“Because of me?”
“Because you’re not what we thought.” He drags a hand through his hair, jaw tight. He looks back at the scroll, his voice quieter. “And maybe we’re not either. Everything we believed—what we are, what we’re for—it starts to look a lot smaller when you're standing in the middle of it.”
The scroll hums in my hand. My blood answers. And Riven’s voice drops to a whisper. “You weren’t supposed to find this.”
The vault doesn’t seal behind us. There’s no sound of a door closing. No hiss of magic. Just silence stretching longer than it should, wrapping around my throat like a second skin. Riven moves ahead of me, just a few steps, before something halts him mid-stride. One foot still in the air. His entire body tenses, not with shock, but with recognition. He tilts his head slightly, like he’s just heardsomething too quiet for human ears but loud enough to matter.
I stop walking.
The air shifts. Like the laws of physics hiccupped, and something slipped through the gap. There’s pressure in my chest, deep and sharp, like the drop of a rollercoaster, but not thrilling.
It’s ancient. Instinctual. Like every cell in my body just realized we’re standing somewhere we shouldn’t be. Riven lifts one hand and presses it flat to the stone wall beside him. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at me. And I don’t ask. Because then I feel it again.
A breath, but it doesn’t come from him. Or me. It comes frombehindthe air. Like the wall itself exhaled. Like something on the other side finally noticed we were here. My skin prickles. The fine hairs on my arms lift. The light overhead dims because the shadows are shifting. Sliding into corners they didn’t occupy before. Refusing to stay still. It’s not a lighting issue or a trick of the eye.
The shadows aremoving. And they’re doing it on purpose. “Don’t move,” Riven says. His voice is tighter thanI’ve ever heard it, low, strained, full of something close to pain. Not physical.Existential. I stay exactly where I am. The gold veins in the stone walls pulse once. Then again. Then…nothing. The hallway hums. A low, resonant vibration I can feel in my bones. Like the place is holding its breath, and I’m standing inside its lungs.
Then something changes.
The wall just ahead of us begins to ripple like glass, forming from stone. A sliver of mirror appears, elegant and thin, where there was only rock a moment before.
And in the reflection, she’s waiting. Not me.Her.
The not-me that’s been bleeding into dreams, sliding through visions, staring back from mirrors with eyes just a few shades too dark. This time, she’s not smiling. Her mouth is red-stained, not painted. Her grin splits wide and wicked, like it’s trying too hard to stretch into human shape. She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t tilt her head in curiosity or mimicry. She lifts her hand and presses it against the other side of the glass. And mine starts to rise to meet it, purely out of instinct. Like my body’s trying to answer a question my mind doesn’t remember being asked.
Riven reacts fast. One arm snaps around my waist while the other catches my wrist in a grip just shy of bruising. He yanks me backward so hard I collide with his chest. My breath leaves my lungs in a rush I can’t recover from. “Don’t fucking touch it,” he snarls.
“I wasn’t…”
“You were.”
The mirror shivers. Her hand twitches. Then she bares her teeth in something that wants to be a smile but isn’t. The floor cracks beneath us. A sound, like a bone splitting down the middle. It’s not small or subtle. It’s a fault line tearing through the stone floor like it’s paper. And from the widening fracture, light seemingly bleeds out. Although it’s not light.
It’s black and violet and pulsing. A cold kind of glow that doesn’t illuminate, it erases.The memory of fire without heat. A reflection of stars that have already died.
My vision doubles from reality splitting in two.
I see the hallway and I see something else overlaid with it. Towers made of bone. A sky like black glass. Ash drifting like snow. And at the center, a throne carved from shadow. Empty. It feels like it’s watching me. Like it’s been waiting.
A voice curls inside my skull, smoke and static and something older than words.Lux.“Say your name,” Riven barks behind me.
“What?” I breathe.
“Yourname.Now. Full,” he demands.
I open my mouth. It sticks. I force it out. “Lux…Lux Avery Marlowe.” The effect is immediate. The mirror explodes. Glass vanishes midair before it can hit the ground. The crack in the floor seals in reverse. The shadows stop crawling. Everything resets, now quiet and still. Like we had awakened something. And now it’s watching.
Riven’s breathing hard behind me. He doesn’t speak or meet my eyes. He places both hands on the wall like he needs it to hold him up, or maybe he’s trying to holditback. And for the first time since I met him… He looks afraid.
Not afraid for me.Of me.
18
The Devil You Know
Riven doesn’t speak on the way back, he doesn’t need to. The silence does all the work. We move through the vault like ghosts, like the place already forgot we were there. The walls don’t groan. The gold veins don’t pulse. The air feels scraped clean, as if whatever had been watching me finally turned away. The damage is done. Something cracked, and we both felt it. And now?
Now we’re pretending nothing has changed.
