Chapter 10: The mirror shatters the moment Hana's fingers brush its surface, flooding her mind with visions - her mother dying in childbirth, Kage's demonic form ripping through soldiers, and her own hands burning blue as she stands over Emperor Kang's corpse.
The mountain was a silent sentinel of misery. It took two days and two nights, a grueling, uphill slog through increasingly wild terrain. Sleep was a series of shallow dips into restless blackness, punctuated by the call of strange birds and the whisper of things moving through the underbrush. Hana kept the fox close, a warm, living anchor in the alien chill. The imperial guards, scarlet and proud in the palace courtyard, became twitchy scarecrows as the forest closed in. Their bravado leached away with every mile.
They fell one by one. Not in battles, but in disappearances. The rearguard soldier who went to relieve himself and never returned, his scream cut short by a sound like tearing canvas. The scout who took a side path was found later, his armor unblemished but his face frozen in an expression of such abject horror his eyes had hemorrhaged. They found no body. Then another guard, his throat opened by claws that left ichor-smelling streaks on his steel gorget. The forest, once quiet, now seemed to watch them with predatory patience.
The remaining guards tightened their formation, hands white-knuckled on their swords. They didn’t look at Hana, Kenji, or Kage anymore; they looked at the shadows between the trees. The silence grew textured, heavy with the breath of unseen things.
On the second day, they found the ruins. A torii gate leaned precariously, half-swallowed by the gnarled roots of a massive, ancient pine. Beyond it, the remnants of a shrine crouched under a canopy of moss and shadow. Stone steps led into a dark, open maw where the main hall had partially collapsed.
“The mirror is here,” Kage said, his voice barely a murmur. “The air… it reeks of stolen time.” He spoke not to the captain, but to Kenji.
The captain, his face pale, ordered four men inside. They didn’t come out. There was a series of wet, percussive thumps, a brief clash of steel, then an echoing silence that was worse than any noise.
Kage unsheathed his own blade, a simpler, darker weapon than the ornate imperial swords. “We go in together. Or we die separately.”
He went first. Kenji, with a look of profound resignation, followed, gesturing for Hana to stay behind him. The fox slipped in at her heels, a whisper of orange fur.
Inside was a cavern of crumbling wood and stone. The roof was a lattice of broken beams against the grey sky. In the center of the space, on a stone pedestal draped in rotted silk, lay the artifact.
It was not a mirror as Hana understood it. It was a collection of jagged, reflective shards, large and small, held together in a fractured, circular frame by some unseen force. They didn’t reflect the ruined room. They each held a different, shifting scene, flickering like deranged television screens. One showed a battlefield in driving snow, another a still pond under a starless sky, another the interior of a room she vaguely recognized—the Obsidian Hall, but empty.
A low thrumming filled the air, a frequency that vibrated in her teeth.
“Don’t look directly at it,” Kage warned, his jaw tight.
But she had to. The Emperor’s prize. Their ticket… to what? She wasn’t sure anymore. She took a step closer.
A larger shard, directly at the center, seemed to snag her gaze. Its surface shimmered and resolved. She saw her own face, but older, worn with grief and scarred by frostbite, standing in a blizzard. Then the image shifted—not to a future, but a past. She was sure of it. A woman with her face, her eyes, wearing the crimson robe from the feast, was screaming in the same snow, blood spreading from her side to stain the white a shocking crimson. Her lips formed a name, over and over. Kenji.
And then she saw him.
Kage. In that same blizzard, a younger, fiercer version, his face contorted in agony as a blade of silvered ice sliced across his abdomen. The spray of blood was black in the vision. He fell.
Was it the past? The thought was a desperate claw in her mind.It felt real. It felt immediate. It felt like it was happening again, right now.
The mirror shard swelled, consuming her vision. It wasn’t one image now, but a torrent. A kaleidoscope of terrors: Kage dying in a dozen different ways. Her father cut down by shadowy forms. Herself, kneeling before Emperor Kang, her spirit broken. Herself, holding a newborn with tiny, dark horns. The visions came faster, blending, a cacophony of possible endings. And through them all, her mother’s ghost, a silent figure in the periphery of every reflection, her mouth open in a soundless, endless scream. Her mother’s hands pressed against the glass from the other side, pleading. Her lips formed two words, over and over: Let go.
The silent scream filled Hana’s skull. The plea to let go wasn’t about the mirror; it was about him. About the path. About the future drenched in blood and snow.
Hana’s breath tore from her lungs. A raw, primal sound ripped from her throat—not a scream, but a wordless shatter of grief and terror. She was shaking, her hands flying to her head as if to contain the onslaught. The world narrowed to the fractured glass and the silent, screaming face of the mother she’d never known. Sobs wracked her, violent and uncontrollable. She couldn’t speak. She could only point with a trembling finger, tears and saliva mingling on her chin, her body shuddering as if electrocuted.
“Hana!” Kenji’s voice was distant, distorted.
