The shadow room
The hallway narrows.
Not in space, but in sense. Sounds dampen. My own breath comes back to me a second late, like I'm hearing it through stone.
At the end: a door that's not a door.
A frame. No handle. No lock. Just a shimmer, like heat over stone. I step through
And everything goes silent.
The Shadow Room is vast.
But it doesn't feel like a room. It feels like outside, except the sky is missing. The ceiling moves, but not like clouds. More like thoughts. Fast. Flickering.
And carved into the floor in deep obsidian:
The circle split by bolt symbol, surrounded by hundreds of smaller ones some whole, some broken.
As I step closer, the room reacts.
Mirrors rise.
But they don't show me now.
They show me then.
Me as a child, running down rain-slick streets.
Me with my brother during Hollowname Day, staring at jars.
Me at the crater, whispering the word I hadn't known I remembered.
And then
A version of me I've never seen.
Older. Arm scarred with symbols.
Eyes hollow.
Wearing the robes of a Veilbound.
He looks directly at me.
And says:
"You were always going to break the rule. That's why they marked you before you were born."
The room pulses.
Suddenly, a statue rises from the floor made not of bone or shard, but of mirror glass. A reflection frozen in shape. It's the bird figurine… but grown. Wings wide. Chest cracked open. Inside:
A name, pulsing faintly.
Not mine.
Not Rhevan.
Sia Tennin.
The name from the stone. From the vision. From the dead.
And it's alive inside the statue.
A voice behind me.
Low. Calm.
"You weren't meant to find this."
I turn slowly.
It's the woman from the street the one who drew the ash symbol. Her mask is gone. Her eyes are dark mirrors. Her voice familiar. It sounds like mine, like Ena's, like the man from the chamber.
"This is not a memory," she says.
"It's a warning."
"What is?" I ask.
She nods toward the statue.
"Sia tried to become the anchor. The echo didn't just remember her. It kept her."
My skin goes cold.
"Then why show me this?"
She steps closer.
"Because you've already begun the same path. And because the next name the echo will keep… is yours."
The ceiling shifts.
A crack appears.
Light pours down but it's not light.
It's memory.
And it hits me all at once:
The figurine never moved on its own.
The mist never wrote symbols.
I did.
Every unexplained shift.
Every pulse.
It's not that the Fragment responds to me.
It's that I'm responding to it.
And it's shaping the city through me.
Even Ena Varis didn't see that part coming.