Chapter 9 – The Mirror That Screams

"Some truths don't shatter the mind. They show it was never whole to begin with."

They didn't speak for a long time.

After the graveyard.

After the name.

After Aren remembered dying… as a child.

He walked like a man out of place—not just from the town, but from time. Yin noticed it first. The way he stared into puddles too long. The way he flinched at his own reflection in the blade of her sword.

The scroll had changed too.

Its ink had become unstable. Words bled between pages. And at the center of it all, a sigil burned into the parchment, unmistakable and sharp:

 -- " V – The Mirror That Screams " --

Their path led west.

To a broken monastery at the edge of the Shrouded Expanse.

Once called the Temple of the True Form, it was now nothing more than fractured walls and rotting silk. The wind cried through its ruined prayer-halls like a child begging for its face back.

And on every mirror—dozens of them, embedded in the stone, hidden in alcoves, buried beneath ash—was the same thing.

A mouth.

Screaming.

Frozen in silvered agony.

"We shouldn't be here," Yin whispered, hand on her hilt.

"We have to be," Aren said. "This is where I died next."

She turned to him, pale.

"Are you saying—"

"Yes," he said. "I think the Fifth… is the one who taught me how to forget again."

Night fell too quickly.

And when it did, the mirrors began to move.

Not all at once. Not violently. But softly.

A twitch here.

A ripple there.

And then a whisper.

"Aren…"

He turned. But Yin hadn't spoken.

"Yu Aren…"

A different voice. One he knew.

His mother's.

He turned toward the mirror nearest him.

And saw her.

Not as she'd been when she died, but as he remembered her as a boy. Younger than she should have been. Eyes kind, voice trembling.

"Why did you leave me?" the reflection asked.

He reached out.

The glass was cold.

Too cold.

Yin pulled him back. "That's not her."

"I know."

But still… he wanted to believe.

They camped inside the prayer hall.

The walls had once been painted with celestial beasts and cultivation maxims. Now they were blank, whitewashed by some unseen hand.

As if the Fifth didn't want anyone to remember what had been worshiped here.

Or worse—

What had escaped.

That night, Aren dreamed of mirrors.

Of a child, trapped in a hundred reflections, each screaming a different name.

Some weren't his.

Some were.

He woke before dawn.

The scroll was open on its own.

A new line had formed in blood.

-- "You will not survive this death." --

And beneath it, written in the same bleeding ink:

-- "But you must remember it anyway." --

They found the shrine just before sunrise.

Hidden behind a false wall.

A room filled with mirrors.

Dozens. Hundreds. All cracked. All stained.

And at the center—

A chair.

Not grand. Not divine.

Just a simple stone seat with manacles for wrists and a mirror facing it directly.

Aren stepped forward. "This is it."

Yin touched his arm. "You don't have to do this."

"I do."

He sat.

The mirror before him was the only one untouched.

Clean.

Whole.

Waiting.

And then it spoke.

Not aloud. Not in voice.

In feeling.

Like a flood of thought and memory crashing into his skull.

He was seventeen.

On the run. Hunted by sect assassins. Cold, starved, half-mad.

He stumbled into the Temple of the True Form, bleeding from a gash in his side.

They welcomed him.

Fed him.

Told him they could help.

"Forget your sins," they whispered. "Forget your failures."

"Forget your name."

And then they strapped him to the chair.

Made him look at himself.

Not his body.

His truth.

The reflection didn't show flesh.

It showed his mind.

All the pieces he'd locked away.

All the deaths.

All the pain.

All the things he'd done when death stopped mattering.

He saw them all.

At once.

And he screamed.

Back in the present—

The mirror cracked.

Just a hairline fracture.

But it was enough.

The Fifth had awoken.

It was not a person.

Not anymore.

It was a presence in the glass.

A storm of reflections.

Eyes upon eyes upon versions of Aren he had never become.

"You broke us," it said. "You made us forget."

"I had to."

"You killed what you were."

"No," he said, standing now, trembling. "I buried it. And I'm digging it up."

The room convulsed.

Mirrors shattered outward.

Each shard became a blade of memory.

Yin screamed his name as they whirled around him.

But Aren didn't move.

He stood still as the mirror turned black.

Not empty—

Just done.

He saw the Fifth then.

A woman, once. Shrouded in veil and silver. Her face was blank. Not from deformity, but from absence.

She had cut it away.

He remembered her now.

The cultist who taught him how to erase identity.

The price had been high.

"Give me your name," she had said, seventeen years ago.

"And I will give you peace."

Now, Aren stepped forward.

"I'm taking it back."

The Fifth tilted her faceless head.

"Then you will remember what you are."

She raised a shard of glass.

And pressed it into his chest.

Aren remembered.

How he sat in the chair.

How he screamed for it to stop.

How he begged her to make it end.

How she said:

"You are not a man anymore. You are a vow."

"And your pain is the oath you cannot break."

The mirror shattered.

Aren collapsed to his knees.

Blood trickled from his eyes.

But he was alive.

And the Fifth was gone.

Only the chair remained.

Empty.

Cracked.

Waiting for the next soul who wanted to forget.

Yin rushed to him.

He smiled, barely conscious.

"I remember the Fifth."

She didn't ask what that meant.

She just held him.

And as the scroll burned with new ink, a line etched itself into the void:

[ 🩸 The Fifth Vow

I will not run from my reflection, no matter how loud it screams.

The face I see is mine. The guilt is mine. The memory is mine.

And I will carry it.

]

And beneath the vow, as always, a new title:

Next: The Second – "A Crown of Flies"