The light began to bend.
Not dim. Not gone. Just...wrong.
Colours split apart like shattered glass, pooling across the path in strips of a red, violet and green, that shimmer when you step through them.
Every now and then, the forest stills, as if holding its breath, listening.
"Does anyone else feel like we're walking into a painting that's about to argue with us?" Elara asks, eyeing a particularly smug-looking birch tree.
Moony, perched on Rowan's shoulder like an indignant scarf, mutters, "The birch just said, and I quote, 'You're the reason trees evolved to bark…to tune people like you out."
Elara gasps. "How dare they!"
"Don't engage," Rowan murmurs, amusement in his voice. "That's exactly what it wants."
The trail wounds deeper into the forest, the trees grow stranger the further they go. One wore its bark inside out (Apparently this one likes to socialize). Another occasionally sighed like it had regrets.
They rounded a bend where the path narrows, funnelling into a gorge of twisted trees grown together like the ribs of some ancient, slumbering beast. Branches crisscrossed above, forming a natural archway draped in black moss and dangling crystals that chime softly in the airless quiet.
Fenwick slows, eyes narrowing. "We're here."
The Veil of Echoes.
A wall of fog stretches out before them…not mist, not smoke. It shimmers like silver silk in water, pulsing with faint whispers and strange lights that slide just beneath the surface.
Elara steps closer, heart lurching. "Do we...go through it?"
Fenwick nods solemnly. "You don't walk through it. You are pulled. One at a time. It's a crossing of the soul."
Valen folds his arms. "That's a deeply comforting sentence."
"Each person must face their Echo," Fenwick continues. "A reflection not of the past…but of the path not taken. A version of yourself that might have been, or still could be."
"Oh great," Elara mutters. "Alternate me is probably running a dark cult and has better eyebrows."
Fenwick ignores her. "It will speak. Do not answer unless you mean it. Do not follow unless you're certain. And above all…remember who you are when you step back out."
The fog churns gently, as if amused.
"Wait," says Rowan, glancing at Fenwick. "You're not going?"
"I've already seen my Echo," Fenwick replies, too quickly. "We...parted ways. Professionally."
"You broke up with yourself?" Moony asks, tail flicking.
Fenwick sniffs. "I have high standards."
Elara looks at Rowan. "I'll go first."
"No," Rowan says firmly. "I'll…"
But she has already stepped forward.
The Veil reaches for her like a tide and swallows her whole.
She falls upwards.
Wind howls in reverse. Light cracks. Then…silence.
Elara lands in a graveyard of mirrors.
Tall shards rise like gravestones from the soil, each holding a different reflection: one shows her as a Queen in a tower of flame; another, cloaked in black feathers, her hand outstretched to a dying sky. Some versions wept. Others smiled with too many teeth.
Only one stepped forward.
She wore a crown made of bone and glass. Her eyes shimmered like starlight. She looked older and terrifyingly calm.
"Hello, Elara," the Echo says, voice echoing in every mirror around them.
Elara swallows. "Let me guess. You're me if I gave up my friends and feelings to become an all-powerful magical nightmare."
The Echo tilts her head. "Or...if you finally stopped pretending you didn't want to win."
The ground flickers beneath Elara's boots, unsteady as memory.
"Power without purpose is just another cage," Elara says. "And I've spent enough time on those."
"Is it a cage," the Echo asks, "if you built it yourself?"
Elara steps back, heart hammering.
"You're not me."
"But you could be." The Echo's voice softens. "You've lost so much already. Wouldn't it be easier to close the door and become unbreakable?"
Elara thinks of her parents and Isadora. Of Valen's maddening smirks. Of Rowan's steady gaze. Of Moony snoring during their campfire watch, the people she is encountering along the way and most important of all, finishing this quest her aunt had left her to solve.
"No," she says determinedly. "Unbreakable isn't the same as whole."
The Echo smiles, slow and sad. "Then go. Before the choice stops being yours."
The world twists.
And Elara steps through the Veil.
She lands hard on the other side, her breath ragged.
Rowan catches her instantly, which is quite eerie, considering how he is always around.
"You're alright," he asks, voice steady, though his hands tremble slightly.
She nods. "More or less."
Moony licks her ear in a rare show of comfort. "Told you not to trust fog. It's always lying."
Valen goes in next.
No warning. No word. He just walks into the Veil like it owes him something.
They waited.
