Rain drummed on Sunny's created roof while Arthur sat alone in the archive's narrow corridor.
Everyone else was asleep—or trying to be. Lola's aether was nearly spent. Sunny had drained himself building the shelter. Azrion's wound darkened beneath his bandages. Outside, the corrupted city waited in the rain, patient as hunger.
Arthur should have been planning routes.
Instead, he found himself staring into a cracked mirror hanging crookedly on the wall.
At first, it showed only him: tired eyes, wet hair, and a face that felt strangely unfamiliar in the pale light.
Then lightning flashed.
The reflection did not flash with it.
Arthur went still.
The man in the mirror was older.
Older by years, perhaps more. A long scar ran from his temple to his jaw. His coat was blackened at the edges as if he had walked through fire, and his eyes carried the exhausted certainty of someone who had survived too much.
But it was Arthur's face.
Not similar.
His.
The older Arthur lifted one hand to the inside of the mirror. On his palm was the same split-gate mark Arthur had seen at the train station.
> "Do not let them decide who you are."
Arthur's breath caught.
The reflection's voice was low, distorted by static and distant thunder.
> "They will give you names. Hero. Weapon. Failure. Monster. They will tell you which one is real until you forget there was ever a choice."
Arthur moved closer despite himself. "Who are you?"
The older figure gave a faint, bitter smile.
> "That depends on which version of us survives."
The mirror began to fracture from the center. Behind the older Arthur, Arthur glimpsed impossible places—a red gate beneath a dead sky, a ruined throne room, and a city swallowed by black water.
> "When you meet me," the reflection said, "ask what I sacrificed to keep my name."
The mirror shattered.
Arthur stumbled back as the fragments hit the floor. Each shard reflected a different face for a single instant: Arthur as a child, Arthur covered in blood, Arthur wearing a crown, Arthur with empty eyes.
Then all of them became ordinary glass.
From the next room, Lola shifted in her sleep.
Arthur closed his hand around the gate-mark, his heart pounding.
He had been trying to reach the finish line.
Now he wondered whether the road north was leading him toward an enemy, a warning—or the version of himself he might become.
Arthur crouched beside the largest shard.
Rainwater trembled across its surface. His reflection stared back—young, exhausted, familiar.
He touched it.
The glass went cold enough to bite.
The archive vanished.
Arthur stood beneath a sky with no stars, surrounded by the ruins of a city he did not recognize. Towers lay broken across a black sea. Far away, something immense moved beneath the water.
The older Arthur stood at the shore, back turned.
"You chose this," Arthur said.
The older man did not look around. "No. I chose what was left after everyone else made their choices."
"What did you sacrifice?"
For several seconds, only black water answered.
Then the older Arthur raised his marked hand. The split-gate symbol glowed in his palm, deeper and more jagged than Arthur's own.
"My name," he said.
Arthur frowned. "That makes no sense."
"It will." The older Arthur finally faced him. His eyes were hollow with exhaustion. "One day, people will remember what you did but not why you did it. They will call you things until Arthur is only a word they use to fear you."
A sound rolled across the drowned city: a bell, low and distant.
The future Arthur's expression broke—not with fear, but regret.
"Do not let them turn you into me."
The black sea surged forward.
Arthur tore his hand away.
He was back in the archive corridor, on one knee amid the broken glass. Blood welled from his fingertip where the shard had cut him.
But one fragment had changed.
It no longer reflected his face.
It showed a name scratched across the inside of the glass:
> **ARTHUR VAELOR**
Arthur stared at it.
Vaelor.
Eldric's surname.
And from the room nearby, where Eldric sat keeping watch beside Azrion, a floorboard creaked.
Arthur pressed the bleeding cut back against the shard.
The moment blood touched glass, the fragment drank it.
The archive corridor dissolved again—but this time Arthur did not return to the drowned city. He stood in a vast hall made of mirrors, each one reflecting a different Arthur.
A child with frightened eyes.
A soldier kneeling in ash.
A king wearing a broken crown.
