The Guild didn't send him with a partner.
That was the first red flag.
The second was the mission brief—three lines long, sealed with a glyph that sizzled when broken:
> Location: Duskwane, Border of the Null Stretch
Status: Red-Level Shadow Collapse
Objective: Observe. Contain. Return only if intact.
Not "return safely." Not "return with data." Just: return if intact.
And even that felt like a gamble.
The masked man gave him a travel pass, one black vial of preserved echo-ink, and a worn traveler's coat lined with silent runes. The kind issued to Seekers going into warzones.
"Protocol requires a three-person binding triad for any incursion into Null-affected zones," Izen muttered, thumbing through the supplies. "Since when does the Guild send a Dreamshade Reaver solo?"
The man's expression—what little of it could be seen beneath the new fractured mask—didn't change.
"You're not going as a Reaver," he said. "You're going as bait."
Izen paused.
"Should've said that first."
The man tossed him a secondary glyph-tag. Pale gray, stitched with soft gold thread—unfamiliar to Izen, but old. Old in the way forgotten oaths and burned churches were old.
"What's this?"
"Shadow-seal," the man said. "Worn by the Sovereign Circle."
Izen blinked. "There's no such thing."
"There was. Once. Your blood qualifies you."
He looked down at the tag, feeling the pull of it before even attaching it to his coat.
"Why Duskwane?" he asked.
The man's answer came slower this time.
"Because the girl's already waiting for you."
"What girl?"
But the man was already gone.
---
Duskwane wasn't dead.
But it wasn't alive either.
The sky there was wrong—gray in a way that didn't feel like weather, more like a bruise stretched over the world. The sun shone in patches, flickering between cracked clouds, but shadows didn't fall naturally. They bled. Curled. Hung in the air like smoke too heavy to drift.
Izen stepped off the Seeker's transit path and immediately felt the pressure change.
The null-zone edge was near.
Not visible. But felt.
It was like his bones remembered a silence they'd never known.
The town had once been a trading outpost—he could tell from the layout. Low buildings, long bridges, carved stone with faded Guild emblems. A place meant for rest and regulation.
Now?
Every window was shuttered.
Every door bolted from the inside.
Even the shadows were cautious—sticking to corners, clinging to cracks. Watching.
He made his way to the town center. No movement. Just a dry wind that scraped across the stone streets, carrying with it the faint scent of rusted metal and burnt wax.
Then—footsteps.
Soft. Barefoot.
He turned.
She was maybe sixteen.
Too young to be here alone. Pale skin like unmarked paper. Hair silver-blonde, cut unevenly. And eyes that were... wrong. Not glowing. Not clouded.
Just empty.
Like someone had stolen the reflection from a mirror and left the glass behind.
"You don't belong here," she said quietly.
Izen didn't move. "Neither do you."
She tilted her head. "But I was born here."
He stared at her.
"That's not possible. Duskwane was evacuated four years ago."
"I wasn't born in Duskwane," she said. "I was born under it."
He took a slow step closer.
"What's your name?"
She looked at him like he'd asked something vulgar.
"I don't have one," she said simply. "Not anymore."
He narrowed his eyes. "Everyone has a name."
"No," she replied, and her tone shifted slightly. "Some of us were made without ink."
A chill slid down his spine.
"Who made you?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she walked past him—bare feet silent on the cracked stone—and gestured for him to follow.
And for some reason, despite every lesson, every rule, every Guild-damned protocol screaming at him to stop—
He did.
---
She took him through winding alleyways.
Past buildings half-swallowed by creeping void.
Once, they passed a man sitting in a doorway. His skin was gray. His face… hollow. Not bruised. Not dead.
Just gone.
Like his reflection had left and taken the rest of him with it.
Izen slowed. Reached for a pulse.
The girl touched his arm.
"Don't. He's listening."
"Who?"
She looked at the sky.
"The thing behind the sun."
He stared at her.
Then at the sky.
There was nothing there.
But he felt it anyway.
Like something was staring back.
She led him to a basement hatch beneath a ruined chapel. It opened with a hiss—not mechanical, but living.
The steps descended into pure dark.
"You said you were born under Duskwane," he said.
"Yes."
"What's down there?"
She looked at him.
Her voice was quieter now.
"My shadow."
The descent didn't feel like steps.
It felt like sinking.
The staircase below the ruined chapel twisted downward in impossible angles, each turn steeper than the last, lined with stone etched in glyphs too eroded to read. The air was thick—not stale, not dead, but alive in the worst possible way. Breathing around them. Listening.
