The sea was restless that night, as though it knew the physician was trespassing upon waters best left undisturbed. Waves battered the sides of the small vessel, their spray cold as knives against Lysander's skin, but his grip on the tiller never faltered. Lana had offered him safe houses, the Resistance whispered warnings, and the Empress commanded him to remain near her side—but the child's fevered visions and the mark in his palm had pointed him elsewhere. Toward the edge of maps, where sailors swore there lay an island no compass could hold: the Island of Silence.
The crew he'd gathered were few and reluctant. Exiles, smugglers, desperate men who valued coin more than superstition. Yet even they muttered prayers under their breath as the night drew on, for already the wind carried an unnatural hush. The gulls that had followed them since leaving Aurealis were gone. The waves still rose and broke, but their sound seemed muffled, like breath behind glass. The farther they sailed, the more the sea seemed to move without voice.
By dawn, one of the crew refused to continue. His eyes wild, he clutched a dagger and whispered that the silence was eating into his thoughts, that he could no longer remember the name of his own mother. He leapt into the sea before Lysander could stop him. The splash was soundless. The crew stared, horrified, at the ripples that spread without a single echo.
By evening, the horizon revealed it: a dark silhouette rising from the ocean like a broken tooth, shrouded in mist that swallowed even the sun's reflection. The Island of Silence. No bird circled its cliffs. No waves sang upon its rocks.
They anchored the ship in sullen quiet, and Lysander alone descended into a smaller boat, the child's words still burning in his memory: There is a place where voices die, but truth remembers. There you must choose what you will forget.
His boots met stone. The air was still, heavy, suffocating. Even his own breath refused sound, his heartbeat pulsed without echo, his footsteps landed like shadows instead of weight. The island seemed to devour not only sound but memory itself. Already, he felt something tugging at his thoughts, threads loosening from a tapestry. The oath he had sworn in another life—do no harm, preserve life at all costs—flickered faintly, as though written in smoke.
The path before him was jagged, carved into the cliffs by forces ancient and merciless. He climbed, hands scraping stone, and yet the silence persisted. No grunt escaped his lips, no scrape of boots upon rock. The world denied his existence, and in return, his mind rebelled. Images pressed in: a hospital corridor gleaming with sterile light, a woman's laugh he once knew but could not place, the metallic tang of antiseptics. Memories from Earth—his lost world—surged, then unraveled.
At the summit, he found a plateau where black stones formed a circle around a pool of still water. The surface reflected not his body but his essence: shadows of every life he had touched, every death he had failed to prevent. Faces stared up at him—patients he could not save, comrades consumed by the Fog, strangers burned by imperial decree. Their lips moved, but no sound emerged. Only their eyes accused, endless and unyielding.
Kneeling, he pressed his marked palm to the water. Ripples spread silently, and in them a voice bloomed—not heard, but felt, inside the marrow of his bones.
"Physician. Healer. Witness of wounds. You come to the island where names dissolve, where truth remains after sound is stripped away. What will you give to heal a world not your own?"
He shut his eyes. What will I give? He had already given sleep, blood, sanity. Was there more?
The water shifted, and another vision gripped him. Aurealis burned under a sky filled with blackened fog, the Empress enthroned upon ash, Lana's resistance scattered, the child consumed as vessel for something vast and merciless. And himself—standing at her side, scalpel in hand, not healer but executioner.
"No!" he shouted—or thought he did, but no sound carried. His denial dissolved in the silence, leaving only intent.
The pool darkened, and the voice pressed closer. "Then what do you choose? To sever the world from its fear, you must sever yourself from what binds you. Offer memory. Offer self. Or depart, and let all bleed."
Lysander trembled. To forget himself was to lose not only Earth, not only his past, but the anchor that kept him human. Yet the alternative was worse: to abandon the world that had, despite cruelty, entrusted him with its last fragile hope.
Slowly, with hands that shook, he pressed both palms to the water. He felt it sear through him, tearing threads of memory loose: his mother's smile fading, the halls of the hospital dimming, the sound of his own name dissolving into nothing. Pain unlike any wound carved through him, yet beneath it ran release. Weight lifted. Suffering shared.
When he opened his eyes again, the pool had changed. Its reflection showed not accusations, but possibilities. The faces remained, but they were calm, luminous, waiting. And upon the shore of that silence, he saw the second relic: a mirror of purest glass, standing upright though no hand held it. Its surface shone with an inner light, and within it he glimpsed himself—not the man he was, but the man he might yet become.
He reached for it, and the mirror dissolved into his chest, settling within him like breath. For the first time, he felt not only the wound of the world, but its yearning to heal. The Mirror of Truth had chosen him.
Exhausted, trembling, he stumbled back toward the cliffs. The silence did not relent, but it no longer gnawed at him. Instead, it seemed to watch, to weigh, to wait. When at last he returned to his boat, the sea stirred soundlessly, yet within himself he carried a resonance deeper than words.
The crew shrank at the sight of him, for though he bore no visible mark, his eyes reflected something otherworldly. They dared not speak, but in their silence, they knew he had crossed a threshold no man should have crossed.
And as the ship turned from the Island of Silence, Lysander stood upon its deck, the scalpel burning faintly in his palm, the mirror steady in his soul, and his heart a battlefield between what he had lost and what he must yet save.