A man with blood on his hands, whispering a name Arthur could not hear.
At the end of the hall stood the older Arthur.
"You should not have opened it again," he said.
Arthur ignored the warning. "Why does the shard call me **Arthur Vaelor**?"
The older Arthur's jaw tightened.
"Because names are not always lies," he said. "Sometimes they are cages. Sometimes they are inheritances. And sometimes someone takes one from you so completely that you grow up believing it never belonged to you."
Arthur's pulse quickened. "Eldric Vaelor is here. Is he—"
"Do not accuse him."
The future Arthur stepped closer. The mirrors along the hall began to crack.
"Eldric carries a name. You carry a question. They are not the same thing."
A new reflection formed beside them.
It showed Arthur in a place that looked like the capital—except the city was whole. Sunlight touched its towers. A younger Eldric stood beside him, smiling as if they had known each other their whole lives.
Then the image changed.
The same Eldric stood over Arthur with a blade in his hand.
Arthur recoiled.
"Which one is real?" he demanded.
"Both," the older Arthur replied. "Or neither. That is what you still fail to understand."
The hall shook.
Beyond the mirrors, a voice began repeating Arthur's name—not *Arthur Vaelor*, not *Arthur*—but dozens of different names layered over one another until none of them sounded human.
The older Arthur grabbed Arthur's wrist.
"Identity is not finding the one name they gave you," he said. "It is deciding which name survives what they do to you."
Arthur looked down.
The split-gate mark had opened like an eye in his palm.
Through it, he saw the sleeping archive corridor—and someone standing over **Eldric**.
A thin figure in a soaked black robe.
Watching him.
Then the vision shattered.
Arthur slammed back into the corridor with a gasp. The shard was dead glass again, but the cut on his finger had turned black around its edges.
From Azrion's room came the soft click of a door opening.
The click of the door pulled Arthur out of the dead reflection.
He spun around, hand closing over the blackened cut on his finger.
**Azrion Velcrest** stood in the doorway.
He was upright.
Not merely awake—not barely holding himself together beneath bloodied bandages. The sickly pallor was gone from his face. His breathing was steady. Even the ravager wound along his side, which had been spreading dark veins only hours before, was now sealed beneath clean, dry skin.
Arthur stared. "How are you standing?"
Azrion stiffened at the question. His hand moved toward the weapon at his waist.
"Who are you?"
Arthur's expression hardened. "Arthur. You were injured. Eldric carried you here."
Azrion's confusion deepened rather than eased. He looked past Arthur into the dim corridor, taking in the pale walls Sunny had created, the leaking archive ceiling beyond them, and the rain crawling down the ruined windows.
"Eldric?" he repeated. "Where is Eldric?"
"He's here," Arthur said carefully. "We're sheltering in an abandoned archive on the edge of the capital. What happened to you?"
Azrion looked down at his healed side as if he were seeing it for the first time.
"I was fighting a ravager," he said slowly. "It was close to advancing—a rank above what it should have been. Then…"
His eyes unfocused.
"Then there was pain. Darkness. Something speaking from inside the wound."
The corridor went cold.
"I thought I died," Azrion whispered. "But I woke up somewhere else. A corridor with no walls. It asked me if I wanted to live."
Arthur's blackened fingertip throbbed.
"And you said yes?"
Azrion looked at him.
"I don't remember answering."
The commotion woke the others.
Doors opened. Lola emerged first, exhausted but alert. Sunny followed, looking like the walk across the hall had cost him a week of sleep. Vaelis came with his weapon already in hand.
Then **Eldric** pushed through from the common room.
He stopped dead.
"Azrion?"
Azrion turned toward him.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Eldric had carried him through flooded streets. He had watched him burn with fever. He had sat beside him expecting the wound to worsen.
Now Azrion stood before him alive—and whole.
Eldric crossed the corridor in two strides and gripped his shoulder. "You were dying."
Azrion flinched, then looked down at the hand.
"I know," he said. "I think something stopped it."
No one answered.
Outside, thunder rolled over the drowned capital.
