Smoke thinned into threads as they left the ruined slope behind. The path wound toward the charred chapel that had once crowned the hill, a shell of stone blackened but still standing. The tether between them hummed like a pulse under skin, tugging with a rhythm neither could ignore.

Inside, air hung heavy with resin and wet ash. Myrren caught the faint tang of mint-white vapor, too clean for fire, too deliberate. She crouched, brushing soot aside with her sleeve. Beneath the debris, a spiral sigil glimmered faintly, etched into the flagstone with something metallic and dark.

“Another mark,” she murmured.

Corven’s gaze followed the pattern. “No. A trap.”

Before she could ask, the tether pulled hard enough to wrench her to her knees. The spiral flared with pale light, lines of onyx dust igniting in concentric rings. Her lungs locked. The air smelled of frostmint and copper, the scent of half-remembered experiments.

Corven lunged, grabbing her shoulders and dragging her back. The moment his hand met hers, the light burst outward, silver and black at once, tether and spiral colliding. The force threw them both against the wall.

“Myrren!” His voice broke and vanished.

She blinked through the haze. The sigil’s glow was dying, but its echo pulsed inside her skull. Corven knelt beside her, breathing unevenly, his shadows trembling like wounded things. Then his eyes rolled back.

“Corven!” She caught him before he hit the floor, his weight sinking against her. The tether still glowed, a burning line between their wrists, tightening with each heartbeat.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. “You cannot fade now.”

The air shimmered. Memory overlaid the present: a room of flasks, the same spiral drawn in gold chalk, a voice calling his name, not hers, yet hers all the same.

“Corven, come back to me,” she breathed, the words spilling out without thought. The syllables felt borrowed, like an echo from a life she had never lived.

The tether pulsed once more, violent and blinding, and the floor swallowed the light.

Silence rushed in. Corven lay motionless, shadows collapsed into stillness. The spiral had gone dark, but Myrren’s wrist still burned as if his heartbeat were trapped beneath her skin.

“Saints, no, no, no.” Myrren pressed her fingers to his throat. A pulse answered, weak, irregular but the tether still burned, its heat winding through her veins like fever. The scent of the trap clung to everything: mint resin, ash, and something darker that tasted of iron and memory.

Footsteps pounded up the chapel stairs. “Myrren!”

Ori burst through the half-fallen doorway, skirts torn, hair wild with soot. She froze at the sight: Corven sprawled against the stone, Myrren’s hands red with dust and blood. “What in all the saints’ names happened?”

“Spiral trap,” Myrren rasped. “It triggered when we crossed it.”

Ori dropped to her knees beside them, already pulling a bundle of cloth from her belt. “Do not talk. Help me roll him.” She snapped open the bundle: vials of frostmint oil, crushed rue, thin slices of gingerroot bound in twine. “If he is breathing shallowly, the mint will bite him awake.”

Myrren nodded numbly. Together they lifted Corven’s head. Ori tore the cork from a vial and waved the pungent scent beneath his nose. The air burned sharp enough to sting Myrren’s eyes. Corven flinched, coughed once, then gasped, eyes fluttering open.

“Good,” Ori breathed. “Come back, shadow lord. Do not make me drag you from death by the ear.”

Corven tried to rise, failed, and leaned back against the wall. His shadows stirred faintly, curling around his fingers like smoke seeking direction. “You should not have touched it,” he murmured, voice rough. “That sigil was meant to pull us both.”

Myrren swallowed. “Then why did it stop?”

He looked at her wrist, where the tether had burned silver into skin. “Because something else intervened.” His gaze dropped to the flagstone between them.

Half-buried in ash, a shard of onyx glinted, still warm. Myrren reached for it, hesitated. The moment her fingers brushed the edge, heat flooded her palm like heartbeat answering heartbeat. Corven’s eyes widened in recognition, then shuttered.

“You know what this is,” she said.

“It is proof,” he answered too quickly. A muscle jumped in his jaw; his shadows twitched, betraying the lie. “And a curse. Hide it before anyone sees.”

