By dawn, Eldrenvale woke beneath an ash it had never seen before.Every street breathed the residue of something unholy, and even the air felt rewritten.
Ash fell like slow rain from a sky that had forgotten how to breathe.
The city wore it like sorrow. Roofs turned gray, streets slicked to obsidian, lanternlight swallowed into small oranges that could not warm the air. Between the cracks that netted every pane of glass, whispers moved—syllables scraped thin, as if language itself had been dragged across gravel.
Marianne and I crossed an empty square where a fountain had learned to hold its water perfectly still. Behind us, the tower bells kept striking the same three notes, far apart, as if measuring the distance between breaths. A child's humming threaded the ash—six soft notes, again and again. I couldn't see the child. The tune stopped and coughed. The wind carried it off and left the cadence behind, like a stain the ear could not wash out.
Crimson-clad soldiers found us at first light. Their armor wore the council's insignia, edges filmed with gray.
"Lord Felix von Frederick," the captain said, visor down, "you will come."
The citadel's halls smelled of molten brass and soap. Runes guttered low along the walls, steady and sick. The council chamber received me like a mouth: high and red, lined with teeth of polished banners. Nobles turned as one organism, their silk making the smallest dry sound. I stepped across a floor that remembered boots more honest than mine.
My father sat at the far end—a statue that someone had posed as a man. Beside him stood Emily, white uniform banded in scarlet, sword sheathed, eyes like winter glass. They paused at the drying thread of blood under my eye and moved on without moving.
"Lord Felix," a magister began, voice brittle with ceremony, "you stood at last night's epicenter. Mirrors across Eldrenvale fractured. Do you deny use of forbidden sight?"
"I deny understanding it," I said. "Whatever came, came for me."
A murmur like a draft in a closed room. Some mouths folded to hide their fear. Others did not. Emily's hands were still at her sides. When the questions tilted toward cruelty—as they will, once fear tastes itself—she stepped forward without asking permission.
"If he had truly wielded what you think," she said, even and quiet, "we would be bones and air. Examine, if you must. But hang your judgments on facts, not gossip."
Silence did a slow circuit of the room. She looked at me for a heartbeat—not comfort, not contempt—something careful, as if a door were being opened the width of a finger.
Behind the duke's chair hung the only intact mirror in the city. I felt it before I saw it: a ripple in the surface when I spoke, like water remembering the stone once thrown into it.
They dismissed us without ending anything. I left to air none of us owned. On the balcony the city lay spread and breathing—if breathing is what you call the tremor a body makes when it is trying to stay very still. Ash ghosted the rooftops. Puddles went black and offered back no sky. The golden eye ached to open. I let it, against better counsel.
The world doubled and then layered: a dragon turned as if mid-swim and fell in sparks; a cathedral melted inward like a candle reconsidering its shape; a single red eye hung in the reflection of every unbroken surface, patient as rust. Between one blink and the next, my reflection in the window did not follow me. A breath, no more, and I was missing from my own glass.
Marianne came to stand at my shoulder. The bandage around her wrist was silver thread and old prayer.
"Each vision is a door," she said. "Each door remembers the hand that opened it."
"How do we pass," I asked, "without admitting the house is not ours?"
"We don't," she said. "We walk like thieves and hope the owner sleeps."
A wind with a metal taste moved over the balustrade. The city's distant bells tried their three notes again, further apart now, as if they were running out of space. Somewhere below, a cart rolled. Horses snorted at nothing.
By night I found the river without meaning to. The bridge lifted from fog as if someone had drawn it in a single line. Ash fell softer there, false snow that did not melt. The water took the lanterns down to dark and returned them shivering.
Bootsteps found me.
"Still haunting the streets, my lord?" Her voice didn't bother to be sharp. It was too tired to choose a weapon.
"I could ask the same," I said without turning.
"I came to count the damage," she said. "Half the dormitories report fractures. The rest removed their mirrors and hung blankets." She stopped beside me and let the quiet work. "Your eye… is it—"
"Hungry," I said. "It eats the price first and tells me later what I bought."
She studied me without medicine. "You speak like a poet now."
"Then maybe I stole his mouth," I said. "Maybe the other Felix left it lying around."
"You don't get to joke your way out." No heat in it—just a clean refusal. "What are you becoming?"
