They walked without speaking for a long time after the Keeper's hall.
Kael's legs still ached from the sprint, his ears ringing with phantom echoes of that terrible note. Every step now felt deliberate, as if the air itself could betray them if they moved carelessly.
The woman didn't slow. Her hand brushed the wall every so often, feeling the faint grooves and ridges carved into the stone. Kael noticed they changed every dozen steps — sometimes straight lines, sometimes jagged spirals.
Finally, the corridor split into three.
She paused, studying each path with the intensity of a hunter choosing which scent to follow. "Left is wrong," she said. "Middle is worse."
Kael arched a brow. "So we take right?"
She gave a humorless smirk. "We take the one that kills us slow instead of fast."
They turned right.
The air changed almost instantly. It was cooler here, sharper, and carried a faint hum — not like the Keeper's, but higher, like glass vibrating under a fingertip. Kael frowned. The sound wasn't constant. It rose and fell in a strange rhythm, almost like breathing.
The corridor ended in a high archway. Beyond it, a vast, domed chamber opened up, lit not by torches or orbs, but by the walls themselves.
Glass.
Every inch of the curved surface was made of enormous, fractured panes, each taller than a man. The cracks spiderwebbed across them, yet none had fallen. Light shimmered faintly through them, though the source was hidden.
And in each pane… a reflection.
Kael stepped closer, his breath catching.
The reflections didn't match reality. In one pane, he stood alone in a snow-covered wasteland. In another, he was drenched in blood, his eyes hollow and unblinking. In yet another, he wasn't human at all—something wrong had grown where his shadow should be, its limbs too many to count.
He stumbled back. The lantern's glow wavered.
"They show possibilities," the woman said, her voice flat. "Not truths. Not lies. Just… options."
Kael tore his gaze away from a particularly twisted reflection of himself — one where his body was stretched impossibly thin, his mouth a hollow void — and looked at her. "And what happens if you break them?"
She didn't answer at first. Instead, she stepped to one of the panes and laid her fingertips against it. Her reflection was different, too — taller, cloaked, her face hidden behind a mask of bone. The sight seemed to hold her in place.
Finally, she said, "If you break a glass, you choose."
Kael's stomach knotted. "Choose what?"
Her eyes shifted to him. "Which future you get."
The hum grew louder. Kael's skin prickled. Something in the far corner of the chamber moved. At first, he thought it was another reflection — but then it stepped out from behind a pane.
It looked like him.
Almost.
The proportions were wrong — its limbs just slightly too long, its posture too still, its head tilting with a deliberate slowness that no human would ever mimic. Its face was his, but the smile was too sharp, the eyes too steady.
It began walking toward him.
The lantern flared in Kael's grip.
The woman moved between them, her hand on her knife. "Don't let it touch you."
The figure stopped just shy of the lantern's circle of light. The glass panes behind it flickered, each one now showing the same distorted version of Kael.
It spoke.
The voice was his. "You'll end here."
Kael's chest tightened. The whisper in his mind — the same one that had first offered him life — stirred again. Feed it.
He hesitated. The last time he'd fed the lantern, something had been taken from him. He didn't even know what.
The reflection-Kael tilted its head further, impossibly far, bones in its neck cracking like breaking ice. "You're already empty."
The hum became a low, resonant note that rattled the glass. Several panes cracked further, the sound sharp in the stillness.
The woman drew her knife. "Choose now."
Kael looked around. In one of the nearest panes, his reflection stood over the shattered body of the other him. In another, he lay broken instead, the doppelgänger walking away with the lantern in its hand.
His heartbeat roared in his ears.
The figure stepped forward.
Kael raised the lantern. Its light swelled, sharp and blinding, and the hum became a shriek. Glass exploded outward in shards.
The moment a piece struck his arm, his vision shattered too.
He was standing in a place he'd never seen — a city built on black water, bridges of bone connecting towers of glass. Bells rang in the distance. In the reflection of the water, something vast and faceless moved beneath the surface.
Then he was back in the Hall of Glass.
The doppelgänger was gone. The woman was staring at him, knife still in hand.
"You broke it," she said, her tone unreadable. "Now it's yours."
Kael didn't know if that was a warning or a promise.
But as they left the chamber, he could still hear faint cracks echoing behind them — as if somewhere in the maze, the glass hadn't stopped breaking.