The Exposure
Glass exploded outward.
Mirrors cracked, reflecting not one Aerin but dozens — all screaming different names. The air thickened with illusions: ghosts of customers, flickers of light, fragments of time.
The Inquisitors fell back, shouting. Eldric grabbed her arm, but her skin burned with blue light.
"Aerin—" he began, and then she was gone.
When the vision cleared, half the workshop was ash. The others whispered of a demon of light and mirrors.
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The Flight
Aerin woke outside the town, lying among blackened trees. She couldn't remember how she got there. Her hands were raw, her clothes torn, and the shard pulsed faintly in her pack.
She opened her journal — the one she used to record her days in case her memory failed — but several pages were missing.
Her handwriting stopped mid-sentence:
He said the light will—
Nothing else.
Wind howled across the crater. Behind her, smoke rose from Virelle. She could almost hear the Church's bells ringing — the toll for her own death.
She should have run farther, faster, but her reflection in a nearby pool stopped her cold.
For just a heartbeat, she didn't see herself. She saw another woman — older, with the same crystal marks, the same haunted eyes.
And she heard her voice: "Find the Vault before it opens. Or we all burn again."
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The End of the Beginning
When Aerin looked up, the sky was no longer still. A faint crack of light shimmered across the heavens, a wound that hadn't been there before.
The shards were waking.
And the last of the Veilshards had nowhere left to hide.