The Town of Mirrors and the Girl Who Forgot Her Name
"Not every reflection tells the truth. Some lie just to survive."
---
The wind was dry as paper when they arrived at the edge of Neriso.
A border town, if one could still call it that. Cracked bricks marked the arches of the old Flame Gate, its sigil scorched and unreadable. Wooden signs swung from rusted chains, creaking under no breeze. Not a soul stirred. But the town… watched them.
Yuji stepped in first, Eternal Ring faintly pulsing against his palm. Aika followed beside him, her hood raised. Ryen, ever vigilant, scanned every rooftop, every alley. Even Xioner slowed down, eyes narrowing at the strange architecture—a harmony of stone and mirror.
Mirrors.
They were everywhere.
Slabs of silvered glass embedded into walls, doors, and even trees. Broken fragments littered the streets like shattered memories. Some caught light that wasn't there. Some reflected places that didn't match what they faced.
"I don't like this," Ryen muttered. "This town isn't empty. It's echoing."
Yuji nodded. The reflection in the storefront glass beside him showed the four of them walking… but their shadows lagged behind. When he turned, the shadows snapped into place.
No sound followed them—only silence, and the distant hum of tension.
They passed an old fountain, long dried, with a statue of a woman holding a mirror instead of a child. Her face had eroded, but the mirror was intact. It reflected a sky full of three moons. Yuji looked up. The real sky held only one.
Aika paused. "This place… feels like a forgotten dream."
Ryen knelt beside a shattered plate of glass on the ground. A faint whisper echoed from it when he touched it.
"Did you hear that?" he asked sharply.
"No," Xioner said. "But I felt it."
They pressed deeper into the ghost town. The streets looped in strange circles. At one point, they crossed the same bakery three times. Each time, its sign hung at a different angle, and the bread in the window rotted more.
Then, near the heart of Neriso, they saw her.
A girl. Thin, maybe fourteen. Pale skin. Long black hair. Sitting cross-legged in the center of the square before a wide mirror nailed to a wooden frame.
She didn't look up when they approached.
She whispered something to the glass—then said it again, but backwards.
"Are you… alright?" Aika asked gently.
The girl tilted her head, as if hearing a language she barely recognized. Her eyes didn't move from the mirror.
"I forgot my name," she said calmly. "But I remember the voices. I remember… someone who wasn't supposed to leave."
Yuji stepped forward. "You live here?"
She blinked slowly. "I don't live. I echo."
Then she looked up—and her gaze landed on Yuji like a falling star.
"You were here before," she said, voice flat. "But not you. Not this you."
Yuji froze.
"What do you mean?"
She didn't answer. She simply stood, walked to another mirror beside the wall, and pointed.
In its surface, Yuji saw something else. Himself, but older. Scarred. Dark energy coiling around him like smoke. His smile was wrong—too calm. In the reflection, the buildings behind him were on fire. And Mina stood beside him.
"That one came first," the girl said. "He touched this place. Broke it. I was made from what he forgot."
Aika shivered. "What do you mean, made?"
"I don't know," the girl whispered. "But I speak like he did. Or maybe like the one who dreamed of him. I don't know which voice is mine."
Yuji turned to Xioner.
"Explain. Please."
Xioner's lips were tight, eyes scanning the walls. "Dimensional scars," she said. "When time fractures, not everything fades clean. Sometimes… shadows of people remain. Echoes. They attach to memory, to mirrors, to moments no longer anchored."
Ryen clenched his fists. "So she's a… what? An afterimage?"
Xioner nodded. "Maybe. Or maybe she's a warning."
Suddenly, the mirror to their left rippled. Not glass. Water.
Yuji turned—and in its surface, his own reflection turned the opposite way.
Aika stepped back. "That's not me…"
Her mirror self didn't blink. It just smiled. Her eyes blackened slowly.
The girl didn't react. She simply sat again, muttering:
"Not every reflection tells the truth. Some lie just to survive."
Yuji tore his gaze away. "We need to cover them."
Aika already moved. She pulled loose cloth from a torn banner and draped it over one mirror, then another. Ryen smashed two with his sword hilt. Glass scattered like teeth.
But the girl just kept whispering.
"I will forget again," she said softly. "But next time, I might remember too much."
