The fog did not retreat. It thickened.
Each morning, Backlund awoke to streets veiled in gray, lamplight bending and breaking in unnatural angles. The ordinary citizen chalked it up to autumn's cruelty, but Lucien knew better. It wasn't seasonal. It was systemic.
Something was pressing on the walls of reality.
From the second-floor window of his temporary residence—registered under the false name Jareth Wolfe—Lucien observed the movements of a particular carriage that had passed the same street corner three times in the last hour. It bore no insignia. No passengers emerged. But the coachman's posture was too rigid, too precise.
A tail, perhaps.
He let the curtain fall.
A kettle hissed softly behind him as he turned toward a cluttered desk. Alongside pages of diagrams and symbolic languages sat a new addition: a coded letter delivered via a street urchin two nights ago.
He cracked the seal again, rereading the content:
"Mirrors don't reflect what they see. They reflect what they're told to show."
No name. No signature. But Lucien felt the weight of something familiar in the phrasing. A message, or perhaps a challenge. A test to measure how far he'd come—or how deeply he was already entangled.
There was a time he would've dismissed such cryptic gestures as theatrics, but not anymore. In the world he now navigated, misdirection was a language of survival.
In the university archives, Elise combed through theological manuscripts. Today, she wasn't reading them for spiritual insight. She sought mention of forgotten rituals, half-remembered entities, and artifacts deemed 'inconsequential' by the church's record keepers.
One passage caught her eye—a sermon fragment describing a child of the Spectator Pathway who vanished from time itself, leaving behind only a mask and a name that no one could pronounce.
A chill ran through her.
Yuki's memories remained incomplete, but the sensation of missing something vital pressed harder each night. Sometimes it wasn't just dreams. Sometimes, it felt like someone had plucked an entire memory out and left a bruise behind.
She suspected Lucien knew. But he never pushed.
That silence was a kindness—and a warning.
When she left the archives, the sky was already bruised with dusk. The fog greeted her like an old friend, swallowing her silhouette as she disappeared into the maze of streets. Every step forward felt like peeling through a veil of someone else's memories.
Later, under the guise of a fog-inspector contracted by the city, Lucien accessed restricted maintenance tunnels below the southern borough.
The first chamber was empty.
The second held residue.
The third… contained something else.
A circle of distorted mirrors arranged with mathematical precision. Fog pooled around the base like waiting breath. And in the center, a sigil scorched into stone—the same eye he had seen before, but now open wide.
Lucien didn't move closer. He didn't need to.
The air around the mirrors bent subtly, like the world hesitated to touch them.
He pulled out a small charm of protection—not for combat, but for clarity. The sigil did not respond.
Something had passed through here. Something was watching.
But what caught his attention most was the faint sound—a chime, almost like laughter, faint and flickering through the stone. It wasn't natural. It wasn't mechanical.
It was mocking.
Lucien studied the mirrors more closely, careful not to let his reflection align fully in any of them. The geometry suggested a ritual function—possibly an anchoring mechanism or a thin point in space. And yet, it was incomplete. One mirror was cracked. Deliberately, perhaps.
As he turned to leave, he noticed a slip of parchment tucked behind a loose brick.
"Even gods watch through broken glass."
He stared at the words for several seconds before sliding the parchment into his coat. He needed answers, and soon.
That evening, back at his apartment, he met with Elise.
She had arrived without a message, her face thoughtful, her steps quiet. She handed him a notebook.
"Rituals that mask perception. Illusions that mimic time distortion. Some of these are theoretical," she said, "but one... one mentions a Witness that can anchor memories across lives."
Lucien's fingers stopped mid-page.
"A Witness?"
"Yes. Not a god. Not a human. Just... something that exists to observe, and in doing so, it stores fragments of the observed. Like a mirror that doesn't reflect—you again, but what you might become."
He closed the notebook slowly.
"What if someone like that has already noticed us?"
She looked down.
"Then we should be very careful about what we show."
To be continued...