Time in the Veil doesn't play fair. What feels like a fleeting handful of minutes inside stretches into an hour or more beyond, as if the forest is quietly rewriting the rules while no one's looking.
When he emerges, he is pale and silent. His hands are clenched into tight fists. His eyes wouldn't meet anyone's, but his shadow clung unnaturally close behind him…longer than it should have been.
"What did you see?" Elara asks gently.
Valen says nothing.
But later, Rowan notices something strange: the curved dagger Valen always carried was buried in the earth beside the fire, its blade twisted like it had been struck by lightning.
Rowan was the last to go.
The Veil pulses, like it knew who he was. What he carried. It held him longer than the others. Elara paces, fists clenched, while Fenwick quietly starts sketching protective runes into the dirt.
When Rowan finally returns, he looks...older. Not physically. But something had settled in his eyes. Something that hadn't been there before.
He says only three words: "I saw him."
No one needs to ask who.
They walk on in silence.
The trees grow taller, thinner. The ground sparkles faintly, like it remembers stars. Somewhere in the distance, a waterfall laughs in reverse. The air feels lighter, but charged…as if the forest had judged them and chosen to let them pass.
Fenwick exhales. "You did well."
"You didn't go through," Elara says again, more pointed now.
"I already know what I'd see," Fenwick says simply. "And I've seen it before."
That was...unsettling.
But no one pressed further.
They camp near another hollow tree that sings lullabies in an old dialect of Sylian, just off-key enough to be vaguely threatening. Rowan takes the first watch. Valen second.
Elara couldn't sleep.
Dreams spin thick as cobwebs behind her eyes.
She dreams of six shards. Of a creature clawing at the walls beneath the world. Of Isadora's snow globe, the cottage windows glowing with golden light and someone waiting behind the glass.
Voices whisper:
"One more step, Elara.
And the forest will test you."
Morning came strangely.
The sun, if that's what it was, shimmered like molten pearl through the canopy. Leaves fluttered upward. Gravity shifted every so often, just to make sure they were still paying attention.
Moony clings to Rowan's shoulder like a limpet. "This place is cursed."
"Technically," Fenwick says, "it's sanctified."
"Same thing," Moony mutters. "Only prettier."
As they walk, Elara notices a new sensation: a pull.
Faint, but persistent. Like a heartbeat not her own, just beneath the ground.
"The shard," she says aloud.
"It's close," Rowan agrees. "I can feel it too."
Even Valen nods, his silence more focused now than withdrawn.
The trees part suddenly, revealing a field of fractured silver.
Not stones. Not ice.
Mirrors.
Thousands of them.
Some stood upright like monoliths. Others lay cracked and glinting in the tall grass. Each one whispered as they passed…soft, unintelligible things. Begging. Warning.
Fenwick stops short. "This is Mirrorfield. The last trial before the shard."
Rowan steps forward and his reflection flickers.
Not him.
Someone else.
His brother.
Eyes wide. Face pale.
A phantom from a grave that never stopped bleeding.
Rowan clenches his jaw and moves forward anyway.
Elara follows.
Her reflection shimmers, warps and then smiles with too-sharp teeth.
She blinks.
It was her again.
Mostly.
Moony sniffs. "I hate this place."
They walk carefully, single-file, the mirrors watching like silent sentinels. Their own faces twisted and turned. Doubled. Aged. Broken.
At the centre of the grove stands a mirror unlike the others…taller, rectangular, framed in living roots that twists upward like reaching fingers. It pulses with a pale, silvery light.
"That's the one that has the shard in it," Fenwick whispers, almost reverently.
Valen crosses his arms. "And how do we extract it? Tap three times and say please?"
"We don't," Fenwick says, taking a step back. "Elara has too."
"Not Helpful," Rowan mutters.
Elara gives them all a look. "Do I get a manual for that, or...?" Elara mutters, stepping forward despite the sudden tightness in her chest.
The mirror ripples…once, twice…and then her reflection moves.
It tilts its head. Smiling.
Then glides out like an encore no one asked for with the elegance of a ghost at a gala, tracing her fingertips down an invisible rail, as if she'd designed the entrance herself."
Moony immediately hisses, tail puffing. "Well, I hate her already, I don't trust anyone who glides. Gliders are liars."
"Oh good," the Echo says, voice smooth as frostbite. "I was starting to think you'd never show. I even fluffed my hair for this."
It leans in, eyes gleaming with too many thoughts.
"Let's make some poor life choices together, hmm?"