They stayed the night in the broken inn. No fire, no noise.
Aika wrapped her coat tighter. "She wasn't real, was she?"
Yuji shook his head. "No. But she wasn't fake either."
Outside, the reflections watched.
And somewhere far beyond the broken town, the red sky of Nation IVAS began to rise.
---
What We Carry
"We don't escape pain. We carry it better."
---
Night draped over the ruined town like a quiet funeral cloth.
The mirrors were all covered now—sheets of torn banners, cloaks, spare linens. Aika had gone out of her way to double-wrap the cracked one in the town square. Ryen smashed the ones that couldn't be hidden. Still, everyone spoke softly, as if their voices might echo too far into the dark.
They set up a small campfire in the courtyard behind an old inn. Stone benches surrounded them. The stars hung above—quiet, uncaring—and three moons peeked through clouds like unblinking eyes.
No beasts hunted. No wind howled.
Just silence… and memory.
Ryen was the first to speak.
"I once watched a man die," he said, staring into the flame. "Not his body. That stayed alive. But his soul… cracked like glass. You could see it in his eyes."
Yuji looked over, surprised. Ryen didn't usually talk like this.
"He was a soldier under my command. The enemy ambushed us near the Shattered Wastes. He survived the blades, the poison, even the fire. But he came out clutching a small ring. Said it belonged to his brother." Ryen's jaw clenched. "He thought he'd saved him. But… he was holding the ring because his brother had burned."
Aika looked down. "What happened to him?"
"He walked for three days after that. Never said a word. Ate. Slept. Moved. But he wasn't there anymore. The man who came back… wasn't the same one who left. His soul had gone somewhere else."
Yuji let the words settle in the firelight. The shadows flickered like ghosts on the stone walls.
"Sometimes I wonder if that's what happened to me," he said finally.
Aika glanced at him.
"Back when I first awakened… when I found out I had Wind," Yuji continued, voice low. "I was furious. Wind felt useless. Like a child's toy element. I used to think—'Why not Fire? Why not Lightning? Something real. Something strong.'"
He held up his hand.
The Eternal Ring on his finger responded, pulsing faintly.
"I hated it," he whispered. "But now… maybe it wasn't the element that was weak. Maybe I was."
Aika reached out, slowly, and touched his wrist. "You were never weak. Just scared."
Yuji looked up. The reflection of the flame danced in her eyes. But there was something else behind them. Something… uncertain.
"What is it?" he asked gently.
She hesitated. Then sighed. "Back in the illusion realm… when we were trapped. I passed out. I never told you what I saw."
Yuji and Ryen both turned toward her, listening.
"I saw… a tower. Made of bone and obsidian. And at the top… there was a throne. I was sitting on it. Wearing armor black as night. And everything around me burned with dark flame. But it wasn't fire. It was something else. Something that listened."
Yuji blinked. "You were ruling?"
"Yes." She shook her head, as if still unsure. "I was calm. Powerful. But empty. Like I'd given up everything to become that version of myself. And the worst part is…" She paused. "It didn't feel wrong. It felt like it had already happened."
Ryen frowned. "Could've been a future. Or a warning."
"Or a memory," Xioner said from the treeline.
They hadn't heard her arrive. She leaned against an old pillar, arms crossed, eyes shimmering faintly under the moons.
"A memory?" Aika asked.
"This place—Neriso—it's a scar in the world. The border between Flame World and the threads beyond. Sometimes echoes from other realities bleed through. Other timelines. Other yous." Xioner tilted her head. "Your vision might not be a dream. It could be you—but from another path."
Aika's hands curled slightly. "Then which version of me am I becoming?"
Xioner didn't answer.
Yuji looked down at his palm again. The Eternal Ring shimmered softly in the dark. He took a breath—then focused.
Wind… Dark…
From his hand, a flicker of silver-black light rose. A flame—not quite a flame. It shimmered like dark mist, but pulsed like air in motion. Wind and shadow, dancing together in harmony. Small. Incomplete. But alive.
The firelight bent slightly in its presence.
Ryen stared.
Aika gasped softly.
Xioner's lips curved into a faint, unreadable smile.
"You're getting closer," she said.
Yuji looked at her. "To what?"
