The mirror burst like a lung collapsing.
A wave of light tore through the chamber, swallowing Kael's voice before he could reach him—
"Eren!"
Then, silence.
Not the gentle kind he once commanded. This silence bit.
Kael staggered back, boots scraping glass and blood. The world trembled as the last fragments of the mirror dissolved into ash and light, leaving only a warped reflection of the sky—dark, pulsing, endless.
"Eren," he whispered again, softer now, as if afraid the city itself might hear. His gray eyes—normally calm, deliberate—were rimmed red with exhaustion. Rain hissed through a crack above, cutting through smoke and ozone. The Pulse had gone quiet, but he could feel it breathing somewhere deep beneath the ruins.
Alive. Unstable. Angry.
He dropped to one knee, fingers brushing the fractured floor. The glass still hummed faintly under his touch, a lingering echo of Eren's energy. He's alive.
Kael exhaled shakily, clutching that fragile truth like a wound.
Behind him, the remnants of the Silence gathered—shadows moving as one, faces hidden by broken veils. Only one spoke. "You shouldn't have let him in."
Kael didn't look up. "You think I had a choice?"
"He's destabilizing the current," the shadow replied, voice rippling through the static air. "The Pulse doesn't know what he is anymore."
Kael's jaw tightened. Neither do I.
He rose to his full height, the black of his coat catching the dim reflection of the mirror shards. He'd always been composed—controlled to the point of cruelty—but now that control cracked around the edges. "Find Lyra," he ordered. "If she's still breathing, she'll know where the faultline opened."
The shadow hesitated. "And the boy?"
Kael's throat worked. "I'll find him."
When they vanished, Kael was alone with the hum of the city.
Vareth's skyline bled through the shattered ceiling—neon streaks smeared by rain. The Pulse shimmered faintly in the distance, running like a heartbeat through the veins of every tower. And somewhere within that pulse, Eren's presence flickered like static between frequencies. Too bright. Too human. Too alive to be what Kael once believed him to be.
He closed his eyes and reached out—not with hands, but with what the Pulse had left him. A thread of soundless thought. The kind that once belonged only to gods and ghosts.
Eren, listen to me.
Nothing.
Then, faintly: a whisper in return. Disoriented. Afraid. Distant. Kael?
Before Kael could answer, it fractured—like glass cracking under pressure—and vanished.
He swore under his breath. The connection wasn't broken; it was redirected.
He turned toward the north—the direction of the oldest district, where the Observer's first Mirror had been sealed. The place where the Pulse had first breathed. If Eren had fallen through the mirror, he hadn't died; he'd been pulled into its origin.
A place Kael had sworn never to enter again.
The rain thickened as he stepped into the open. Vareth stretched out before him in its fractured beauty—holograms flickering against the fog, alleys trembling with quiet life. Above the noise, the Pulse murmured, almost sentient. It watched him as much as he listened to it.
As Kael moved, the city seemed to bend around his presence, lights dimming and flaring with each step. He wasn't a man, not entirely. The Pulse had made sure of that. But tonight, his heart beat like one.
He reached the edge of the abandoned district—iron gates twisted by time, walls covered in forgotten murals that pulsed faintly under the drizzle. And then, from the shadows, a voice slid out like smoke.
"You shouldn't have followed him."
Kael turned sharply.
Draven stood there, pale and perfect as ever, the rain gliding off his dark coat. His silver eyes gleamed, catching every flicker of light the way a blade catches blood. "You know what happens when light falls through broken glass," he said. "It doesn't come back the same."
Kael didn't answer. His silence was sharper than words.
Draven tilted his head. "Still the stoic hero, hmm? Tell me, Kael—when did you forget you're not human enough to love something like him?"
Kael's jaw tightened. "And yet you're jealous".
Draven smiled—thin, elegant, venomous. "Jealous? Oh, no. I'm curious. I've watched you guard that boy like a secret you can't afford to lose. But what happens when he learns what you truly are?"
Kael's hands curled into fists. The Pulse around him flickered, answering his anger with a tremor that made the ground hum. "Stay out of this, Draven."
"Can't," Draven said simply. "Because unlike you, I understand what Eren is becoming. You think he's fragile. But he's evolving. He's the city's next voice—and maybe its final one."
Kael stepped closer, gray eyes glinting beneath the rain. "If you touch him—"
Draven's grin widened. "You'll what? Silence me? Again?" His voice dropped lower, intimate and cruel. "You can't silence what you used to be."
For a heartbeat, Kael froze. That name—Silence—burned through him like memory. He remembered the moment the Pulse had created him—not as a man, but as a stillness between storms. He'd been nothing more than an echo given form. And then he'd found Eren—the first spark of warmth he'd ever known. The first pulse that made him real.
Draven watched the flicker of recognition cross his face and smiled. "Ah. There it is."
Before Kael could move, Draven was gone, leaving only the whisper of his words:
"He's already forgetting you."
The rain fell harder.
Kael pressed a trembling hand to his chest, feeling the faint rhythm beneath. "No," he said quietly. "He won't."
He turned toward the gates, forcing them open. The hinges screamed, metal crying against metal. Beyond was darkness—thick, dense, and alive with whispering light. The air shimmered like the surface of water. The first Mirror Chamber waited below.
As he descended, memories flickered around him—ghosts of the city's creation, voices that once belonged to the Observer, to the Silence, to the Pulse itself. Each whisper brushed against his skin, soft as regret.
"You were never meant to love him," one voice murmured.
Kael's lips parted. "And yet I do."
He reached the core of the chamber—a circular room filled with suspended shards of broken mirrors, floating in slow motion like stars caught mid-collapse. In their reflections, he saw fragments of Eren—his amber-hazel eyes glowing faintly, his skin traced with the Pulse's light, his expression torn between pain and awakening.
Kael stepped closer. "Eren," he breathed, his voice cracking. "I'm coming."
And for the first time since the silence had been given a name, it answered back.
The shards vibrated. The air shuddered.
A faint echo of Eren's voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Then hurry.