he morning after the mirror shattered, silence settled over the house like a second skin. It wasn't peace. It was stillness—a breath held too long, waiting for a scream that might never come.
Lucien sat alone in the spell chamber, where the last shards of the broken mirror still clung to the floor. Someone had tried to clean—Rhydian, likely, by the neat sweep lines on the stone—but a few silver slivers remained embedded in the chalk circle. They glinted when the light hit them just right.
He touched one absentmindedly, letting it press into his fingertip until a thin line of blood appeared. He didn't feel it. There was something else pressing at the edges of his thoughts—distant but insistent. Like a melody remembered from a dream, or a voice half-heard underwater.
Lucien stood. The light in the room bent slightly as he moved.
In the hallway, nothing looked changed. The walls were familiar, the air warm with morning light. But as he passed a mirror near the stairs—one of the smaller ones no one had touched since the ritual—it warped. For a heartbeat, his reflection showed him the wrong expression.
Not fear. Not confusion.
A smile.
Not his.
Lucien backed away.
When he blinked, the mirror was still. Dusty. Normal. But the back of his neck prickled.
Downstairs, Kai and Rhydian sat at the long table in the sunlit kitchen. Caelan was outside playing with a floating illusion orb, too far to hear. Kai looked up immediately when Lucien entered.
"You're up," he said, trying to sound casual. "How do you feel?" Lucien hesitated. "...Unreal." Kai closed the journal he'd been reading. It wasn't the old one—not A.M.'s. Just a blank leatherbound volume with only a few notes inside. But Rhydian's expression was sharp.
"You were unconscious for fourteen hours," Rhydian said. "And when you woke, you didn't speak. Not for almost ten minutes." Lucien didn't answer that. He stepped to the window, watching the orchard.
The trees outside swayed gently. But the sky above them had changed.
He could see it now.
The spiral was faint, barely more than a suggestion of movement—clouds circling nothing. But it was there.
Lucien whispered, "It's bleeding through."
Kai stood. "What do you mean?"
"The city. The stars. The Eye. It's not behind a wall anymore. It's beside us. Layered. We're brushing up against it, moment by moment."
Rhydian crossed his arms. "Then we need to reinforce every barrier we have."
"It won't hold," Lucien said simply. "This isn't a breach—it's an alignment."
Kai moved closer. "What happened in the mirror? What really happened?"
Lucien swallowed hard. "I saw myself. Scarred. Older. He spoke like he knew what I was about to choose. Like he had already chosen it."
"And the sigil?" Rhydian asked.
Lucien turned to face them both. "It isn't a key. It's a wound. And I think I'm the blade that opened it."
Later that day, Lucien found the second journal.
It wasn't hidden, exactly. Just placed.
Tucked beneath the bed in the room that had once belonged to A.M., now used for storage. Dust coated everything except the journal itself. It was newer than the first. Bound in dark leather. No name on the cover. Inside, the handwriting was unmistakably his own. But… not quite.
It slanted differently. Rushed. Confident, but brittle. As if written in urgency.
Lucien sat on the edge of the bed and opened the first page.
Day 17
The Eye opens faster each time I look. The spiral tightens. I see the future collapsing in reverse.
Kai still smiles in the mornings. Rhydian still argues with me like I haven't already failed him. Caelan dreams of birds that never existed.
I envy them.
But I am too far in. The door is half-closed and I am the hinge.
Lucien turned the page. And the next. Every entry was from another version of himself. Another world, perhaps. Another loop.
The other Lucien wrote of failed rituals, cities devoured by light, and a spiral that devoured even time.
One passage stopped him cold.
Day 43
The scar is growing. It started as a dream, then a reflection. Now it's on my skin. I can't remember when it appeared—but it burns when I lie.
I think it is how the Eye marks its pieces.
I no longer bleed red when I dream. I bleed starlight.
Lucien touched his jaw. The skin was smooth.
He checked the mirror in the hall again.
There it was.
A faint, almost imperceptible line—running from his left jaw to just below his ear.
That night, thunder rolled low in the distance.
The orchard was quiet.
Kai sat with Lucien in the study, reading the old journal while Lucien translated pieces from the second one into a new notebook. Their silence was warm, if tense.
But when Rhydian came in, he was carrying something Lucien hadn't seen in weeks.
The original Starseer's Eye sigil, drawn in salt and pressed rose ash, from the earliest days of their investigation.
Only now, the shape had changed slightly.
The spiral was still central. But branching from it were veins. Tendrils. Almost like roots.
Rhydian laid it on the table.
"It changed overnight. Without anyone touching it."
Kai leaned forward. "Or something through someone touched it."
Lucien didn't speak. He stared at the altered sigil, heart pounding.
