Chapter 1 – The Shattered Mirror
(Renar Vuln – Iron Dominion)
The first scream of excitement always comes from the lucky ones.
I sit on a cracked steel bench with thirty-nine other kids and listen to another life begin without me.
The chamber smells of rust and ozone—the Iron Dominion's perfume. Ceiling lights flicker in a stuttering rhythm, catching on the sweat-slick faces of ten-year-olds who can't decide whether to pray or throw up.
We're all waiting for the same thing: our name, the call, the mirror.
One girl just came back through the hatch door, with short dark hair and amber eyes she clutching a crackling ball of blue light in her hands. "It's a Lightning Dormous! I got a storm mouse, isn't he adorable?" she squeals. Her hair around her lifts with static. The little creature spirals around her wrist and bursts into a miniature storm of sparks.
Gasps ripple through the crowd. Someone yells, "It evolved already!"
That kind of early evolution is unheard of here. Her family will move up a whole tier by sundown.
I try not to stare.
She's already surrounded by other girls, chattering, trading friendship vows and future squad promises. No one looks at the quiet boy with coal-black hair and oil-blue eyes sitting by the wall.
I'm not bitter—just realistic. Kids like me don't get lightning. We get iron dust and recycled circuits.
My family lives three tiers below the refinery line. My father welds until his hands seize. My mother counts rations. Neither of them can barely afford food never mind dream about such things as a resonance enhancer. That means my soul frequency is probably garbage.
When my name is finally called, the voice that echoes through the loudspeaker isn't the usual registrar's. It's calm, clipped, foreign.
> "Renar Vuln? Step forward."
A man in a Storm Dominion long coat waits by the iron door, his uniform too clean for this district—dark navy trimmed in silver arcs that shimmer faintly with static.
The other kids whisper. "A Lightning Dominion Agent?" "He shouldn't be here."
He gestures for me to follow. "Time for your mirror, kid."
I nod, throat dry, and walk past rows of envious stares.
The Mirror Chamber that he led me to was colder than the corridors. A single vertical pane of silvered glass stands in the center like a frozen lake upright, its surface humming faintly. Around it, copper conduits feed energy into a circular dais.
The agent stays behind the safety rail. "Renar Vuln, citizen of Iron Dominion, frequency test #21. Place your hand on the glass and focus on what you want most. The mirror will find your resonance."
He says it like he's done this a thousand times.
I place my palm on the glass. It's colder than I expect. My reflection blurs; my breath fogs the surface.
What I want most? Easy. A beast—any beast—that can get my family out of the slag pits.
The mirror hum deepens. Light gathers at my fingertips, rippling outward like rain circles. My reflection trembles, edges bending, darkening.
Then everything stops.
The lights flicker once.
Twice.
The glass turns black.
A spiderweb of cracks races across the pane from the point where my hand touches it.
"Step back!" the agent barks, but I can't move. My reflection looks back at me—only it's not me. Its eyes are glowing cobalt, and behind it swims something small and sinuous, like a shadowed fish moving through ink.
The mirror shatters inward, glass turning to liquid mercury that splashes around my feet without a sound.
From that pool rises a single object: a smooth, obsidian sphere etched with lines of dim blue light.
A Cryosphere, a black one too? That wouldn't be low tier... But—no—that's impossible. Cryospheres are virtual shells for synthetic beasts, not mirror-resonance born eggs or eggs at all.
The agent curses under his breath. "There may be a system corruption, here—stand down!"
The walls begin to buzz with warning sigils.
That's when I hear it.
A voice—not in the room, but inside my skull, quiet and echoing like a deep sea current.
> "Finally, a suitable candidate has been allocated."
The sphere pulses once, and light spills across the floor in an expanding ring of darkness. My vision whites out, and then—
```
[VOID SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
> Affinity detected: Shadow / Void
> Host synchronizing...
```
My knees hit metal. I clutch my head. Data lines crawl across the air, strings of letters I can't read.
VOID?! How did I get Void??
"Kid! Can you hear me?" the agent shouts.
The voice fades, replaced by silence and a faint heartbeat that isn't mine.
Then, in the middle of the black liquid, something moves. A small fish,of a size thar could fit in the palm of my hand. It rose through the egg to the surface. Its scales are darker than night, but each one catches light like polished steel. Two bright rings shimmer along its fins, pulsing softly.
It moves fluidly from the egg to hovering in the air, tail flicking lazily, watching me with silver eyes.
The agent lowers his weapon. "That… is not a registered Shadow-class. At least not one we know of." There was some beeps from a metal communications pad on the wall.
The new baby fish blinks once. The room temperature drops a few degrees.
More text flickers before my eyes.
```
> Bond established: Shadow Koi
> Status: Baby / Stable
> Synchronization Depth: (LOCKED)
> Do you wish to name your Shadow Koi?
```
Locked?
Before I can ask what that means, the security shutters slam down. Alarms blare, roaring in my ear.
The agent grabs my shoulder. "We're leaving. We need to go... Now! It's no longer safe for you here."
"But—my—"
"Now!"
He drags me through a maintenance tunnel by my wrist as the Mirror Chamber fades into the distance behind us, the air shaking with magnetic recoil.
I glance back once—just long enough to see the black koi swimming through the collapsing light, following me like my own reflection given life. This black koi... it had hatched from the strangest egg... Was I a shadow affinity or water? I'd had no time to think about anything.
As we burst up and onto the street outside from the underground mirror test centre, there was a storm syrging in the skies above the Iron Dominion's country. The sky split open with a sheet of lightning.
The agent raises his communicator.
"Asset secured. Code designation: We have one child with a Void Hatchling. They are secure and I am moving them to safety, right now."
I stare at the small sphere now cooling in my hands, feeling it pulse once, twice, in perfect rhythm with my heart.
It was then, the Void System whispers again, with words displaying before his eyes:
> "Welcome, Damien Black."