Students gather in clusters throughout the atrium, their voices creating a low murmur that rises toward the distant ceiling, seeking escape that will never come. Some whisper to one another, seeking comfort in familiar faces, while others stand alone, staring at the columns, the height, the sheer scale of everything that surrounds them. I recognize the look in their eyes. The same mixture of awe and unease that tightens my own chest.
I count them without meaning to, a habit I cannot break, but there are too many to track comfortably, over a thousand at least, and the number keeps shifting as more emerge from side entrances, faceless and fearful.
Binah drifts closer. Her form flickers between solid and translucent. Her eyes roam the space, curious. Hungry.
An Exarch stands at the center of the atrium. His silver mask is more ornate than the others I have seen. Engravings trace patterns across its surface, catching the light. Spirals within spirals. Meanings I cannot read.
His voice carries, soft but filling the space effortlessly.
"Welcome, Initiates."
The murmuring stops.
"You stand at the threshold." He gestures to the space around us. The columns. The height. The weight of stone above. "The path will test you. Some will endure. Others will not."
Silence settles over us, complete and heavy.
"Proceed through the Path of Reflection."
He points to a wide corridor. Its walls are mirrors. They line both sides, stretching into darkness. The surface gleams, perfect and cold.
The students move. Some hesitate. Others push forward with false confidence. The sound of footsteps echoes, multiplying in the corridor beyond.
I fall in line. My heartbeat is loud in my ears.
The first mirror reflects normally. My face stares back with dark hair dulled by the strange light, gray eyes marked by their faint purple flecks, my skin warm-toned and darker than the pale complexions common to Malkiel, my white-gold torq gleaming against my throat like a claim I have not yet earned.
Then the reflection shifts.
My face elongates, the features stretching until I am taller, broader, my jaw sharpening into something harder than I recognize. Lines carve across my face, deep and scarring. A warrior's marks. Or a victim's.
I force myself to keep walking, even as the next mirror shows me young again, unmarked, a child's face looking back with eyes too old and too knowing, as though I have already lived through everything waiting ahead and learned nothing from it. In another, I am skeletal, sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, skin stretched tight over bone. The variations multiply with each step. Older. Scarred. Transformed. Each surface offering a different version of what I might become.
The mirrors multiply the corridor itself, creating infinite reflections that stretch into impossible distances, each surface offering another future I might inhabit or another past I might have lived. I focus on the floor ahead. Dark stone. Smooth. Safe.
But the reflections press at the edges of my vision. Insistent. Demanding attention.
Others are not faring well. A girl stands frozen before her weeping reflection, tears streaming down the mirror's surface though her own face remains dry. A boy presses both hands to glass that shows three versions of himself, each moving independently. "Which one?" he whispers. "Which one is real?" Further down the corridor, another student has collapsed entirely. Two Exarchs move toward him, their silver masks gleaming. They lift him gently, guide him back toward the entrance. He does not resist.
I walk faster.
The metallic smell grows stronger, sharper, like blood on stone. It coats my tongue.
In one mirror, a throne. Massive. Carved from black stone that seems to drink the light around it.
Someone sits there, black hair catching what little light remains, white-gold torq gleaming against dark skin. Their face is turned away, but I recognize the way they hold themselves. The careful control. The measured stillness.
I stop without meaning to, without choosing it.
The figure sits with perfect posture. Shoulders back. Head high. The throne itself dominates the space, its armrests thick and carved with symbols I cannot read from this distance. I recognize nothing about the setting, not the chamber, not the architecture visible beyond.
But I recognize the way the figure holds themselves.
Something in my chest pulls toward the image. Hunger. Recognition. This is what I have worked for. What I have sacrificed for. Power. Position. A place beyond question.
The chamber behind the throne is vast. Empty. No advisors. No companions. No family.
Just the figure. Alone on black stone.
The throne room's walls stretch upward into shadow. The same shadow that fills the spaces between stars. Cold. Infinite.
The figure begins to turn, and I tear my gaze away before I can see the face, walking faster, my pulse pounding in my temples as though it wants to escape my skull.
Behind me, I hear the sound of something settling. The throne. The figure. Whatever waited there.
I do not look back.
The next mirror shows a room I do not recognize. White walls. White sheets. The sterile emptiness of medical facilities throughout Malkiel.
My mother lies in the bed.
Her dark skin has grayed. Dulled. The vibrant purple of her eyes, my inheritance diluted, has faded to something clouded. Distant.
