The city bled from a thousand mirrored wounds.
The eastern gate had collapsed under the pressure of false sun and bone-armored soldiers. Rivers of light, not fire, but something hungrier, licked the avenues clean of memory. Where people died, they left behind no bodies, only ash traced with glyphs.
Elias staggered through the smoke, pressing a torn cloth to his side. It was soaked with blood, not his own. Ayélè had taken a blow meant for him.
She now lay beneath the broken arch of the temple, breath shallow, eyes open but unfocused.
"Say the words," she whispered."The ones that bring you here."
Elias didn't answer.
Because for the first time since he began leaping, he didn't know how he got here.
The last defenders had turned to salt.
Literally.
Each time a mirror was dragged into the square, people changed. Some aged a century in seconds. Others became still as statues. Time, compressed or reversed, like a child twisting the dials of a universe it didn't yet understand.
Elias found himself at the mouth of a chamber he hadn't noticed before, beneath the temple, behind the mirror.
It was black inside, but not from shadow.
It was a void that rejected light.
The Watcher's voice came like a vibration under his skin.
"This is the wound in the world. This is where you were born."
Elias stepped through.
The chamber was circular, etched with concentric rings that pulsed when he stepped closer. In the center was a platform, a mirror shaped like a heart, cracked along one side, still bleeding slow droplets of red mercury.
Elias felt it before he saw it: the final cipher glyph, not on the walls, not in the mirror, but on him.
It glowed just beneath the skin of his chest, over his sternum, like a brand applied from the inside.
He touched it.
It burned.It sang.It whispered.
"You are not a witness anymore. You are a thread. The next leap ends you. Unless…"
The Watcher did not finish the sentence.
Instead, it presented him with a choice.
"This Time, You Must Leap Without Dying."
Every leap before had been preceded by death. Always a fall, a fire, a blade, a collapse. The soul cast loose through trauma, snapping into the next moment.
But this time…
"You must leap alive," the Watcher said. "Your memory intact. Your body unwilling."
"But that's impossible," Elias said. "The mirror feeds on endings."
"Then give it a different ending."
The glyph on his chest pulsed again. The mirror-heart began to reflect, not his face, but his lives. All of them. As if his soul had become a scroll, unspooling at last.
He saw:
His first leap, running from fire in a burning archive.
Rae's face, before she knew who he was.
The city of hands. The wall of names. The whisper of "Break."
Kéon's funeral mask being painted.
Ayélè holding the blade to his throat and calling him "brother."
The boy with glass teeth weeping at the edge of time.
All of it was him.
All of it was now.
Ayélè's Voice
Somewhere behind him, she stirred.
"Elias," she said, weakly.
He turned. She was crawling toward the chamber, blood dragging in her wake like a second shadow.
"If you can leap alive," she said, "then do it. Not for yourself. For those of us who won't make it."
"But I don't know where I'll land."
"That's how you know it's real."
She took his hand. Pressed something into his palm.
It was the first blade, the ritual dagger used in the mirror rites.
"The heart is the cipher," she said.
"And it must be opened."
Elias stood at the center of the chamber, blade in hand, facing the mirror that bled like a wound.
He did not stab himself.He did not fall.He did not die.
Instead, he made an incision through the glyph on his chest, as if opening a lock. His blood ran not red, but golden. The chamber lit up in lines, every glyph he had ever known pulsing with meaning.
The mirror flashed.
But it didn't shatter.
It folded.
Reality curled in on itself. Time compacted. And Elias, remained conscious.
He felt every cell unravel, stretch, reorient. He did not black out. He burned awake.
The Watcher screamed.
Or was it laughing?
"This has never been done," it said. "You are not traveling anymore. You are becoming."