She saw Kage move, his face stark with alarm. He snatched a strip of cloth from the rotted bunting on the pedestal, wrapping it around his hand as he reached not for her, but past her. With a swift, decisive motion, he seized the entire, shuddering mirror, using the cloth as a barrier. The moment his wrapped fingers closed around the frame, the visions in the room snapped off. The thrumming ceased.
The sudden silence was deafening. Hana crumpled, the support of the horror gone, leaving only the hollow, shaking aftermath. Her sobs were quiet now, wretched hiccups of sound. She couldn’t form a word. She saw her father’s terrified face, saw Kage looking from the wrapped mirror to her with an unreadable, intense expression.
Then darkness, soft and total, took her.
She dreamed of a corridor made of mirrors. Every reflection showed a different version of herself: as a child, as an old woman, as a warrior, as a ghost. And in every one, just behind her shoulder, was her mother. Not screaming now. But her eyes were caverns of sorrow. She mouthed the same words, slow and deliberate: Stay away from Lord Kage.
Hana tried to ask why. In the dream, her voice was the tinkle of breaking glass. The mirror-mother just shook her head, a single tear of silvered mercury tracing a path down her cheek.
She woke to the smell of canvas and woodsmoke, and the solid, warm weight of the fox curled against her stomach. She was in a tent. Her palms throbbed. She lifted her hands, turning them over in the dim light filtering through the fabric. Four precise, crimson crescents were gouged into each palm, the blood dried to a flaky rust-brown. She had clawed into her own skin.
The memory of the mirror—the visions, the scream trapped in her throat—flooded back, a cold tide of nausea. But overlying it was a more immediate, visceral worry, a hook in her gut. Kage.Slashed. Bleeding black in the snow.
Was he alive?
The thought propelled her up. She was still in her nightclothes—one of Kenji’s old, soft cotton shirts that fell to her mid-thigh. It hadn’t mattered in the modern world. It didn’t matter now. She had to see him. Had to know the vision wasn’t a premonition of something that had just happened.
She pushed out of the tent. The camp was quiet, just a few remaining imperial guards—only five were left—huddled around a low fire, their faces haunted. Her father’s tent was closed. She saw another, slightly larger tent set apart.
Without thinking, driven by the residue of panic, she strode to it and threw the flap open.
“Hey, are you—“
Kage stood shirtless in the center of the space, caught in the act of pulling on a clean undershirt of dark linen. The lamplight fell across the planes of his torso, and there, livid and stark against his skin, was a scar. A long, diagonal slash from his lower ribs across his abdomen. Old, but vicious. Exactly as she had seen it in the mirror.
A flicker of movement behind him—a thick, black shadow against the tent wall that seemed to coil and vanish in the blink of an eye. She dismissed it; a trick of the lamp, her frayed nerves.
His head snapped toward her, the half-donned shirt still in his hands. His eyes, wide for a split second, then narrowed into blades of anger. “What are you doing here?”
Hana froze. The directness of the question, the bare skin, the intimate space—it all crashed into her at once. “I… you… I saw…” She stammered, her gaze locked on the scar. Proof. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. From the ruins.”
She took a slow step back. Only then did she register his own gaze. It wasn’t on her face. It traveled down, taking in the bare legs below the hem of the shirt, the way the thin cotton clung, the complete and utter inappropriateness of her appearance. His jaw tightened, a muscle feathering in his cheek.
Dammit.The shirt. Just the shirt. Of course.
In his world, this wasn’t casual. This was either insanity or an invitation. And given her performance at the feast, he’d likely assume the latter.
Her face burned. “I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” She backed out of the opening, fumbling with the flap.
“Hana.” His voice stopped her, low and thick.
She paused, a sliver of his furious face visible.
“Leave,” he said, the word final as a tomb door closing.She fled.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird. She rounded the corner of a supply pile and collided solidly with her father.
“Whoa. Easy.” Kenji’s hands steadied her. He took one look at her flushed face, her state of undress, and the direction she’d come from. His own face hardened into granite.
“Hana. What were you doing?”
“Nothing. I just… went to check on him. After the mirror, I…”
“You went to his tent. Like this.” It wasn’t a question.
“It’s not what you think! I saw something, in the mirror.He was hurt. I had to know—”
“I don’t care what you saw,” Kenji interrupted, his voice low and urgent. He gripped her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. His eyes were dark with a fear she hadn’t seen since they first arrived in this world. “You stay away from him. Do you understand me? Stay away. Whatever you think you saw, whatever you feel… it’s a path lined with thorns. It ends in blood. His blood, and likely yours.”
“You know something,” she breathed, the chill from the dream returning. “About the scar. About my mother’s warning.”
Kenji’s expression closed off completely, the shutters coming down. “I know enough. And I am telling you, as your father, to heed it. For once in your life, Hana, just listen. Don’t chase this shadow.”
He released her and walked away toward the fire, leaving her standing alone in the cold mountain dark, the ghost of a scream still echoing in her mind, and the searing image of Kage’s scar—and his furious, interpreting eyes—burned into her sight.