She is dying.
I know this with the certainty the mirrors provide.
Her chest rises. Falls. The rhythm is wrong. Each breath labored, fighting against something invisible. Against inevitability.
I should look away. I cannot.
Behind her bed, in shadow, someone sits.
I do not see him clearly at first. Just a shape. A presence.
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Then he leans forward into the light that has no source.
Me.
Older. Gray touches my temples. His temples. Lines carve his face that I do not yet have. His torq gleams against his throat.
Electrum.
The engravings cover its entire surface. Intricate. Earned through achievements I cannot imagine. Victories. Conquests. The highest rank known in a different world.
He has everything I want.
And he is weeping.
His shoulders shake. Tears track down his face, though he makes no sound. One hand rests on the bed's rail. The other covers his mouth as though holding back something too large to contain.
My mother's breathing grows worse.
The older version of myself does not look at her.
He stares at his own hands.
At the electrum torq around his neck.
At something I cannot see.
His expression carries grief. Yes.
But beneath it, something else.
Horror.
Understanding.
Guilt.
My mother's body shifts beneath the sheets. Her torso bulges. Rises.
The older me does not react. Does not move.
He already knows. He is waiting for it.
The sheets tear.
Pale flesh emerges. Not from a wound. From inside. As though her body is merely a shell, a chrysalis something has been gestating within.
The mass expands. Shapeless. Wet.
It pushes through her ribs. Bone snaps. The sound carries through the mirror's surface, sharp and final. Her body convulses. Blood spreads across the white sheets, impossibly red against the sterile white.
The blob does not emerge gently.
It rips.
Tears through muscle and tissue with the single-minded hunger of something that has waited too long to feed. Her chest opens. The thing spills out, formless and voracious, spreading across her body like rot.
Where it touches flesh, it consumes.
Eating. I swear I hear the sound of chewing.
Her arm vanishes into the mass. Then her shoulder. The consumption is methodical. Terrible. I watch bone disappear into pale flesh, watch her body reduced to nothing by this hunger that knows no satisfaction.
My mother's eyes still do not focus. Her mouth opens. No sound emerges.
Then she is gone.
The bed holds only the consuming thing, larger now, pulsing with the rhythm of digestion. Its surface ripples.
Hungry still.
The older version of myself watches. Tears still streaming. One hand still covering his mouth.
He does not try to stop it.
Cannot stop it.
The mass spreads across the white floor toward him. It moves with purpose now. With recognition.
The older me does not run.
He closes his eyes.
The Codicil on his brow catches the light. It is lesser somehow than the one that marks Uncle Titus's brow.
The blob reaches him. Touches his leg.
The consumption is faster this time. His flesh tears away in chunks. His leg collapses beneath him. He falls. The thing surges over him, and I watch my older self pulled apart, piece by piece, bone exposed and then devoured, until there is nothing left but the mass itself, grown larger still.
His face is the last thing to vanish. Still twisted in grief, in guilt, in terrible understanding.
Then there is only the mass.
Only hunger.
It fills the mirror now. Edge to edge. Both of them gone. Consumed.
The thing presses against the glass.
The mirror shakes.
Cracks spread across the surface. Thin lines like veins. Like deadly roots.
The blob continues growing.
It reaches the edges of the frame and keeps going. Spreads to adjacent mirrors.
Where it touches other reflections, they vanish. The warrior I might become. The child with ancient eyes. The figure on the throne. All my possible futures.
Consumed.
The mirrors shake. Multiple frames now. The cracks multiply.
Around me, gasps. Others stepping back from their own reflections.
But their mirrors show different horrors. Personal terrors written in glass and light.
Mine shows this.
Mine shows a thing that kills my mother.
That kills me.
That eats every version of myself I might become.
The glass bulges outward. The blob presses harder.
It will break through.
It will—
Binah's hand closes around my wrist.
Her grip is cold. Solid. Real.
I cannot look away from the mirror. From the thing that continues to grow.
She pulls, not gently.
I stumble backward. My shoulder hits the opposite wall. Smooth stone. Cold.
The blob surges against the glass. The bulge increases. Cracks spread like lightning.
Binah steps between me and the mirror.
Her small form barely reaches my shoulder. Translucent. Flickering between solid and not.
But she does not move.
The thing behind the glass presses harder. The mirror groans. The sound of ice over deep water, ready to break.
Binah raises one hand.
Palm out.
