I don't sleep that night.
Instead, I sit by the water's edge and carve.
The bark from a dead ash tree peels away in long strips. Beneath it, pale, dry wood—light enough to shape, strong enough to bind. I hollow it slowly, carefully, not with my blade but with the edge of a heated stone and slivers of bone.
It's not beautiful. It isn't meant to be.
No sigils. No gold. No shine.
Just lines.
Hard, sharp lines. Like the ones this world carved into me.
When I finish, I tie it with dark thread around the back of my head. It fits snug. Slightly off-center, jagged at the edges, angled like a predator's smile.
The Masked One walks now.
Not the boy from Darnem Hollow. Not the servant of fate.
Someone *else.*
The ring pulses against my palm.
Subtle. Quiet. But it's there.
I murmur nothing. Make no show of its presence. Power like this is best hidden—not paraded.
Let them wonder. Let them guess wrong.
---
Dawn creeps in pale and soundless.
The stones before the lake don't shift. Don't glow. Don't welcome.
I step toward them anyway.
The token burns briefly in my hand. A single drop of light falls from it into the water.
The surface *opens.*
No splash. No ripple. Just a silence that stretches like a tunnel.
Then a voice—not loud, not clear. More like thought pressed directly into bone.
**"To enter, you must face yourself."**
I already have.
But the gate doesn't care what I believe. It pulls me in.
---
The world around me *vanishes*.
I stand in fog.
Empty. Cold.
Then, a figure steps forward from the mist.
My height.
My frame.
My mask.
But the wood is shattered. Blood trails from the eye sockets.
I know this version.
I've *been* this version.
The voice echoes again.
**"This is what you become if you fail."**
The figure lunges.
Faster than it should be. Stronger than me.
But not wiser.
I let it strike. Let it come close.
Then I draw inward—not aloud, not with gesture, just a pull from deep within. The energy coils at my fingertips. A force no one here has seen.
Not yet.
Shadow threads lash out—not like wild tendrils, but like precise wires, silent and invisible. They wrap the figure's limbs mid-motion.
I twist—not to dodge, but to *bind.*
The masked reflection jerks violently, frozen mid-air.
I speak low, not to the enemy, but to the idea.
"You are not me. You are what I left behind."
The threads tighten. Silent. Unseen.
Then—ash.
The reflection shatters into smoke and memory.
Silence again.
Then the stones appear ahead of me. Clear. Whole.
The fog fades.
And the water returns—only now, the lake no longer reflects *my* image.
It shows a gate.
Old, silver-edged, carved into the air itself.
The entrance to the small world.
I step through.
And Stillwater Reach accepts me.