She didn't sleep.
Lynchie sat motionless on the bed, knees drawn tight against her chest, the dim azure of her dorm lantern casting trembling shadows across the walls. Her hand, still faintly marked with the mirror-shaped glyph, rested atop her knee, glowing ever so faintly.
You were never meant to wake this early.
The voice echoed, softer now, no less sharp. A splinter in her mind, lodged between what she'd always believed and what had just... looked back at her.
The other students hadn't noticed her slip back into the dormitory. Jaira had murmured in her sleep, stirring once, but said nothing. Michaella's delicate snores were rhythmically muffled beneath her lavender sheet-drape. Viminda had tossed a pillow across the room at Kristel for stealing the blanket again.
Only Chloue, eyes half-open, had watched her enter.
She'd said nothing—just held her gaze for a moment, then rolled over, silent.
But Lynchie knew: someone had seen her. Someone would start asking soon.
She turned toward the window, where a crack in the enchanted glass revealed the sky over Seraphis Academy's upper tower spires. The stars blinked, unfamiliar tonight. There were more of them. Or maybe they were... closer?
One cluster shimmered unnaturally, like it watched.
Her skin prickled.
She'd studied the constellations since her second year. The celestial scripts. The twelve known orders of Heaven. Even the rumors about the forbidden thirteenth—a fallen sign said to foretell rebellion or ruin.
But this... this wasn't in any of the tomes.
Not even the mirrored vault Elgron kept sealed in the academy's deep archives.
Her gaze drifted toward her desk, where a single ancient volume lay hidden beneath her uniform blouse: Heaven's Binding Stars: Codices of Celestial Law.
Illicitly borrowed.
Not stolen. Borrowed.
The page she'd dog-eared earlier—on Angelic Pact Hierarchies—was now smeared with a thumbprint she didn't remember leaving. A black one.
She hadn't touched ink.
Slowly, she pulled the book closer and flipped the pages again, now more carefully. Her hand trembled as she found it—a passage nearly burned into her thoughts:
> "All pacts are sanctified by the Echo. The Mirror binds. The Name seals. But the Rift breaks the wheel. If an Angel speaks a name not granted by Heaven, a new lineage is born—and with it, a war that echoes backward into the stars."
Lynchie stared at the words.
Echo. Mirror. Rift. Name.
Every one of them had just come to life in that hidden chamber.
A part of her—a tiny, rational whisper—wanted to believe it was a hallucination, a side effect of prolonged exposure to arcane compression fields, maybe even the fumes from Professor Jhelev's noxious fireweeds.
But that voice had known her.
And the thing she saw… it hadn't just looked at her.
It had recognized her.
"Lynchie Regino," Elgron had said. Not Lynchie, not Regino. Her full name. Formal. Icy.
He knew something.
She'd seen enough political lectures—her brother's old textbooks, her mother's encoded angelic doctrines—to know that when someone used your full name at night, after a rift nearly killed you, it wasn't out of affection.
It was a threat.
A binding.
The mark on her hand pulsed again, faintly.
And for the first time, she noticed it had grown.
Not larger.
Deeper.
As if the skin beneath it now held a second layer—mirror-thin, like a shell just waiting to crack.
A knock.
She nearly screamed, clutching the pillow to her chest.
Another knock. This time louder. Rhythmic. Familiar.
Jaira stirred. Kristel groaned. Viminda rolled and muttered something about "mushroom assassins."
But only Lynchie rose.
She tiptoed barefoot to the door, pulled it slightly ajar.
And found a letter. No sender. No wax. Just a folded slip of auric parchment. Paper that hummed slightly.
When she unfolded it, only six words greeted her:
"The Mirror sees. Midnight. Observatory Dome."
No signature.
No crest.
Just that slow, terrible pulse beneath her palm…
…and the faint echo of a memory not her own, whispering, "A war that echoes backward into the stars."
Behind her, the stars outside the dorm window twitched again.
And far beneath the academy, in the rift-chamber now sealed by Elgron's hand, a single mirror in the dark began to crack—hairline first, then deeper, as something inside pressed softly outward…
…waiting.