Chapter 34: Mirror of Fate
Abe'las was not a man, but a convergence. He stood before Daylen as if assembled from the dappled light filtering through the silver leaves, his form shifting between that of an ancient, weathered elf and a shape woven from living root and bark. His eyes held the depth of a forest at midnight.
"The light you carry," the voice resonated, not from a mouth but from the air itself. "It is a seed of something older than your sun. Planted by forces who saw the unraveling of worlds. The Blight you fight is but a single thread fraying from a greater tapestry of decay."
Daylen felt the Orb pulse in response, a warm, threatening ache. "A seed for what?"
"Rebirth. Or damnation. It is a focus, a catalyst. In untrained hands, it is a torch to burn down a village to kill a single rat. In hands that understand… it can mend the hole in the sky you dreamed of. It can silence the song of the abyss." Abe'las gestured with a hand that seemed made of gnarled wood. "But your hands know only the chantry's tight gloves. You clutch a star and call it a candle."
"So teach me," Daylen said, the urgency hot in his throat. "The dream showed me… a war coming. A rebellion, chaos. I can't face that like this. I can't face Flemeth like this."
Abe'las's form solidified into that of the elf, his expression unreadable. "We cannot teach you here. The veil is too thin in this place, the rules of your world too persistent. You must go to a place where time is not a river, but an ocean. Where you can learn without the cost of years you do not have. Where death is not an end, but a lesson."
"That sounds like the Fade."
"It is a cousin to the Fade. A place between what was and what could be. A testing ground of the soul." Abe'las turned and walked towards the still, starlit pool at the heart of the temple. As he approached, the water's surface shimmered, then hardened, becoming a sheet of flawless, silvery glass. A mirror that reflected not Daylen's current form, but a distorted version of himself—taller, wilder, crowned in flame. "Beyond this, you will be stripped to your essence. Your power, your will, your very sense of self will be all you have. You will fall. You will break. You will be unmade a thousand thousand times."
"And if I put myself back together?" Daylen asked, staring at his impossible reflection.
"Then you will return as what you are meant to be. Not a mage. Not a Warden. A truth." Abe'las stepped aside. "The path is through the mirror. There is no other way to master the light before it consumes you."
Daylen approached the mirror. His own breath seemed loud in the humming silence of the temple. He thought of Morrigan, of her fierce, practical faith in him. Of Alistair's uncomplicated loyalty. Of Lothering burning. He thought of the hole in the sky, and the songs of war to come. He exhaled, and stepped forward.
The world inverted.
He felt a tearing, not of flesh, but of context. His armor, his robes, his staff, his blades—all of it was peeled away in a flash of agonizing translucence. He was thrown forward onto rough, grey stone, cold and utterly naked. The air was not air; it was thick, heavy, charged with a particulate energy that scraped his lungs.
He had a second to comprehend the scale.
Everything was massive. The flagstones beneath him were each the size of a village square. The archway he’d stepped through loomed like a mountain range against a bruised, eternal twilight sky. Grasses taller than towers swayed in a distant wind. The sense of diminishment was instantaneous, crushing.
The hoofbeats came from everywhere.
A shockwave through the stone. Then a shadow fell over him, colossal, blocking the strange sky. He looked up.
A warrior, mounted on a beast that defied description, armored in plates of tarnished gold and weathered iron, towered above him. The rider was a giant, his face obscured by a helm fashioned into a grim, emotionless idol. He held a lance that was a dead, silvered tree.
There was no roar, no battle cry. Only the silent, deliberate descent of the lance tip.
Daylen tried to roll. His muscles, honed in a world of normal proportions, responded with frustrating lethargy in this dense, heavy place. He tried to summon a barrier, to pull the heat from the Orb. A spark fizzled at his fingertips, pathetic, snuffed out by the overwhelming pressure of this realm.
The lance point, wide as a bucket, punched through his chest.
The pain was absolute. A sunburst of agony that vaporized thought, memory, self. He felt his ribs explode outward, felt his spine sever, felt the stone beneath him crater with the force. He had a fragment of a second to see the impassive helm of the rider looking down, before the world went grey, then black.
Then, light.
He was kneeling on the same massive flagstone, whole, naked, gasping. The ache of the wound was a ghost-limb memory. The giant rider was gone. The landscape was empty, silent, as if nothing had happened.
He stood on shaking legs. The memory of death was etched into his nerves, a fresh brand. He understood, then. This was the lesson. Death was the curriculum.
He ran. This time, he sensed the vibration sooner. He saw the rider materialize from a shimmer in the air a hundred yards away, the charge beginning instantly. Daylen didn't try to fight. He sprinted for the cover of the monolithic grasses, his heart hammering against his ribs. The lance grazed his back, opening a furrow of fire before he tumbled into the forest of giant blades. He survived for ten minutes, learning the texture of the ground, the way sound moved, before a silent arrow the size of a ballista bolt took him through the neck from an unseen sentinel in the grass.
Death. Light. Return.
He learned. He scavenged. His third life lasted a day. He found a shard of sharpened crystal, a pathetic dagger against the scale of this world, and used it to pierce the ankle of a lesser, dog-sized predator. It bled ichor that burned his skin. He drank from a puddle of frigid water that tasted of metal. He died to the predator’s pack.
He lost count of the deaths. A hundred? A thousand? Time was granular, meaningless. Each resurrection was a fresh start, a blank slate upon which his accumulated knowledge was written in the ink of pain. He learned to move differently. To read the subtle shifts in the oppressive light, to predict the patrols of the colossal, silent guardians. He learned to draw the power here. It was not the Fade. It was something older, denser. He pulled it in, not in delicate threads, but in raw, gulping torrents.