I searched the black river for an answer that could stand. The reflection showed us both, gold ringing the shadows of our heads—a soft, impossible coronation. I blinked and there was only the river again.
"Something that stands between a story and its ending," I said. "Even if I have to rewrite myself to be it."
"Rewrite yourself," she said. The words turned over in her mouth, trying on a different shape. "Then prove it."
I would have laughed once. I only nodded now. The ash gathered in her hair like a crown that didn't know whether to bless or bury. She half turned to go, then paused.
"For what it's worth," she said, not looking at me, "if you meant to break the city, you would have done a cleaner job."
"I've never been good at clean jobs," I said.
"So I've heard."
She walked away. Her shadow dragged long behind her, too long for the lanterns, moving with a mind that wasn't the wind's. I told myself the bridge was old and the light was poor. The part of me that had learned to stop lying did not answer.
A roofline to our left wore two figures that the sky forgot to finish. They were patient as roofs. The pale girl who had clawed my life earlier knelt with her hands on the parapet. Lines of faint gold threaded out from the corners of her eyes, pulsing to a rhythm I didn't need a stethoscope to recognize.
"The mirror-seal failed," she breathed to the dark beside her. Her lips made the words; her voice came from somewhere that had never been taught lips. "He breathes still. The Master wants the girl."
Another voice declined to be a voice and answered anyway. "Then the bridge becomes the snare."
A current moved under the river, or above it, or inside the spine of the bridge. I felt it in my teeth.
I left the railing and went back through streets that now pretended to sleep. A door clicked very softly as I passed and the person behind it set their breath down on the floor next to their shoes. The child's six-note tune found me again from nowhere, same cadence, same patience, as if it were teaching a room how to hum. I counted the notes without wanting to. Six, rest, six, rest. When I turned to catch it, an empty alley answered, and a small handprint was drying on a pane already cracked.
The citadel let us in because it could not keep us out. Marianne had taken a lamp and made the flame small. The corridor stones remembered heat very well; they gave it back in little returns that warmed nothing. We paused before a wall that showed us ourselves in fragments. The shards didn't agree on where I was standing.
"Tell me something," I said, keeping my voice below the range where rumors develop claws. "The council's mirror. Why is it the only one that didn't break?"
"Some mirrors are not made to show," Marianne said. "They are made to keep." She looked at me until I understood the degree of what she was not saying. "Old oaths. Older houses."
"My father," I said, and the word found a stone in my mouth and tripped.
"Ask him when you've decided which son you are," she said gently, which was unkind only in how true it was.
We returned to the clinic because our feet knew the way and because the last candle was still burning there to lead us home. The door remembered breaking; it creaked as if embarrassed to be a door again. The room had kept the Severance in its air like the husk of a storm. Powder from the mirror lay where it had fallen, too white to be dust. I took from my pocket the shard I had kept—its back scratched with a single word. I turned it over. The face of it showed me poorly. A man with no patience for his own outline.
"Do not hang it," Marianne said. "We've used our once."
"I know." I set it on the sill. The city's hush collected around it as if listening.
Somewhere in the academy a horn complained and stopped. The hush returned, one finger higher. I sat because standing asked too much of my ribs. The place where the spear had been was a bruise on a thought, not a body.
"Tomorrow," I said, "we start stealing the rest of his mirrors."
Marianne's mouth twitched toward a smile and thought better. "You make theft sound like liturgy."
"If he writes with glass," I said, "then we'll take away his pages."
"And when he starts writing on water?" she asked.
"Then we learn to read the current and drown last."
She blew out the lamp. Night shrugged and sat on the window ledge. The candle we left earlier still burned to spite common sense. Its flame tilted, not to a draft—the windows were sealed—but as if the air had leaned to listen at a keyhole. I listened too. Beneath the ordinary night: a shuffle, a click, a patient rhythm of six. The candle righted itself and trembled like a throat about to speak.
Before sleep found me badly, I thought of Emily's shadow dragging like a net. I thought of the council's perfect mirror that did not care that the world was cracking. I thought of my reflection missing me for a breath and of the river showing two gold coronas when there were only two people and only one of them had a reason to shine.
When I finally slipped, the city slipped with me. The bells took their three notes and set them one on each stair down to the dark. On the last stair a voice I knew and did not know at once set a finger to its lips and whispered a secret that wasn't for me.
In every mirror that night, two reflections breathed when one should have.