Refraction Point

The sky bled rust.

Sheets of metallic rain fell sideways across the blasted plains of the Cindertide Verge, each drop clattering like nails against their filtered masks. The ground was scarred with twisted veins of scorched memory stone—remnants of recursion threads long since burned.

Zayn tightened his cloak around him, watching the shard in his hand pulse with amber light. Laziel's fragment stirred within it, guiding them forward with steady resonance.

"Tell me again why we're walking into a place that literally corrodes time?" Patch called out through the comm static.

"Because the shard says the next thread is here," Althea replied, shielding her Karnyx from the slicing rain.

Fry adjusted her readings, eyes narrowing. "The distortion's strong enough to collapse minor echoes. We're inside a recursion fracture."

"Translation?" Patch asked.

"Reality might not follow the rules in this zone."

They crested a ridge—and saw it.

An obsidian tower rising from a crater of twisted glass. The structure pulsed faintly beneath the downpour, its walls crawling with inscriptions that flickered in languages none of them recognized.

The shard glowed brighter.

Zayn whispered, "It's there."

They descended cautiously, every step through the crater greeted by whispers—fragments of past thoughts caught in recursion decay. Laughter. Screams. A child humming a lullaby that none of them could quite remember.

The tower door opened at their approach, folding apart like paper burnt in reverse.

Inside was silence. No echoes. No reflections.

Only a single pedestal at the chamber's heart, upon which floated a second thread.

It shimmered blue, cold, flickering.

And surrounding it—eight mirrors. Each one showed not reflections, but versions of themselves—broken, altered, older, younger, corrupted.

"...Zayn," Althea murmured. "These are recursion variants."

Zayn stepped forward, heart pounding. "What are they doing here?"

A low voice answered, soft and crystalline.

"They keep me company."

The thread pulsed—and formed.

A girl, maybe sixteen. Silver hair, motionless. Her eyes were closed, but her lips moved.

"I couldn't forget them. So I remembered every version instead."

"Who are you?" Zayn asked.

"They called me Mira. Designation: Echo-Veil."

Fry whispered, "An empathic echo collector... She remembers other Zayns. Other timelines."

Patch tilted his head. "Great. A multiversal scrapbook. What happens if she remembers the wrong one?"

The mirrors began to shimmer. One showed Zayn screaming, hands covered in blood. Another showed him alone in a void. Another showed him—smiling—beside a stranger.

Mira opened her eyes.

"You are not any of them."

Zayn stepped closer. "I know. But I'm here now."

The shard responded to her presence. It glowed blue, Laziel's light pulsing in rhythm.

Mira looked at it. "You carry the others."

"Yes," Zayn said. "We're here to find the rest. To stop what's coming."

"Then you must carry me, too."

She placed a hand on the shard—and her thread flowed inward.

The mirrors shattered. One by one.

And silence returned.

The shard now pulsed with two lights.

Althea steadied herself. "That's two down. Four to go."

Patch sighed. "And a thousand creepy memories left to surf."

Zayn turned to the others, the tower door reopening behind him.

"We keep going."