It looked like it was growing.
The storm passed in the early hours of morning.
It didn't rage—just moved, slow and deliberate, like something watching through the rain. When dawn finally broke, it was soft, gold-tinted, the way it used to be before any of them had ever heard the word Starseer.
Lucien stood at the edge of the orchard in his nightclothes, barefoot in the dew-damp grass. He hadn't meant to come out. He'd simply… woken there.
The spiral was in the sky again, clear now—pale against the dawn like frost in glass. It wasn't moving. It wasn't pulsing. It was simply present. No longer bleeding, no longer growing. Just watching.
Behind him, Kai's voice was quiet. "You saw him again, didn't you?"
Lucien nodded once. "He was waiting. In the mirror."
He turned.
Kai stood with a blanket over his shoulders and a mug of tea in his hands, face still soft from sleep. The warmth of him cut through the chill of morning air.
Lucien stepped closer.
"I spoke to him. The other me. The one with the scar."
Kai's gaze was steady. "What did he say?"
Lucien looked back at the sky. "That this is where it ends. Here. Not with fire. Not with collapse. Just… choice."
That day, they returned to the spell chamber for the final time.
Rhydian prepared the circle, marking it with a stabilized version of the sigil. Caelan added small magical anchors—delicate runes made of string and silver dust, shaped like spirals unwinding.
Lucien placed the two journals—A.M.'s and the second Lucien's—within the boundary. Then he stepped in alone.
"I'm not going to trap it," he told them. "Not again. Not like A.M. did. That's why it bled—because something was still alive behind the seal."
Kai's voice was steady, but laced with quiet fear. "Then what will you do?"
Lucien looked up at the empty mirror across the room.
"I'm going to speak to it. For real this time. Not as a vessel. As myself."
Rhydian's jaw clenched, but he didn't stop him. Not this time.
The ritual began.
The light in the chamber dimmed without anyone touching it. Dust lifted off the stones in swirling spirals. The mirror, long dormant, pulsed once—then opened like a door made of water.
Lucien stepped forward.
And there—on the other side—was the scarred version of himself.
They looked at each other for a long moment. Neither flinched.
"You made it," the other Lucien said.
"I did," Lucien answered. "But I'm not becoming you."
Scarred Lucien smiled. "No. I don't think you are."
Behind the reflection stood the spiral—no longer roiling chaos, but a massive, sleeping eye, calm and ancient.
Lucien took a breath and reached out—not to seal, not to control, but to understand.
He saw everything. Every path he might've taken. Every version of himself that had fallen, or burned, or been consumed. He saw the one who failed. The one who ran. The one who surrendered to the Eye completely.
And he saw this path. The only one where he chose to end the cycle.
Lucien spoke aloud.
"I let go."
The mirror shattered for the last time.
There was no scream. No wind. No collapse.
Just silence.
And then, light.
When Lucien opened his eyes again, he was back in the circle. The journals were gone. The sigil had crumbled into dust. The wound was closed—not hidden, not locked, but healed.
He stood, heart racing.
Kai ran to him, wrapping him in a wordless embrace. Rhydian followed, his expression full of unspoken relief.
And Caelan—bright-eyed, still holding a little charm of stars in his hand—smiled like the sky had never held a spiral at all.
✦ One Month Later ✦
The house had changed.
Not in layout or structure. But in feel.
There were no more flickers in the mirrors. No spiral clouds overhead. No forgotten pages. Just warmth. Books. Laughter. Rain tapping against the windows without meaning anything more.
Lucien had taken to gardening with Caelan in the afternoons, helping him grow a new herb garden by the eastern wall. The boy had a gift—not just for magic, but for listening. The quiet kind that made Lucien feel steadier.
Rhydian taught Caelan sword forms again, less for battle now and more like dance. The scars on Rhydian's fingers had faded. So had the tension in his shoulders.
Kai wrote again. Poems, mostly. Lucien found scraps tucked into books and under teacups.
They never spoke about the Eye anymore.
They didn't have to.
One evening, as fireflies rose from the fields and the windows glowed with warm lamplight, Lucien stood at the back door and watched the sky.
No spiral. Just stars.
Kai joined him, slipping a hand into his. "It's beautiful tonight."
Lucien nodded. "Do you think we'll ever forget it? The Eye. The other versions of us."
Kai leaned against his shoulder. "I hope not. I want to remember how close we came to losing everything. Because then I'll never take this for granted."
Lucien smiled, softly. "Me neither."
Behind them, Rhydian called for dinner. Caelan's laughter echoed down the hall.
Lucien turned toward it, toward home.
The spiral was gone. The mirror was closed. The journals, dust.
But the life that remained was real.
And that, finally, was enough.