Chapter 10: The Life That Wants Me
925 Words
The whispers had grown louder since the Hall of Echoes.
Auren heard them not only in mirrors now, but in puddles, in glass panels, in the shifting shimmer of Virellia’s skies. They weren’t words, exactly. More like feelings given shape—longing, sorrow, recognition. And sometimes, in the heart of night, he heard them whisper his name the way a child might whisper home.
He stood on the northern overlook of the Palace of Echoes, where one could see the full length of the city and beyond. Virellia pulsed like a dream beneath him—beautiful and wrong, familiar and foreign.
He had spent his whole life thinking Earth was the only place he belonged. That the strangeness in him was a defect, a wound left by trauma or imagination. But now… he wasn’t so sure.
There were pieces of this world buried inside him.
He could feel them waking.
Behind him, footsteps echoed. Ren.
“You’re restless again,” Ren said quietly.
Auren didn’t turn. “Restless doesn’t begin to cover it.”
Ren joined him at the edge. His robes shimmered with light, but his expression was shadowed.
“You’ve seen things you weren’t ready for.”
“I’ve remembered things you didn’t want me to,” Auren corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Ren sighed. “There’s a chamber below the city. Hidden in the old root of Virellia. It’s where dreams were first shaped. Where the realm first woke. We call it the Chamber of Origins.”
Auren turned sharply. “I’ve heard it in my dreams.”
Ren stiffened.
“The whispers want me to go there,” Auren said. “I hear them every night now. They say it’s where I’ll find the truth.”
“That chamber holds memories too old to trust,” Ren warned. “It’s where the realm keeps its deepest secrets. And its deepest griefs.”
“Which is exactly why I need to see it.”
Ren’s face twisted, half anger, half sorrow. “You don’t understand, Auren. The Chamber doesn’t just show you. It binds you. If you go in with doubt, it might choose the truth for you.”
Auren met his gaze. “Then it’s time I stop doubting.”
---
The descent was not a grand staircase or a glowing elevator. It was a thread of shadow behind a tapestry in a forgotten corridor. Lyra had shown him the passage days ago, though she'd warned him not to take it until he was ready. Auren figured there was no such thing as ready—not for truth like this.
He slipped through the narrow corridor, light growing dimmer with each step. The walls pulsed with heartbeat rhythms. The air thickened. Time felt uneven, like it sometimes moved ahead of him.
Eventually, the corridor opened into a vast cavern of glass and memory.
The Chamber of Origins.
It wasn’t a room—it was a wound.
The walls curved in endless mirrors, each one veined with silver light. At the center, a floating shard of darkened glass pulsed with emotion so old it almost felt holy. The chamber had no floor, only suspended platforms of light that flickered beneath his steps.
The whispers surged around him.
Auren. Auren. Not the beginning, not the end. The chosen forgetting. The remembered child.
He stepped forward, heart thundering.
The mirrors lit up—one by one.
He saw himself as a baby, cradled by the woman with glass eyes.
He saw her hand him to someone cloaked in dark feathers—someone who took him through a shimmering portal and vanished.
Then, Earth.
The foster home. The blank years. The sudden fear of mirrors. The nights he dreamed of silver forests and thought it was just imagination.
“I was exiled,” Auren whispered. “Hidden away.”
To keep the realm safe, the chamber whispered.
To keep you whole.
Another mirror shimmered.
Ren. As a child. Crying as Auren was taken. Screaming his name. Being told to forget.
Auren staggered backward. “He knew.”
He remembered. But buried it.
A final mirror ignited.
It showed Auren now—standing in this very chamber. But in the reflection, he was different. Taller. Older. Glowing. He wore no crown but held light in his palms.
The reflection smiled.
Not in malice. In recognition.
And whispered: You are the life that wants to be.
Auren fell to his knees.
Tears spilled, unbidden. For years he had wondered who he was, why he felt so other. And now… he saw it clearly.
He wasn’t born broken.
He was born becoming.
This realm hadn’t just been calling him.
It had wanted him.
From the moment it first dreamed.
---
He emerged from the Chamber hours later—though time was meaningless there. The moment his foot stepped back into the waking halls of Virellia, he found Ren waiting.
Ren didn’t speak.
Auren did.
“You loved me once,” he said softly.
Ren’s jaw clenched. “Still do.”
“You let them send me away.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Auren stepped close. “You do now.”
Ren’s eyes shimmered with grief. “You changed in there.”
“I remembered in there.”
“And?”
Auren looked toward the horizon where the mirror-moon had begun to rise. “I’m not a guest in this realm. I’m not even its prince.”
Ren waited.
“I’m its breath,” Auren said. “And it’s time I stopped holding it.”
- Writer
