CHAPTER 19 — THE MIRROR OF ASHES
1109 Words
The forest swallowed Elias whole long before he realized how far he had wandered.
Mist curled around the trunks like restless spirits, and the air tasted of winter though no snow had fallen. The deeper he walked, the quieter the woods became—until even his breath felt too loud. Something ancient waited ahead of him, pulling him forward with a force he didn’t understand.
The raven had told him only one thing before vanishing into the branches:
“In the heart of the forgotten woods lies the shrine. There, truth unmakes the liar and completes the broken.”
He hadn’t expected the shrine to feel alive.
It appeared as a circle of blackened stones rising from the earth, their surfaces cracked like charred bone. In the center sat a structure half-swallowed by roots: a small, weathered chamber that pulsed with faint silver light.
Elias hesitated at the entrance. His instincts screamed to leave, but another instinct—one older, deeper, tied to Mira herself—held him firm.
He stepped inside.
The chamber was colder than the outside air, as if winter had seeped into the stone. Vines clung to the walls like skeletal fingers. Feathers—black as a raven’s wing—lay scattered across the floor, untouched by breeze or time.
And at the far end stood a mirror.
Tall, framed in obsidian, its surface shimmered with a soft white glow. Elias took a slow breath and moved closer, expecting to see his reflection.
He didn’t.
He saw her.
Mira’s face stared back at him, pale, exhausted, eyes glistening with tears she refused to let fall. Her chest rose and fell unevenly, as though she were fighting for breath. Behind her image flickered a storm of memories—scenes that weren’t his but felt unbearably familiar.
“Mira…?” His voice broke before he could stop it.
Her lips didn’t move. Her reflection remained frozen, locked in a moment of sorrow.
He reached a trembling hand toward the mirror.
The instant his fingertips brushed the surface, the world shattered.
Glass splintered—not outward, but inward—like a star imploding into darkness. Elias stumbled as visions exploded across his mind, each sharp as a blade, each too vivid to be illusion.
A field of white snow, untouched and pure.
Mira kneeling beside a young man whose blood melted the snow in crimson rivers. She pressed her hands to his chest, chanting healing words with a desperate ferocity—but the light wouldn’t come, and his eyes slowly closed.
A whispered plea left her lips: “Please… not again…”
Then the memory snapped, replaced by another—
A hall of gleaming ice. Mira stood alone at its center, clutching a broken pendant. Her shoulders trembled as she whispered a name Elias couldn’t hear. Frost spread from her feet outward—slow, deliberate—as if sealing her heart inside the walls she created.
And then another vision—
Mira sitting by a fire with a healed, smiling child, pretending strength even as exhaustion hollowed her eyes. Just behind her, unseen by others, something dark coiled around her shadow—an echo of grief she could never burn away.
“Stop,” Elias whispered, gripping his head. The pain was blinding. “Stop—please—”
But the visions kept coming.
Her laughter in summer sunlight.
Her screams in a collapsing temple.
Her trembling hands as she pushed loved ones away, convinced she only ever brought curse, never blessing.
His knees gave out. The chamber floor rose to meet him.
Why was he seeing her memories? Why these moments? Why through this mirror?
The raven’s voice echoed again, but this time from everywhere and nowhere at once.
“You are her undoing… and her salvation.”
The statement struck him like a physical blow.
“What does that mean?” Elias gasped. “How—how can I be both?”
The mirror glowed brighter.
Mira’s face reappeared, but different now—closer. Tears finally fell down her cheeks. Her lips parted as though she were calling his name. He felt the raw fear in her eyes, fear for him, not of him.
He reached for the mirror again, this time not to witness, but to reach her.
The surface turned liquid beneath his touch.
His hand sank through.
Cold fire raced up his arm, swallowing him, dragging him into the mirror’s world. He choked on a breath that wasn’t air. Shadows curled around him, pulling him deeper.
Through the swirling void, a silhouette formed.
Not Mira.
Someone older. Someone cloaked in the ruin of centuries.
A woman with hair like frozen rivers and eyes that glowed molten amber. She looked at him as though she had been waiting since the dawn of time.
“Elias,” she said, her voice both thunder and whisper. “So you have finally stepped into the truth.”
He staggered backward, unable to form words.
She lifted her hand, and the mirror’s broken shards reassembled themselves into floating fragments around her, each shard containing a piece of Mira’s past.
“She carries the weight of two lifetimes,” the woman continued. “And the curse entwined with her heart has begun to awaken.”
Elias’s pulse hammered. “Curse? Mira isn’t—she can’t be—”
“She is,” the woman interrupted. “You have seen it. You have felt it. And unless the binding is broken, she will fall… and with her, the world you cherish.”
Elias shook his head. “Then tell me how to save her.”
The woman studied him with unsettling calm.
“You cannot save her,” she said softly. “Not as you are.”
A cold dread crawled through him.
“But you can destroy her.”
The shards around her dimmed.
Elias’s breath caught. “No. I would never—”
“You already have,” she whispered.
Something shifted behind him. He turned too late.
A shadow—his own shadow—rose from the darkness, contorted into a monstrous shape. It lunged, claws extended, aiming straight for the woman—or perhaps through her, toward the mirror’s heart.
Elias tried to move, but the void tightened around his limbs like chains.
The woman’s eyes flashed.
“Choose, Elias! Will you embrace what you are? Or will you lose her forever?”
The shadow struck.
The mirror exploded in blinding white light.
And the world fell away.
Cliffhanger End
Who attacked?
Is Mira still alive on the other side of the mirror?
And what truth about himself is Elias being forced to confront?
- Writer
