The creature's weeping echoed like cracked glass being dragged across stone.
It wasn't a sound meant for human ears—no sobs or wails, but a fragile, rhythmic hum. Each note bent the air around it, causing Chris's vision to distort and Grey's sword to shimmer and split into three ghostly outlines.
They didn't move. Neither did the creature.
The wind didn't blow. Time itself seemed to wait.
Chris took a careful step forward. "What… are you?"
The creature's mouths moved, but not in unison. One whispered, one screamed, one laughed a hollow, broken sound. Yet when the sound resolved, the voices aligned into one sentence:
"I am what he never wanted to see."
Chris froze. "You're… a mirror of Wale?"
"No." The voice trembled. "I am the reflection he discarded. The truths he could not bear. The pain he chose to erase."
Grey stepped beside her, watching the creature cautiously. "Then you remember everything."
"I do." It lifted a slow, trembling arm. "Would you?"
The stone at the creature's feet cracked open like an egg, revealing not light but memories. Swirling fog in the shape of moments. Chris saw them flicker like a filmstrip caught in fire:
—Wale as a child, watching his village burn from the shadows, his parents never returning.
—Wale among the Mirror Scholars, younger than the rest, always isolated.
—Wale meeting Grey, Chris, and Lucien, and finally… smiling.
—Then losing them. One by one. Slowly, inevitably.
—And the mirror. The one that didn't reflect the world—but himself. A cracked thing.
—He didn't shatter it. He buried it.
The creature knelt, its limbs contorting but never snapping. "I was that mirror. I did not break. He locked me here, hoping to forget."
Chris swallowed. Her voice was barely a whisper. "Why show us this?"
"Because he fears you," said the creature. "But he fears me more."
Grey furrowed his brow. "Then help us stop him."
The mirror-being looked at him—no, through him.
"If I leave this place… the truth he tried to destroy will return. But I cannot fight him. I am what remains. I am sorrow. I am the crack in his perfect lie."
Chris lowered her staff. "Then let us carry you."
The being tilted its head.
"You would carry his pain?"
Chris nodded. "Yes."
The silence that followed was longer than a moment. The creature reached toward her—not a threat, but a gesture of trust.
Its hand touched her chest, just above her heart.
The world twisted.
Chris gasped as the weight of memories not her own flooded in: loss, betrayal, loneliness, guilt. A thousand unanswered questions. A million dreams deferred. Every quiet night Wale sat staring into nothing, asking the mirror why the world refused to love him back.
It wasn't rage that birthed Wale's darkness.
It was longing.
The creature stepped back, now dimmer, weaker.
"I am part of you now," it said. "But take heed—truth can be your salvation… or your undoing."
Then it faded into smoke, leaving behind a single, black shard of mirror embedded with gold veins—like a broken star trapped in glass.
Chris picked it up.
And the Maze began to dissolve.
They emerged into the real world beneath a pale, fractured sky.
Isolde was the first to speak. "He'll know you carry it."
"Let him," Chris replied. "It's time he faced the one part of himself he couldn't destroy."
Grey turned to her, more serious than she'd ever seen him. "What if the truth breaks you instead?"
Chris smiled softly, eyes distant. "Then we'll break together. But not before we finish this."
They had a direction now: the Nexus Heart—Wale's stronghold, buried beneath the Spire of Echoes, once the epicenter of mirrorcraft, now a fortress of lies and flickering light.
The journey would not be easy.
Already the landscape warped beneath Wale's control. Hills shifted subtly when no one watched them. Roads moved in spirals. Sometimes the stars above rearranged themselves to show fragments of memories instead of constellations.
But they pressed on.
And something new began happening.
The more they moved forward, the more others found them.
At first it was one: an old scholar who remembered Chris's name from when she saved his son in the western city of Thorne.
Then two: a pair of merchants who refused Wale's offered paradise, claiming they'd rather live with ugly truth than pretty fiction.
Then ten. Then twenty.
A resistance formed.
Not of warriors.
But of the real.
People who remembered pain and chose to bear it rather than trade it for hollow peace.
The truth was spreading.
And Wale would see it soon.
Far ahead, unseen and unreachable, Wale sat within the core of the Nexus Heart, his fingers trailing over mirrored glyphs that shimmered with impossible equations.
He paused.
Something had shifted.
A crack—small, nearly invisible—ran through one of his control panels.
He stared at it, expression unreadable.
He whispered to himself: "Not yet…"
Then louder: "Not ever."
The chamber pulsed.
And the world shivered.