Kael stared at the blade for a long time.
The notches along its spine were subtle, as if carved by someone who didn't want the world to notice—six jagged, deliberate marks that meant only one thing in the old Sovereign code: Death by one's own hand.
Rin remained quiet beside him, reading the shift in his breathing, the slight twitch in his hand, the way his thumb hovered over the edge of the blade without ever touching it. She had seen Kael many ways—brilliant, battered, blind with fury—but never like this. Never still. Never uncertain.
Zeke hovered a few feet away, checking scan results from the box again. "There's no spirit signature on the metal," he muttered. "Which is weird. Sovereign-forged blades always echo. This thing's null."
"It's a Memory Severer," Kael said quietly.
Zeke froze. "A what?"
"It was made to sever bonds. Cultivation ties. Spirit loops. Even... fate. I built this one to erase someone from the soulstream."
He looked up at them, voice steady but cold.
"And I used it."
No one asked the obvious question.
He didn't need them to.
The answer was bleeding out of him already.
Selene stepped in from the corridor behind them, eyes scanning the case and the blade with cool precision. "The note. 'The Mirror still waits.' What mirror?"
"A place," Kael said. "A trial, maybe. I don't remember all of it yet, but we used it to confront ourselves. Sovereigns were required to pass through it at the start of their reign."
"Why?" Rin asked.
"To see if we could survive what we really were."
There was a silence after that. Not tension. Just the weight of too many truths crowding into a room too small to hold them.
Finally, Zeke cleared his throat. "So... someone broke into the Moonveil ruins, bypassed spirit rot zones, accessed a sealed vault, found one of your past-life weapons and knew your private code for annihilation, and then mailed it to us in a nice little box?"
Kael nodded.
"Cool," Zeke said. "So we're all gonna die."
Kael slid the blade back into the silk wrap. "Not yet."
Rin watched his hands closely. "You're taking it?"
"I have to," he said. "If the Mirror still waits... it's not a warning. It's an invitation."
----------------
They left the next morning, quietly and without backup.
Selene objected, of course. Zeke nearly short-circuited trying to load every countermeasure into Kael's travel rig. But Kael refused to take the full squad.
"This is tied to me," he told them. "I won't risk pulling you into something that was never meant to exist in this time."
Rin didn't ask permission.
She was already waiting at the transport terminal, duffel slung over one shoulder, eyes unreadable as the early rain rolled across the pavement.
"I said I was going alone," Kael told her.
She shrugged. "Then don't slow me down."
He didn't argue.
The transport slid silently through the outer sectors of the city, past derelict factories and submerged roads, where the Fade scars had never fully healed. Kael watched the skyline fade, and for a while, neither of them spoke.
Then, quietly:
"You're afraid of what you'll see there," Rin said.
Kael didn't deny it. "I have a memory. A fragment. The blade... it wasn't supposed to come back."
"You used it on yourself."
"Something like that."
Rin studied him. "If it worked, how are you here?"
Kael looked out the window again, eyes distant.
"That's the part I'm starting to remember."
----------------
The coordinates from the case led them to a hollow stretch of land north of the Cascades—once a cultivation testing ground during the Sovereign War, now forgotten, overgrown, and laced with long-dormant glyphs that hummed beneath the soil like sleeping nerves.
They walked for hours before they found it.
A monolith. Ten feet tall, buried halfway into the earth, covered in mirrored obsidian and etched with carvings too old for modern dialects. Kael reached out and touched it.
His mark flared.
And the world rippled.
Rin took a step back.
The monolith shimmered, then cracked.
A doorway appeared—not a physical one, but a curtain of silver flame, hovering between reality and something deeper.
Rin didn't hesitate. "You first."
Kael nodded, drew the wrapped blade from his satchel, and stepped through.
The flame swallowed him.
And the world vanished.
----------------
There was no air in the Mirror.
No ground.
No sky.
Only reflections.
Kael stood in a void of mirrored light, infinite surfaces showing infinite versions of himself—Azuran in his prime, Azuran broken and bleeding, Kael now, Kael as he might become, Kael with power beyond comprehension, Kael corrupted by it, Kael dead.
He turned—and every version of him turned too.
A voice echoed through the chamber.
"Which one are you?"
He clenched his jaw.
"I don't know yet."
"Then choose."
The blade in his hand pulsed once. And then one of the mirrored images stepped forward.
Azuran.
Robes of deep flame. Sabers crossed on his back. Masked face calm but dangerous.
He said nothing.
Just drew a weapon—a twin to the one Kael held now.
Kael raised his own.
And the Mirror began.
----------------
It wasn't just a duel.
It was a reckoning.
Every strike Azuran delivered carried weight. Not just physical power, but memory. Kael saw visions flash with each clash—of cities burned to seal away threats, of enemies executed before they could explain, of allies sacrificed to win impossible victories.
Azuran moved like the world owed him surrender.
Kael moved like the world was trying to bury him.
He countered low, dodged high, let instinct guide him—but Azuran anticipated each move. Of course he did. He was Kael.
But Kael was not Azuran.
Not anymore.
He broke pattern.
Ducked under a wide arc.
Flared his core backward—a move Azuran never used because it left too much exposed.
But Kael had learned something Azuran never did.
He trusted.
And as Azuran lunged to finish the exposed opening—
A streak of shadow and steel burst from the Mirror behind him.
Rin's blade slashed low, intercepting the Sovereign's strike.
Kael spun in with her momentum and drove his Memory Severer upward into Azuran's chest.
The Mirror shuddered.
Azuran gasped.
And then laughed.
"You really are different," he said.
Then he shattered.
Glass and flame spiraled outward, then folded back into the chamber walls like forgotten memories returning to sleep.
The void darkened.
And a path opened ahead.
Kael turned to Rin, panting.
"You followed me."
"You didn't exactly make it hard," she said. "Zeke left me your tracer rig."
"Remind me to yell at him later."
"Noted."
They walked together into the dark, the blade now humming in Kael's grip like it had remembered who it belonged to.
----------------
They emerged hours later to a dying sky and a crackling storm.
The monolith behind them had crumbled into dust.
Kael tucked the blade away.
"I'm different now," he said.
Rin nodded. "Initiate is only the beginning."
He looked at her.
And this time, he didn't flinch when he said:
"I'm ready for more."
----------------
Far away, behind a hundred encrypted firewalls and spirit-veiled surveillance towers, Dr. Halden watched the footage from the Mirror burn itself out.
He turned to the figure beside him—the veiled one, wrapped in silence and symbols.
"He's progressing faster than the simulations expected," Halden muttered. "The Mirror should've locked him in echo-loop for a week."
The figure said nothing.
Halden looked back at the screen.
"What do we do now?"
The voice came quiet, layered in thousands of whispers.
"We begin preparing the next seal."