Arthur looked from Azrion's healed wound to the dead mirror fragments at his feet. The future vision. The name **Vaelor** scratched into glass. The voice asking to be dragged into Hell.
Too many impossible things were beginning to overlap.
And Arthur had the growing sense that Azrion had not been healed.
He had been **answered**.
Vaelis stepped forward before Arthur could speak.
"Don't move," he said.
Azrion's hand hovered near his weapon. "I just woke up in a place I don't recognize, surrounded by people I apparently know. You'll forgive me if that sounds difficult."
"You don't know us," Arthur corrected quietly. "Not in this version of things."
Vaelis ignored them both. He crouched beside Azrion and held two fingers just above the healed ravager wound. A dark, controlled thread of aether slipped from his hand and traced the scar without touching it.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the scar pulsed.
Black veins surfaced beneath Azrion's skin—thin as ink lines, spreading across his ribs in the shape of a broken circle. Lola took a step back. Eldric's face went tight.
Sunny stared at the mark. "That is definitely not normal healing."
Vaelis kept his voice level. "It isn't active corruption."
Eldric exhaled sharply.
"But," Vaelis continued, "it isn't gone either."
His aether passed deeper. The room seemed to dim as it met something inside Azrion—not hostile, not exactly. It was cold, dormant, and vast, like a sealed door at the bottom of a lake.
Azrion winced and grabbed the wall. "Stop. Something is looking back."
Vaelis withdrew his hand at once.
The black veins vanished. The healed scar remained, almost ordinary again.
"It has left a **trace**," Vaelis said. "The ravager's corruption should have spread and killed you. Instead, something cut it out—or changed it into a seal."
Arthur's eyes fell to his own hand, where the split-gate mark sat hidden beneath his sleeve.
"A seal for what?" Eldric asked.
Vaelis looked at Azrion for a long, uneasy second.
"I don't know. But he is not turning into a corrupted beast."
Azrion let out a breath he had clearly been holding. "That is meant to reassure me?"
"No," Vaelis replied. "It is meant to keep us honest."
Outside, the rain strengthened again, drumming on Sunny's constructed roof. Through the sound came a distant, low cry from somewhere in the city—a ravager's call, but wrong somehow.
Azrion's scar answered with one faint pulse.
Arthur understood the problem immediately.
Whatever had healed Azrion might now be able to **find him**.
# The Fated Window
Arthur kept his voice low.
"Azrion… did this start with that explosion? Or did one of your abilities activate?"
Azrion stared at him. "Abilities?"
His fingers drifted to the healed scar at his ribs.
"I didn't have any," he said. "Not before the ravager. I could fight, but I had no attribute. No awakened ability. Then it cut me, everything went black, and—"
A sharp blue-white pane unfolded in front of him.
> **[STATUS WINDOW — AZRION VELCREST]**
>** Given name : The heir without a throne
>** Rank: Awakened
> **Condition:** Stabilized
>
> **Corruption Trace:** Dormant
>
> **Attributes :** `???` , ???,???,???[Fated]
>
> **Special Attributes :**` Swordmaster, ???, ???,???
>
Azrion blinked at the empty air.
"What am I supposed to be seeing?"
Arthur's stomach sank.
Only he and Eldric could see it.
Eldric's face tightened as he read the floating window. "Azrion… you have an attribute now."
Azrion looked from Eldric to Arthur, baffled. "You can see something?"
Arthur said nothing at first.
*Of course.*
That damned **Fated** attribute had done it again—putting him in one of its impossible little positions, giving him knowledge he could not explain while making him look suspicious for having it. Why did fate never simply knock on the door like a normal problem?
The blue panel flickered.
A second line appeared beneath Azrion's hidden ability:
> **[Two witnesses recognized.]**
> **[One bearer remains unaware.]**
Arthur's eyes narrowed.
The window was not merely showing Azrion's status.
It was watching them.
Then Azrion's scar pulsed once beneath his shirt.
Outside, through the rain-soaked walls of the archive, something answered with a distant roar.