Izen stepped carefully. The girl ahead of him didn't seem to notice the cold. Or the dark. Or gravity.
"Where are we going?" he whispered.
"To the room where I died," she replied.
His feet paused mid-step.
"You just said you were born here."
She glanced back, pale hair catching the light of his glyph-lamp.
"I was."
Then she continued.
---
At the base of the stairs, the air thickened. Not in scent, but in weight. Like standing underwater—but with shadows instead of water. They moved along the walls—slowly, silently—but never touched the girl. Never got too close.
They avoided her.
Izen reached for Grinless's echo in his mind.
Still blocked.
Whatever lived down here didn't want echoes.
The chamber opened into a hollow dome. The ceiling rose thirty feet above, black and pitted. The walls bore deep carvings of figures—some human, some not—standing in rings around a central glyph-seal on the floor.
The seal was ancient.
And it was alive.
It pulsed in a slow rhythm, silver-black ink moving through its lines like blood.
In the center: a name.
But not written in any known tongue.
Not Old Sovereign, not Modern Inkcall, not even Echo-script.
And yet—Izen knew what it said.
Because it was written in the same shape as the thread on his arm.
> 𝘾𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙤𝙬
His chest tightened.
"You've seen this before," the girl said, watching his reaction.
"Yes."
"In a dream?"
"No," he said slowly. "On myself."
He raised his sleeve.
The silver thread across his forearm shimmered, and the glyph at its center—normally dormant—responded to the one on the floor.
It pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then—
> "Do not touch it," the girl whispered.
Izen stopped mid-reach.
"Why?"
"Because it's not just a name." Her voice had changed. It was smaller now. Afraid. "It's a doorway. And the last time it opened, the town fell silent."
She knelt beside the seal.
"I was the key."
Silence filled the room.
He stared at her.
"What… are you?"
She touched the ground with her palm.
Shadows responded. Not wildly. Not violently.
Like pets answering their name.
"My shadow died when I was born. The Guild said I was a Lightless. But that wasn't true."
She looked up at him—eyes wide, terrified, but honest.
"My shadow didn't die. It left."
Izen felt it then.
The echo in the air.
Like an open mouth behind the wall, breathing through cracks in reality.
She continued. "It went somewhere. Took my name with it. Left me hollow. Like a cup waiting to be filled. And it's been calling ever since."
"Calling what?"
She looked toward the seal.
Then back at him.
"You."
---
Something behind the wall moved.
Not a tremor. Not a quake.
But a shift.
A wrongness.
Izen's shadow snapped upright like a blade.
The glyph-thread on his arm burst into heat.
"I think we need to leave," he said.
"No," she said. "It's too late."
The glyph on the floor opened.
Not cracked. Not shattered.
Opened.
Like a mouth parting stone lips.
From it, a shape rose.
It was not a person.
Not a shadow.
Not even a memory.
It was a reflection.
Of Izen.
But twisted.
Wearing armor of mirror-glass and ink. Its eyes were hollow glyphs. Its voice was wrong.
> "Reaver. Incomplete. Rewrite initiated."
Izen stepped back.
The girl didn't move.
The thing spoke again.
> "Designation accepted. Integration must proceed."
Izen's breath caught.
It wasn't attacking.
It was absorbing.
He threw a glyph-blade forward, slashing a binding rune through the air. It hit the reflection—but instead of harming it, the echo twisted and fed the creature. The sigil sank into its chest and became part of it.
It grew brighter.
The girl cried out.
"You're giving it what it wants!"
He turned to her. "Then help me stop it!"
She stepped forward.
Her hands trembled. She didn't cast a glyph. Didn't summon an echo.
She just spoke.
A single phrase.
A name.
But not in her voice.
In Lyrell's.
> "Back."
The reflection froze.
The seal quivered.
And from the glyph-thread on Izen's arm, something old pushed out. Not Lyrell. Not Izen.
But a third voice.
A voice with no tone, no face, no body. Just purpose.
> "Designation rejected. Sovereign Path incomplete. Rewrite terminated."
The chamber pulsed once.
The reflection collapsed like melting wax.
The glyph closed.
The shadows stopped moving.
And for a long, heavy moment, the world just… breathed.
---
When it was over, Izen dropped to one knee.
The girl was still staring at him.
He wiped blood from his nose.
"What… what the hell was that?"
She didn't answer at first.
Then—
"That was your other half. The part they left behind when they wrote you."
He met her gaze.
"Is it gone?"
"No," she said. "But for now… it remembers your name."