The door tore off its hinges like the brittle shell of a walnut, and into the clinic stretched a shadow longer than logic, thinner than a blade, wider than the room. It had no features—just a human outline sculpted from liquid night, with two red eyes burning like torches at the bottom of a well. The candles stopped flickering, as if the air itself had asked permission to die.
The physician set a palm to my chest to anchor me. She whispered without turning:
"Don't look into the eyes. If you do... they'll devour you from the inside."
But the shadow did not wait for our advice; it took a step forward, and the floorboards screamed as if being slid out from under us. Then came the voice—not from a mouth or throat, but from everything: from the wood, the glass, the blood in my veins.
"Carter de Juan... at last, I've found you."
My name froze in the air like an icy letter. It did not call me "Felix." It called me by what I had been before waking in this world. In that moment I understood—this story no longer belonged to me alone.
I raised my head despite the warning. I did not see a face—I saw all my reflections, my previous life dripping over a black surface with no bottom. I tried to look away, but the golden eye within me lifted its own lid. Heat stung me; hot blood ran down my cheek again.
The physician reached toward the hidden cabinet, pulling out a small vial sealed with an old sigil, then The Ledger of the Chosen, its pages breathing dust. She traced a sign on the tiles I didn't recognize and spoke with measured tone:
"In the name of the old covenant, by the entrusted blood, I declare this room a sanctuary."
The shadow recoiled as though an invisible glass wall had checked it. But it laughed—a laugh with no mouth, like two stones grinding under water.
"A sanctuary? This is an apartment in a paper fortress. We don't knock on doors; we become the doors."
The mirror on the wall cracked of its own accord—not from impact, but as if a fracture in time ran through its surface. From that fissure seeped a knife-cold frost, and then a hand surfaced out of the black: fingers longer than fingers, nails finer than blades. The hand shot toward the physician.
I didn't think. I grabbed the nearest thing—a rusty scalpel on the table—and leapt. At the instant the hand nearly grazed her throat, a hidden path in the world opened for me: a fine gleaming thread, like a lute string stretched between two moments. The golden eye showed me the accident line—where the edge must pass to change what was written. I struck there—not into flesh, but into the joint between the shadow-hand and its reflection on the mirror.
The shadow screamed, a cry that flaked the crust off the past. The hand shriveled into itself like an insect burning and snapped back behind the glass. But the warning came too late: blood gushed from my eyes, and a heavy dizziness dimmed everything.
The physician steadied me, her voice faint.
"Don't open it again! These aren't visions without price. Every thread you cut weakens you."
I wiped my face with my sleeve, my skull buzzing like a hornet hive.
"It knows my old name... That means—"
The shadow interrupted, spread across walls, ceiling, and floor:
"It means the pen that wrote us has returned to your hand. What you wrote once... you will write again for us. Come, Carter, restore destinies to their course. Do not let your old meddling spoil the birth."
The word birth dragged a deeper cold behind it. Through the cracks that crumbled the air, I saw stuttering scenes: massacres in cities not yet built, dragons falling like burnt stars, a river turning bronze, a crowd chanting in a language spoken only by bone. And at the heart of it all... a faceless figure, holding a sword of darkness—exactly like the drawing The Ledger of the Chosen had flipped to on its own.
"The Master," the physician said the word as if tasting the bitterness of medicine. "The one returning from the Unnamed. He does not arrive—he is brought back. He needs a human mirror to inhabit."
She stepped back, then fixed me with a look.
"And your soul... is a mirror."
The shadow pulled the room toward itself. Door handles, window frames, even the edges of books—all began to slide slowly across the tiles, as if some black gravity drew wood and paper, not iron alone. I realized the sanctuary was wearing thin, the circle she had drawn being consumed second by second.
I whispered to her:
"Your name. Tell me your name."
She hesitated, then said, "Marianne."
I nodded. "Marianne, listen. If this circle breaks, it'll take you first. Take the book... and when I say, read the page that looks like a dagger. You'll know it."
She gasped:
"But that's the page of Severance—"
"Exactly."
I stepped toward the shadow. The air around me was heavier than lead, yet I also sensed another thread gleaming beneath our feet, running between us the way a border runs between two nations. I didn't raise a weapon—I raised my open hands, as if reconciling something inside myself.
"Do you know the problem, faceless one?" I said, breathing hard. "You think what I wrote is fate. I see it as a draft. A page read once... can be torn many times."
The shadow widened its silence, and a red light bent along the wall. "You only tear yourself."
I smiled without certainty. "That's why we brought the ending before the prologue."
"Now!" I shouted.
Marianne opened the book to a page smooth and wordless, cleaved by a single fine slant like the cut of a sword. She read what wasn't written, as if the letters pulled themselves from absent ink:
"With visible blood, mirrors shall be parted from their shadows... and by the right of what was written and said, the traveler's pact is severed."
The room clouded to gray. The page arched, and a sharp wind whistled from its split. The black on the walls turned to smoke; the shadow recoiled, writhing, biting its own edges like a wolf that had lost its prey. But before it fully shrank into the mirror, it hurled a spear of darkness at me. I didn't see it—I felt it.
Cold entered my chest. I dropped to my knees.
Marianne cried my name, but the sound came from somewhere beyond the clinic. Behind it all, from a microscopic crack in the world, the first call that brought me here reached me again, fainter now, as if remembering itself:
"Do not be a pen... be a hand."
I gripped the cold spear lodged beneath my ribs. It wasn't matter. It was a sentence: Your fate completes in us. I broke the sentence—not with muscle, but with what the eye had taught me. I seized the thin thread it drew and snapped it with a pulse of will. The spear vanished like a dream one wakes from. I fell to my palms; sweat and blood raced each other down my face.
The mirror collapsed into white grit. The shadow withdrew entirely, but it left words darker than darkness itself, stained into the wood: "Not yet... Carter."
Silence sealed the room. The candles shivered as if returning to their bodies. Marianne lowered the book with a trembling hand and stepped close, binding a bandage around my wound that could not be seen.
I rasped:
"The severance... how many times can we use it?"
She shook her head. "Once per traveler. You've closed your first mirror. He'll look for another."
I drew a long breath; pain barked in my ribs.
"Then we'll steal all his mirrors."
Marianne lifted her eyes to me. In their shine I saw honest fear—and admiration she refused to name.
"And why would he let us?"
"Because he's used to us being his characters," I said, pressing a palm to the ache. "He hasn't yet tried us as his writers."
Outside, the tower clock struck three spaced chimes. At the third, a far siren rose at the military academy—this was the Fire Continent's way of saying: something breached the grand ward.
Curtains stirred though the windows were shut. The scent of hot ash crept under the door. I looked at Marianne:
"This isn't just us... it touched the city."
She snapped the book shut and tied it with a red cord.
"Then we begin where others usually end: with the finale. We'll need Emily... the map of the Seven Passages... and a true name for the Master."
I bent and lifted from the floor a small shard of mirror that hadn't shattered. It reflected my face... and a golden eye whose glow had dimmed to a tired ember. With a fingernail I scratched a single word on the back of the shard:
No.
I pocketed it and staggered to my feet.
"We won't be a door. We'll be the lock."
I opened the door to the city's night, and the air outside was burning with news not yet written. Behind me, Marianne closed the clinic and snuffed the candles... all but one, left lit so we'd find our way back.
In the distance, two red eyes flashed—like fallen stars that refused to go out.
To be continued...