The first ash fell at dawn.
Not the soft, gray drift of hearthfire, but a fine, silver powder that caught the morning light and shimmered like frost. It came from no fire, from no smoke, drifting instead from the direction of the wound in the sky. It clung to rooftops, settled in hair, softened the edges of every shadow. When people stepped outside, their boots left dark prints against the pale dust, as though the earth itself had been remade overnight.
Elara woke to find the windowsills coated, her breath fogging against glass that had grown inexplicably cold. She brushed her fingers across the powder and found it weightless, almost warm, dissolving on her skin as if it had been waiting for her touch.
Ash, yet not ash. Memory disguised as matter.
She turned and saw the drawer was open. A shard of mirrored glass lay inside, its surface dulled by a film of the same silver dust. She lifted it carefully. Her own reflection wavered—elongated, doubled, fractured into overlapping images. And behind her faint silhouette, she thought she saw another, blurred and watching.
The note beneath the shard was written in Kieran's hand, but the ink bled as though soaked in rain.
They say the ash carries what the breach cannot contain. That it falls when memory burns out. Yesterday, they demanded I break the drawer. I refused. They call me traitor. I call it survival.
Elara—the mirror came from the seam. It wants us to see. But what it shows will not be kind.
She held the shard up again. Her reflection warped further, her eyes hollow, her skin smeared with shadow. Then, for a heartbeat, her image shifted—not her at all, but someone she recognized nonetheless. A woman with her face but not her life. A woman standing in a city she had never walked, beneath towers of glass that pierced a different sky.
Elara staggered back, dropping the shard onto the counter. It rang softly, unbroken.
Her pulse thundered. She had glimpsed not herself, but another self—another possibility carried across worlds. The ash was not only residue. It was memory turned loose, drifting until it found someone to bear it.
When she stepped into the street, the town was already restless. Children scooped the ash into handfuls, flinging it like snow, their laughter brittle. Old women crossed themselves and muttered that it was the dust of souls. Men in heavy coats wiped it from their eyes, cursing, though they could not stop staring at the wound in the sky.
"Elara!" a voice called. She turned to find Mara again, her face streaked with ash tears. "What is this? Why won't it stop?"
Elara opened her mouth, then shut it. She could not tell them that the ash was memory shed by a world stretched too thin, that every flake was perhaps a fragment of a life already erased. To speak it aloud would break them.
"I don't know," she said, and the lie tasted heavier than truth.
By midday, the ash had thickened, falling in soft sheets that blurred the horizon. People huddled indoors, but Elara walked, drawn to the chapel bell tower where the toll had rung days before. She climbed the narrow stairwell, each step dusted silver, until she reached the belfry. From there, she could see it clearly: the seam like a scar across the sky, pulsing faintly in rhythm with her own heart.
She raised the shard of glass again. This time, the reflection sharpened: Kieran's face, weary, streaked with the same ash, his eyes meeting hers across impossible distance. His lips moved, forming words she could not hear. Then the reflection shattered, splintering into a dozen versions of him—laughing, crying, older, younger, alive, gone.
Her knees buckled. She gripped the railing to keep from falling.
The mirror was not showing the present. It was showing what could be, what had been, what might still become. And in every vision, one truth rang clear: they could not hold back the seam. They could only decide how much of themselves to surrender to it.
That night, she wrote with trembling hand:
I saw you in the ash. I saw every you. If the breach means to strip us to fragments, then let us choose which pieces remain.
She pressed the note into the drawer. For a long moment, nothing. Then the ash stirred, and a reply appeared, words etched directly into the wood itself, as though carved by unseen hands.
Then let us stand in the mirror together.
The drawer snapped shut.
Sleep abandoned her. Dreams fractured into images too sharp to belong to her own mind: Kieran walking streets that collapsed into rivers, a version of herself scattering into birds, the seam breathing her name. She woke gasping, ash clinging to her lips like salt.
The next day, the mayor called another gathering in the square. This time his voice broke under its own strain. "We cannot live like this," he said, holding up his palm, ash drifting through his fingers. "We are becoming ghosts before our time."
Some shouted agreement, calling for the drawer to be destroyed. Others wept silently, unwilling to choose between survival and surrender. The square trembled with rage and fear until a new sound silenced them all: a crack, sharp and deep, from the earth itself.
The ground split along the cobbles, ash pouring into the fissure as though feeding it. Light glowed faintly from below. Someone screamed. The crowd scattered.
Elara did not move. She stared into the widening crack and saw her reflection staring back—not in water, not in glass, but in ash and light. A reflection that whispered without sound: Tomorrow waits inside you.
She staggered back, heart hammering. Around her, the people wailed, the town fracturing with the earth. The mayor collapsed to his knees, begging forgiveness of gods that did not answer. And above, the seam stretched wider, spilling more ash until the world seemed ready to vanish beneath it.
Elara ran. Not away, but home. To the drawer. To the only tether left.
When she reached it, she found the shard glowing faintly. She lifted it once more and saw—not Kieran, not herself, but the seam itself, reflected as though it were a face. And in its shifting contours she recognized something that chilled her to the bone: familiarity.
The seam was not other. It was them. Their choices, their longing, their exchanges, magnified until the worlds could no longer contain them. The ash was memory burned by desire too fierce to stay whole.
The mirror slipped from her hand and shattered across the floor.
And from the shards rose a voice, clear and terrible, filling the room:
If you would bear tomorrow, you must burn today.
Elara fell to her knees, ash swirling around her like snow. She understood then why it had been called the mirror of ashes. Not for what it showed, but for what it demanded: reflection, then fire.
Tomorrow had not only arrived. It was already consuming her.