POV: Aria
The mirrors didn’t lie.
I’d stood in front of them for hours—though down here, time meant nothing. There was no light source, no wind, no heartbeat beyond my own, and yet the chamber breathed with me. It watched me.
Three futures.
Three versions of truth, stitched into fragments of possibility.
In one, Kael died with a blade through his chest.
In another, I bled out while trying to stop the roots from collapsing.
And in the last, we lived—but alone. Together, yes. Alive. But the world around us was ash. Magicless. Hollow. As if surviving had come at the cost of everything else.
I pressed my hand to the glass of the last mirror.
Our faces looked back—worn, scarred, aged.
But he was holding my hand.
I traced my finger down his jaw, my breath catching.
“I could choose th