“Who would..”

Ori cut in sharply. “Anyone who wants your head, that is who. If the Queen hears you were found over a ruin full of onyx dust and an unconscious noble, you will both hang for treason.” She shoved a strip of linen into Myrren’s hand. “Wrap it. Now.”

Myrren obeyed, binding the shard and slipping it into her satchel. The tether between her and Corven pulsed faintly, less pain now, more pull, like a question she could not answer.

Corven’s breathing steadied, though his face had gone pale as moonlight. “They used onyx to amplify it,” he said quietly. “The trap was not meant to kill. It was meant to remind.”

“Remind us of what?”

He met her eyes, tired and resolute. “That we have done this before.”

The words sank like lead. The air smelled of frostmint and dread. Myrren wanted to deny it, but the phrase she had whispered still echoed in her mind, foreign yet familiar, as if borrowed from another lifetime.

Outside, faint voices carried up the hill, guards or nobles, calling her name. Ori’s face blanched. “We have to move. If they see this mess..”

Corven struggled to his feet, shadows gathering protectively around them. “Too late,” he murmured. The tether gave a small, warning twitch, and somewhere below, a bell began to ring.

The bell’s echo faded as they stumbled into the side antechamber, a place once used for rites, now half collapsed. Moonlight cut through a shattered window, painting spirals of dust across the walls.

Ori barred the door with a broken beam. “They will search the chapel first. We have minutes, maybe less.”

Corven leaned against the wall, breathing shallow, his skin still gray. The tether between them flickered dimly, no longer burning, only pulsing, two heartbeats out of sync. Myrren knelt beside him, wiping the ash from his cheek with trembling fingers.

“Do not move,” she said softly. “Your pulse is unsteady.”

He managed a faint smile. “It rarely is, around you.”

The laugh that escaped her was brittle. “You think humor will keep you alive?”

“It has kept me from madness so far.”

The retort faded as her gaze drifted to the mirror leaning against the far wall, its frame charred, silvered surface fractured into veins of light and shadow. It must have belonged to the chapel’s seers once. Now it merely reflected ruin.

She rose, drawn to it. Her reflection moved through smoke, eyes hollowed by exhaustion, hair streaked with soot. Behind her, Corven’s form was a silhouette. But as she stepped closer, the image shifted.

The soot vanished from the reflection. Her hair darkened, coiled differently. The face that looked back was not hers, it’s older, sharper. Cordelia’s.

Myrren froze. The reflection tilted its head, perfectly in time with her heartbeat. No sound, only the faint whisper of breath that was not hers. The tether flared once, as if recognizing the mirror’s memory.

“Myrren?” Ori’s voice wavered behind her.

She could not answer. The other woman in the glass raised a hand, the movement delicate and deliberate, and for a heartbeat, Myrren’s own arm refused to follow.

Cordelia’s lips moved, though no sound reached the air. Myrren caught only fragments: burn, remember, rewrite. The silvering rippled, swallowing light like ink on water.

Corven stirred, sensing it even half-conscious. “Do not look at it,” he rasped. “Mirrors hold the oldest loops.”

Too late.

The glass shimmered. For an instant, she saw three layers: herself, Cordelia, and a third shadow between them, faceless but watching. The spiral symbol bloomed across the mirror’s surface, glowing faintly before sinking back into silver.

Myrren staggered away, pulse racing, bile sharp on her tongue. “She was looking at me.”

Ori gripped her arm, terrified. “Who?”

The mirror quieted, only her own reflection remaining, pale, shaking, streaked with ash. Yet the scent in the air had changed. Not smoke, not resin. Honeyroot.

Her childhood failure. Cordelia’s last formula.

And from the glass came the faintest echo, soft enough to be imagined: You will finish what she began.

The tether tightened once, sharply, then went still.

Outside, the bell tolled again, three times, slow and final.

Myrren’s breath hitched. She looked back at the mirror. The reflection smiled with someone else’s mouth and lifted a hand that was not hers.