The glass holds.
Barely.
The blob writhes against the barrier. Its surface ripples with frustration. With hunger.
But it does not break through, not while she stands there.
I find my breath. My legs.
"Move," I hear myself say. "We need to move."
She glances back at me. Her violet eyes, impossibly deep, mirrors of my own, hold something I cannot name.
Then she turns and walks.
My legs will not hold me. I slide down the wall until stone meets my back, cold and solid. Real.
The image burns in my mind. My mother's chest opening. The pale mass spilling through torn ribs. The older version of myself watching and weeping and knowing something I cannot yet understand. I try to breathe, but the air catches and hitches in my throat, refusing to settle.
This is not real. The mirrors show possibilities, fears, futures that may never come to pass. They are not prophecy, not certainty, just reflections of what we carry inside ourselves. But the older me wore electrum, carried himself with the certainty of achievement, embodied everything I work toward, everything I want to become.
And he wept while she died.
While I died. While the thing that killed her consumed me too, methodical and inevitable and hungry beyond satisfaction.
My hands shake, and I press them flat against the stone, trying to anchor myself in the physical, in the now, in the cold reality of this corridor and this moment rather than the horror the mirror showed me. It does not work. The vision has roots too deep, and I cannot pull them free by force of will alone.
The vision loops endlessly, playing again and again. Her body convulsing, bone snapping, the methodical consumption, and his face, my face, twisted in grief and guilt and terrible understanding. Understanding of what? What truth waited behind those tears that made him weep but not act, that let him watch while she died and I died and the thing that killed us grew fat on our consumption?
I cannot carry this weight, not here in the corridor where others still move past with their own horrors carved into their faces, not now when the trial continues and I must continue with it.
The trial continues around me. Others flow past, some supporting companions who tremble and stare at nothing, others moving alone with their faces carefully blank, all of them carrying their own private terrors toward whatever waits ahead. The Exarchs wait there in their silver masks, patient and inevitable, and I must stand, must move, must join the flow or be left behind in this corridor with only the mirrors and the horror for company.
But the horror sits in my chest like a stone too large to swallow, too heavy to carry.
So I do what I have learned to do, what I have been doing since the day I understood what my heritage meant in a city that values platinum over all other colors.
I reach inward. Find the door I have built. The place where unwanted things go. The hell I have made inside myself.
And I feed it everything.
The image of my mother dying. The older me weeping. The blob consuming. The electrum torq gleaming against my throat while everything I love turns to meat and hunger. All of it. Every detail. Every emotion.
I push it through the door.
Down.
Into darkness.
The relief is immediate. The shaking stops. My breathing steadies. The weight lifts.
I can stand.
I can move.
I am functional again.
Beside me, Binah shifts. When I glance at her, she is more solid than before. Her form no longer flickers between states. Her skin looks almost warm. Almost real.
She is watching me with those violet eyes.
Her expression carries something that might be satisfaction. Or hunger.
Or both.
I push away from the wall. My legs are steady now. The metallic smell still coats the air, thick and present, but it no longer chokes me.
Others continue to flow past. The boy who asked which reflection was real is gone. I do not see him among those still walking. Perhaps the Exarchs led him away. Perhaps he found his own path through.
I do not know.
Behind us, the sound of shattering glass.
I do not look back.
More glass breaks. The sound cascades. Multiplies.
Then silence.
Whatever was in the mirror has gone. Or escaped. I do not let myself wonder which.
Ahead, the darkness begins to thin, and light spills from an opening. Pale and cold. The color of starlight filtered through ice.
I follow Binah toward it, leaving the mirrors and their horrors behind, though I know I carry them with me still.
The corridor opens into a space so vast it makes the atrium behind us seem intimate by comparison. The chamber is circular, its walls curving in perfect symmetry, and above us stretches a transparent dome that reveals the night sky in all its terrible beauty. Stars scatter across the darkness, their light cold and distant, and the dome magnifies them somehow, making them feel closer than they should, as though they are watching us with ancient, indifferent eyes.
I step into the chamber, and my footsteps echo and multiply until I cannot tell mine from the others'. The sound of a thousand students breathing in unison creates something like wind through a tomb. The metallic smell persists here, fainter than in the corridor but still present, a reminder of what we passed through to arrive.
And beneath the stars, waiting in perfect formation, stand the Exarchs. All of them. Watching us with their silver masks gleaming like second faces, like truths they will not speak.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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