Something that might devour him whole.
The thought lingered on my tongue like ash, long after I had returned to the manor and tucked myself into the hard corner of the attic floor. No bed. No blanket. Just silence and splinters and the scroll I shouldn't have seen still burning behind my eyes.
"Pain threshold observed: 84%. Conversion not complete."
They had studied me. Watched me.
Even in death.
Even as I screamed.
The system wasn't just something that awakened when I burned.
They'd known about it. Maybe even caused it. Maybe even measured it—waiting to see how far I could break before I turned into something else.
But if 84% wasn't the end… what was?
And what happens when I finally reach 100?
Pain Conversion: 34%
System dormant.
No skills unlocked.
I closed my eyes and tried to summon the peace the Archives gave me. Cold stone. Quiet breath. The comfort of being unseen, unnoticed. But it didn't come.
Because someone, somewhere, had watched me die and recorded it like it was an experiment.
And I needed to know who.
The next morning came in grey streaks of mist and silence.
Therel wasn't in his seat when I arrived.
Odd.
The doors to the restricted section were closed. The hearth was unlit. Scrolls were strewn across the floor like someone had left in a hurry or been dragged away.
I picked them up one by one.
Replaced them in their boxes.
But a sound made me stop cold.
A whisper — like parchment brushing skin.
"Elira," it said.
I turned so sharply the torch hissed.
There was no one.
But then she stepped forward.
From the shadows.
The cloaked woman.
The same one from the courthouse. The one who'd crossed her sleeve — the old signal for I see you.
She wasn't a hallucination. She wasn't a trick.
She was real, and now she stood five paces away, watching me with eyes that had seen too much.
"You've been busy," she said, voice like worn silk.
"You shouldn't be here."
"And yet, here I am."
I didn't reach for a weapon. I had none. But I lifted my chin.
"Who are you?"
She ignored the question and stepped closer, pulling back her hood.
Raven-black hair streaked with silver. A long scar trailing from the edge of her brow to her jaw.
"I saw you burn," she said. "And I waited. And now I see you standing. I was right."
"Right about what?"
"That death wasn't enough to kill you."
I should have been afraid.
But instead… I wanted to ask her everything.
She handed me a folded parchment, sealed in wax without a crest. Then, she placed something else in my palm.
A shard.
Black. Glass. Warm.
Like it remembered flame.
"Don't open it here," she said. "Not with eyes on the walls. Wait until nightfall."
Then she was gone. No door creaked. No footstep echoed.
She just vanished, as if she'd never existed.
But my palm stung where she touched it.
The shard pulsed faintly.
That night, I waited until the manor went still. Sorelda had drunk herself into sleep. Clarisse was gone — likely at another noble's parlor spreading stories about my disgrace.
I lit a single candle and peeled the seal open.
The parchment held just one line.
"They never destroyed the mirror. She's still in there."
No name. No directions.
Just that.
But the moment I read it, I knew.
The Mirror of Vasselreth.
One of the forbidden relics we sealed during the first civil purge. I had been the one to demand it buried.
Because it didn't show your reflection.
It showed your truest self.
Or worse… it trapped it.
And now someone was telling me mine was still inside.
Still screaming.
Still waiting to be freed.
Pain Conversion: 37%
System dormant.
No skills unlocked.
But I felt it. A stirring behind my ribs. A pressure in the center of my spine.
The glass shard hummed against my skin.
Not warm anymore.
Hot.
As if the closer I came to the truth, the more the fire remembered me.
And I remembered it.
So the mirror still existed.
That meant someone had lied. Either Kaelen… or someone worse.
And if my soul, my memory, or my essence — whatever this thing inside me is — had been locked in there...
Then I had a new goal.
Not just vengeance.
Not just blood.
I needed to stand before that mirror again.
And ask it:
"What did they take from me?