From one moment to the next... darkness and a feeling of falling enveloped Kael, without warning, as if he had been in this place since the beginning of his life, that's how familiar it felt.
Kael continued to plummet through the void between Broken Paths, but now something was different. The mirror shard Lirya had given him burned in his palm like a piece of cold sun, piercing his skin.
Lirya's voice sounded from beside him, but he couldn't see her. "Don't let the shard possess you!"
It was too late.
The pain came like a lightning bolt: the mirror shattered in his hand, turning into living mercury that crawled up his arm like a hungry snake beneath his skin. When it reached his chest, the seal burst into silver flames.
And then, he saw it.
Suddenly, he was looking into a cell.
Not of black glass, but of golden bones, polished to a shine like the sun. Inside, a man with her face, but with eyes like pitch-black holes, lay chained.
"Do you see me, copy?" the original whispered, his voice identical to Kael's, but corroded by millennia of silence. "Lirya lied to you. She doesn't want to save you... she wants to replace you."
The chains creaked and tightened their grip.
"This fragment is my blood. And now that you carry it inside... I can show you the truth."
An image seared itself into Kael's mind:
Lirya, standing atop a mountain of identical corpses, her mercury tears turning into daggers, floating around her.
Kael returned to himself in a moment.
He knelt in a sea of black sand, under a starless sky, with no sign of movement around him, the place exuding an ancient air of endless solitude. Beside him, Lirya watched him with her eclipsed eyes as if lost in eternal thought...
"What did you see?" she asked, but her tone was too urgent to be casual.
Kael touched his chest. The seal had changed: it now showed an eclipse within an eclipse, and beneath it, the mercury of the fragment beat like a second heart.
"I saw the original. He's dead."
Lirya smiled, but it was a cold, calculating expression.
"You lie so badly..." Her fingers seductively stroked the modified seal, causing Kael's skin to prickle, unable to resist. "It doesn't matter. Now that the fragment is part of you, we can begin."
"Begin what?"
"The hunt," he whispered. "Because now... it will come for you."
Suddenly and without warning, a terrible pain struck Kael. He doubled over, screaming, while his left arm turned to mercury for a few seconds before solidifying again. It felt like needles were being driven into his bones and his skin was being exposed to intense flames. It's a pain that would drive anyone crazy.
"It's normal," Lirya held him with supernatural strength. "The fragment is changing you. If you survive, you will be stronger than any Eclipsed. If not..."
He didn't finish the sentence. There was no need to. After an unknown amount of time that seemed like centuries to Kael... for an instant, he revealed the eyes of the original, dark as the abyss.