The silence that followed was not the same silence from before.
This silence listened.
It coiled around Ezekiel like a second skin, pressing against his ribs, cradling the edges of his thoughts with something old and watching. It wasn't cruel. It wasn't kind. It simply… weighed.
The room had not changed. Not exactly.
The statues were still statues.
The blood remained. The broken bodies of his royal cousins—their eyes open, their mouths slack and frozen in final, soundless pleas—still littered the white marble.
But now, Ezekiel stood among them.
Alive.
Changed.
His breath came in slow, uneven drags, the inside of his lungs still scorched with heat that wasn't heat. His left arm, newly restored, pulsed with a quiet glow beneath the skin—lines of script appearing and disappearing just under the surface, as if a language were being written into his bones only to vanish before it could be understood.
He reached out and touched the edge of the shattered mirror.
It reflected him now.
Just him.
But not how he remembered.
The boy in the glass had silver eyes—both now. His skin had taken on a marble hue around the edges of the new flesh. His hair, once a tangled black curtain, now held streaks of ash-white. And in the mirror behind that boy stood a shadow.
No shape. No face.
Just presence.
It watched him.
It had always been watching.
And then it spoke. One final time.
---
> "Speak, vessel."
> "Tell me what you are."
---
Ezekiel opened his mouth.
The words did not form easily. They scraped the edges of his tongue like splinters.
"I…"
He looked down at his hands—one flesh, one wrapped in the whisper of light. Then to the pool of blood where his body had lain.
"I'm…"
No one had ever asked him that before.
Not truly.
They had called him prince. Hollow. Lesser.
They had said what he wasn't.
Never what he was.
He looked back into the mirror.
He saw the boy who was broken.
Who bled.
Who chose to live anyway.
His voice was hoarse.
"I am… Ezekiel."
The silence tilted.
Not with approval. Not with doubt.
But with acceptance.
And the voice spoke, not in sound, but finality.
---
> "Then be judged by what you shall become."
> "Live."
---
The mirror cracked.
Not shattered.
Just a single, clean line—like a new sentence at the bottom of a verdict.
Ezekiel blinked.
The light began to dim.
The statues no longer moved.
The dome began to hum again.
The voice was gone.
Not dead.
Not silent.
Gone—because it had spoken all it would speak.
---
He took one step forward.
The floor didn't shake.
The air didn't bend.
But something had changed in the marrow of the world.
He could feel it.
The same way one knows when a storm has passed, but the wind hasn't stopped whispering.
Ezekiel looked around one last time.
At the corpses of his cousins.
At the obsidian dragon, still knelt in quiet reverence.
At the mirror, now dark.
And then, he walked.
Each footstep rang louder than it should have.
Each echo sounded not like one, but two.
His.
And something behind him.