunge, its corpse dissolving into smoke and ash before it hit the ground.
Gasps echoed around her. The silence that followed was broken only by rain and flickering streetlights.
Natalia looked back to the bookstore.
The girl was gone.
Of course she was.
Natalia sheathed her blade and turned away, not surprised. She'd fought gods. Faced armies. Survived betrayals from every corner of the world.
But nothing unsettled her like this girl — this stranger who wore her face like a memory she didn't make.
Natalia took refuge in an abandoned clocktower near the inner district — one of her many bolt holes. The inside was cold, quiet, and undisturbed since the uprising. Dusty maps, old scrolls, and fragments of enchanted crystal covered the tables.
She lit a spirit flame with a snap of her fingers, then pulled a case from beneath the floorboards. Inside lay her old dossiers — parchments and records from her war against the Kim family.
She found one file marked: "Project Echo: Genetic Mirror."
Her hand hovered over it, hesitating. Then she opened it.
Inside were diagrams, spells, theories… and a list of potential "vessels." People the Kims believed could carry inherited traits of powerful bloodlines — built, not born.
Hope Taylor.
The name was scrawled in ink, circled twice.
"Project Echo was never shut down," she murmured.
Hope wasn't just her mirror. She was made that way.
By someone with Kim blood — or worse, by someone working for the immortals who let the Kims thrive.
A knock came at the door.
Soft.
Cautious.
Natalia vanished into the shadows.
The door creaked open.
A voice said, "You always return on the anniversary."
She emerged blade-first — but stopped when she saw him.
Duke Silver.
Clad in a cloak of scaled silk, eyes like molten time, his silver-dragon form faintly outlined beneath the glamour of his human disguise. He looked older than she remembered — regression always took its toll — but his presence was as steady as ever.
"I told you never to track me," Natalia growled.
"And I told you," Duke said softly, "that your mirror was the key to saving Azure. You just didn't believe me."
He stepped forward, holding out a cracked silver compass glowing with Hope's signature.
"She's not just your echo," he said. "She's the axis of the seventh loop. And if she dies—"
"—the world ends," Natalia finished, her voice bitter. "You time-travelers always speak in riddles."
Duke smiled grimly. "Not riddles. Warnings."
They both turned to the compass.
Hope Taylor's spirit energy was flaring.
"She's awakening," Duke whispered.
And Natalia, for the first time in decades, felt something alien in her chest.
Dread.