"I can't say." She turned back toward the trees. "But the mirrors aren't done with you."
Then she vanished into the forest like smoke.
The fire crackled. The silence returned.
Yuji let the dark wind flame fade from his hand. The warmth lingered on his skin—not just from power, but from understanding.
They weren't running from their past anymore.
They were carrying it.
And for the first time, it didn't feel like a burden.
It felt like fuel.
---
A Letter from the Fire Nation
"History doesn't repeat. It survives."
---
The wind in Neriso changed with the dawn.
Where once there was a haunted stillness, now came the faint rustle of life. Trees shivered as if shedding night's memory. Somewhere, a distant stream resumed its song. And from high above, something shimmered like falling light.
Yuji looked up just in time to see it.
A hawk—feathers of flickering gold, eyes burning like coals—spiraled down from the morning sky. It left behind a trail of steam, as if the air itself was boiling in its path.
"A Flame Hawk," Xioner murmured. "From IVAS."
The bird glided lower, wings wide and regal, before perching atop a ruined arch near the camp. It didn't screech. It didn't blink. Instead, it tilted its head and extended one burning claw.
In it: a scroll.
Yuji approached cautiously. The bird didn't flinch.
He took the scroll.
The parchment was sealed with a symbol etched in red wax—half sun, half crown. A circle of twelve firepoints enclosed it.
The royal crest of IVAS.
Ryen narrowed his eyes. "That's not a message they send lightly."
Yuji broke the seal.
There was no ink. No brushstroke. The message had been burned into the paper—carefully scorched, as if flame had carved the letters with divine precision.
The words read:
> To the one who bears both shadow and wind—
We know of you.
And we remember.
IVAS does not forget its debts… or its fears.
—Signed by the Flame Throne, House Veyon
Yuji lowered the scroll slowly. The fire hawk watched him for another breath, then dissolved into heat and vanished—nothing left behind but a faint scorch mark on the arch.
Aika broke the silence. "What does it mean by remember?"
"Could be prophecy," Ryen muttered. "Or history rewritten as myth."
Xioner stepped forward, her boots crunching frost-laced stone. "There was an ancient story… before the Five Realms ever fractured. A bearer of wind and shadow, born between flames, who would break the bridge between worlds. Some said he would bring ruin. Others said… rebirth."
Yuji stared at the parchment in his hand. "So… they think I'm him?"
Xioner's eyes didn't blink. "Or they fear that you might be."
Aika looked toward the horizon, where the blue trees of the haunted forest met the earth's blood.
For there, rising like teeth from the land, were the Crimson-Halo Mountains—tall and jagged, wreathed in smoke and red mist. Peaks glowed with magma rivers. And carved into the side of the central summit, barely visible through the haze, stood the monumental fire-forged Gates of IVAS.
Beyond them: the Flame Nation.
Ryen exhaled slowly. "So that's what they've built…"
"Not built," Xioner corrected. "Burned into being. IVAS doesn't construct. It scars."
Yuji folded the scroll and tucked it into his jacket.
"How long do we have before they come for us?" he asked.
"They already have," Xioner said. "That hawk wasn't just a letter. It was a brand. The moment it landed, IVAS marked your presence in this region. Eyes will be watching now—both royal and hidden."
Aika frowned. "So we're not guests. We're suspects."
"Worse," Ryen added. "We're pieces in a game they already started."
The group began walking, leaving the cold stones of Neriso behind. As they crossed the last edge of the Blue Forest, Yuji looked back one final time.
The mirrors were still covered. The girl was gone.
But he could feel something—some echo in the trees, some unfinished whisper humming through the earth beneath their steps.
He remembered her words.
> "You were here before. But not you. Not this you."
He clenched his fists, then loosened them again. The Wind inside him stirred. The Dark coiled quietly. He didn't fear them anymore. Not like before. Now, they were voices he was learning to hear—songs in a language he hadn't finished learning.
And somewhere, the Fire Nation waited.
Before them, the ground shifted color. Blue grass faded into rust-red soil. The air thickened with smoke and memory. The temperature rose with every step. IVAS was near.
Then Xioner said, in a voice quieter than truth:
> "Walk carefully. Not every invitation is a welcome."
---
END OF CHAPTER 35