There were a hundred mirrors in the palace, and none of them told the truth.
Each was framed in moon-silver or obsidian glass, etched with sigils meant to shield the soul from impure sight. But when the girl looked into them, she did not see a daughter. Or a soul.
Only a reflection of what she was supposed to be.
Her hair was brushed each morning by silent hands, always gloved, adorned with rings older than memory. Her meals arrived in symmetrical patterns—slices of bloodfruit, three coils of rice-root, a half-cup of rose milk—arranged by palace astrologers who had never spoken her name aloud.
Her robes—dyed in orchid blood and lined with whisper-thread—changed daily to match the Empire's chosen virtue.
Today's was Patience.
Which meant no visitors.
No voices.
Only ritual.
⸻
She sat, as she always did, upon the golden dais—its steps shaped like the petals of a dying star. Around her circled the priest-readers, draped in black ceremonial silk. They chanted litanies written by men long-dead, for reasons long-erased.
"Daughter of the Blood.
Heart of the Flame.
Flesh of the Sealed Pact."
The words floated like incense—perfumed, deliberate, stale.
They held no meaning.
Not anymore.
She had heard them since she could walk.
At five, they made her cry.
At nine, they made her question.
At twelve, they made her cold.
Threads shimmered in the air—filaments of ceremonial will, drawn like silk across her collarbone, wrists, throat. Not bindings. But not freedom either. Too elegant. Too sterile.
She closed her eyes. Let the rite pass over her like water on stone.
The Threads here were crafted.
Refined.
Obedient.
They looped with precision, responding not to emotion but instruction. When she breathed, they did not answer. When she blinked, they did not stir.
But in her dreams, the Threads were different.
Wild. Tangled. Breathing.
Once, in sleep, she had seen them burst from the floor like roots—thick with memory and ash. They coiled around her limbs and whispered forgotten songs. Not commands. Not chants.
Names.
⸻
Today, as the priests circled, something shifted.
Not enough to break the rite.
But enough for her to feel it.
A tremor, just beneath her skin—like a thread drawn taut, then plucked from afar.
The air, too still. The chant, too perfect.
She inhaled, and the breath caught.
One thread pulsed wrong. Not in defiance, but in rhythm. As if something older than ceremony had exhaled through her blood.
A flicker of scent—ash and rain, sharp and green—brushed past her senses. Gone before her mind could seize it.
None of the priest-readers faltered. None saw.
But she did.
And for a heartbeat, she was no longer sitting in the dais of the Broken Constellation.
She was barefoot in a ruined grove.
Light poured through cracks in dead leaves.
The wind was singing her name—
But not the name they gave her.
⸻
When the ceremony ended, the priest-readers bowed as one. They turned without glance or pause, their footsteps gliding across sigil-lines carved into the chamber's marble—guides only they could see. Their eyes never met hers.
They left her alone in the dome of the Broken Constellation.
Thirteen golden points marked the ceiling—meanings, long erased.
The Fourteenth was blackened.
Cracked.
Empty.
She stared at it.
As she always did.
It never changed. But it always waited.
⸻
She rose, slow and deliberate.
Behind her, one mirror stood taller than the rest—veiled in black silk.
She approached it.
Paused.
Fingertips grazed the cloth.
The mirror twitched beneath the veil.
She knew what lay beneath. Not a reflection. Not a vision.
A lie.
A mirror made to rewrite the self.
Someone had once stood before it and declared themselves eternal.
Declared their children would carry their will across centuries.
Declared the flame would never die.
But each child that followed—each child born behind sealed walls—had vanished.
Used.
Forgotten.
Replaced.
But this one—
This one had a name.
Not the name written in the ledgers.
Not the one carved in the Archive of Bloodlines.
A different name.
One whispered only in her dreams.
One that had no Thread tied to their control.
One she would not speak.
Not until she could speak it true.
Not until someone remembered.
She touched the veil again.
The mirror rippled—convulsed—beneath the silk. A faint distortion shimmered outward, and she heard it. A sound like glass bending. Like a bell being struck and swallowed at once.
Behind the cloth, the surface warped.
She didn't see her face—she saw movement.
A girl, barefoot, walking between pillars of ash and vine.
A crown made of roots. A bird with no eyes.
And a name—hers—caught on the edge of hearing.
A—
Then silence.
The mirror froze. The vision gone.
A single breath hung suspended in her lungs.
Then—
"Not today," she whispered.
And turned away.
⸻
Far below, in the obsidian catacombs of the palace, a sigil-stone cracked.
A thin red-gold filament unraveled from its seal.
One of the Dreamwatchers—monks wrapped in permanent sleep, guardians of the Threaded Future—stirred in his silence.
His eyes remained closed.
But his lips moved.
A name passed them.
Unspoken.
Unknown.
And forgotten before it could finish.
⸻
Outside the tower, a black-billed bird landed on a ledge that had not existed a moment before.
It blinked.
Sang a single note—high and clear.
Then vanished in a shimmer of veiled feathers.
None knew a ripple had entered the weave.
Somewhere, a thread long buried had bent—just slightly.
Not broken.
Bent.
And the girl in the room without windows…
smiled.
Not from joy.
Not from rebellion.
From recognition.
A feeling, not a thought.
A knowing that slipped beneath words and clung to the ribs like forgotten breath.
Like waking from a dream you weren't supposed to survive.
She stood there, motionless, as the mirror stilled behind her. The silk ceased its trembling. The reflection vanished. But the ache it left behind remained—warm and quiet, like the echo of a name no one had spoken aloud in years.
She had heard it once, not in full, but in fragments—scattered through the sighing of trees in her dreams, or in the hush between footsteps in the dark. She remembered syllables like seeds. Not yet blooming. But buried.
They tried to prune her silence into obedience.
Shape her gestures into ritual.
Even her thoughts had been boxed—trained to follow the tracks of sanctioned memory.
But memory was a beast.
It strayed.
It returned.
And somewhere—beneath the dais, beyond the blackened star, behind the veil—they had let something stray too far.
A single thread. Unmeasured. Unsanctioned.
One that now pulsed in rhythm with her breath.
⸻
Outside her chamber, the palace corridors remained quiet. Not with peace, but with arrangement. Every step in that place had already been walked, every word written long before it was spoken.
The walls whispered nothing.
The guards patrolled with eyes unblinking, minds half-bound.
Even the light was curated—filtered through roseglass to soften shadows into submission.
But somewhere, behind the cold geometry of it all, something was blooming.
She could feel it now—barely, distantly—a warmth underfoot. A tremble at the root of her spine. As if the world was trying to recall a tune it had once sung beneath a sky unbroken by banners.
A song without harmony.
But not without hope.
⸻
In her dreams, she had walked a path of scattered petals and forgotten names.
Now, she felt the path stirring beneath her in waking.
And though she said nothing,
though no one looked into her eyes,
though no one would dare say her name—
the world had remembered first.
And the world, she now knew,
was listening.
Again.