He killed the dog-predators. He fashioned armor from their chitinous hides, bindings for his feet and hands. He found a rusted shortsword, discarded by some long-dead giant, and labored for what felt like years to sharpen it on a vast whetstone ridge.
He died to the mounted knight again, and again, and again. But each time, he lasted longer. He learned the rhythm of the charge, the slight tilt of the lance that signaled a thrust. On the five-hundredth death, or the five-thousandth, he rolled inside the thrust, and his scavenged shortsword, fueled by a torrent of raw energy he now channeled instinctively, found a seam in the rider's greave. The giant staggered. Daylen did not survive the backhand swipe that followed, but he had drawn first blood.
The victories began, small and hard-won.
He felled a lesser guardian, a stone golem that moved with grinding slowness. From its core he took a gem that glowed with inner warmth. He learned to forge. He used the focused heat of the Orb, now a constant companion, a sun in his chest, to meld scavenged metal. His first real breastplate was crude, heavy, but it turned a blade that would have cleaved him in two.
He grew. Not just in skill, but in body. The very substance of this place, the air he breathed, the food he wrested from its monstrous flora and fauna, changed him. His frame, already strong, expanded, tendons and muscles weaving themselves into denser, harder patterns. He gained inches, then feet. His shaved head was a memory; his hair grew, a wild, dark cascade that he tied back with strips of leather, then ignored as it flowed down his back.
Centuries passed in a blur of combat, death, and refinement.
He stood now before the Stormguard, a titan that called down lightning with the sweep of its axe. He had died to this one a thousand times. This time, he did not bother with a barrier. As the bolt arced down, he opened his mouth and inhaled it. The energy cooked through him, a sublime pain he had learned to cherish, and he redirected it down his arm and into the spear he now carried—a weapon he had taken from a ghostly, sorrowful warden of these lands. He threw. The spear, wreathed in stolen lightning, pierced the Stormguard’s eye and exploded within its skull.
He claimed the titan’s greaves, folding their storm-forged metal into his own.
He faced Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Her speed was a mockery of physics, a dance of flowing water and shattered stone. She killed him four thousand times. On the four thousand and first, he did not block her flowing combos. He stepped into them. He let her prosthetic blade pierce through his abdomen, and as she was embedded in him, he wrapped his now massive hands around her arms and unleashed the Crimson Orb’s energy not outward, but inward, a collapsing star that consumed her rot and her glory in a silent, blue-white inferno.
From her he took nothing but the lesson: absolute offense is a fragility.
Radahn, the Star-Scourge. Their battle shook the dead plains for what felt like a decade of continuous, grinding warfare. Gravity magic crushed him into paste. Meteor showers scoured him from existence. His great swords cleaved continents in Daylen’s flesh. Daylen learned. He learned to bend gravity himself, to make himself a void that Radahn’s meteors could not escape. He learned to wear the starlight as a cloak. In the end, he did not use the spear. He shape-shifted, a skill learned from a serpent-god he had consumed ages past, and as a colossal viper of living flame and shadow, he enveloped the falling star, and squeezed until gravity itself died.
Godfrey, the first Elden Lord, met him in a coliseum of bones. This was a battle of pure, unadulterated might. No tricks, no elemental supremacy. Just force against force. They broke each other’s bodies so many times the ground was paved with their shattered remains. Daylen’s spear, now named Divinity’s End, finally found the space between a roar and a breath, and opened Godfrey’s throat. The Lion he wrestled from the Lord’s back, he strangled with his bare hands, its dying roars feeding the fire in his soul.
He was beyond mastery now. Magic was not cast; it simply was. A thought hardened the air around him. A glance could ignite the sky. The Crimson Orb was no longer separate; it was the nucleus of every cell in his body. He was the star.
He found the armor in the heart of a dead god’s citadel. Mesmer the Impaler’s legacy. Plates of crimson adamantine etched with gold, forged from the blood of fallen constellations. It fit him as if grown for his form. The spear, Divinity’s End, he reforged in the heart of a neutron flame until it was a shaft of condensed void, its edge a line of broken physics.
He stood seven feet tall, his body a topography of lean, impossible muscle, a swimmer’s grace honed by millennia of violence. His hair was a black river down to the back of his knees. His eyes, when he bothered to look in a reflection, held no pupil, only a shifting nebula of gold and crimson.
He had lived a hundred centuries. He had died tens of thousands of deaths. He had gutted demigods and consumed concepts.
He remembered Morrigan. Her smile, sharp and real. He remembered Alistair’s clumsy jokes. He remembered the Blight. The hole in the sky. Flemeth.
They felt like echoes from a childhood story. Small. Manageable.
He walked back across the timeless lands, a god walking through his garden. Nothing challenged him. The very earth quieted under his step. He found the mirror, or rather, the place where it waited, a vertical pool of quicksilver hanging in the air of a forgotten crypt.
He did not hesitate. He did not feel triumph. He felt only the quiet certainty of a tool honed to its final edge. He stepped through.
The world shifted, scaled back down, snapped into the familiar proportions of the Temple of Mythal. The air was thin, quiet, achingly simple.
Abe'las stood there, unchanged. His ancient eyes widened, a ripple of true shock moving through his composed features. The sentinel trees of the temple seemed to lean away from Daylen, whispering in a rustle of silver leaves.
Daylen looked down at his own hands, sheathed in the gauntlets of a god-killer. He flexed his fingers. The Fade around this place trembled in response. He looked at Abe'las.
"Okay," Daylen said, his voice a low rumble like continental plates shifting. It was the first word he had spoken in millennia. It felt strange in his mouth. "Now. Where were we?"