Mirror Lake.
It didn't reflect anything.
That was the first thing Pedro noticed. The surface was still, but no sky shimmered on its skin. No trees curved in its waters. No stars blinked in its glass.
It was like staring into a hole.
"This is wrong," Mara muttered beside him.
"It's Envy's domain," Pedro replied, eyes locked on the water. "Mirrors that don't reflect… they steal."
The two crouched among the tall reeds that surrounded the western bank. Across the lake, a dozen figures moved in silence—hooded, robed, masked in green and silver. They carried no torches, yet the lake's surface glowed faintly, lit from beneath by something… alive.
Pedro pulled a brass scope from his coat and peered through.
"The cult's gathering around a broken obelisk."
Mara narrowed her eyes. "What's that symbol on its base?"
Pedro adjusted the scope.
A wheel of seven teeth, devouring a crown.
"Zairan's mark. But more refined." His tone darkened. "That's not a herald's mark. That's the echo of a Monarch's own design."
A symbol embedded with the Monarch of Envy's true signature was found at Mirror Lake.
The use, inscription, or verbalization of the true name is forbidden.
Doing so will result in immediate awareness by the Monarch.
Proceed in silence.
"This isn't a summoning," Pedro said softly. "It's a communion."
"They're trying to speak to him?" Mara's knuckles whitened around her spear.
"Worse. They're asking him to respond."
Pedro adjusted his grip on his exorcist rod. "We're outnumbered. Can't take them head-on. We get in, get the anchor, and destroy it before the ritual finishes."
Mara nodded.
"Let's ruin their party."
They moved through the shadows like ghosts, slipping between crumbling stone statues half-sunken in the lakebed. Some of the statues were holy. Others had been altered—faces carved off, replaced with smooth, mirrored plates. Envy's touch warped everything it could not possess.
At the foot of the obelisk, the cult leader stood—taller than the rest. Robes of dark jade. Mask of pure glass.
"This is him," Pedro whispered. "The Mouthpiece."
He was Zairan's most loyal servant—an orator who once served in the high courts of the Church before vanishing during the Fall. Rumor claimed he had no face beneath his mask, only envy itself.
The Mouthpiece raised both arms.
"Tonight," he declared, voice echoing with unnatural clarity, "we reflect the sins of the world upon the glass—and we shatter it!"
The cultists responded as one, chanting, bending, placing hand mirrors around the lake's edge.
"They're opening a gate," Mara hissed. "A mirror gate. They're trying to let a part of the Monarch through."
Pedro reached into his coat and pulled a single-use relic: a sunburst glyph infused with Saint Silvaria's chainwork. He only had one.
"We use this at the core. Hit the mirror gate when it peaks."
They moved.
Pedro dashed left, weaving between two robed acolytes. With a flick of his wrist, he severed a binding thread, sending one cultist into seizure. Mara moved like a storm behind him, her spear knocking masks loose and breaking bones.
The Mouthpiece turned.
"We are mirrors, fools. You see us only because we let you!"
A pulse of green energy surged outward from the obelisk. Pedro stumbled, ears ringing. Visions flickered in his head—his mother's last scream, the crack of his father's seal breaking, the silence after.
"No," he growled. "You don't get to own that."
He slammed a seal onto the obelisk's base. It flared with golden light—Law of Origin Denial.
The energy snapped. The Mouthpiece staggered, his mask cracking at the edges.
Pedro sprinted to the obelisk's heart—where a mirror had been embedded, pulsing.
The shard of Zairan in his coat glowed violently now—screaming in silence.
"Now, Mara!" he yelled.
She tossed the relic.
Pedro caught it midair and slammed it into the heart of the mirror gate.
"Saint Silvaria, shield this world from what it refuses to forget!"
The relic erupted.
Chains of silver and fire wrapped around the obelisk, the mirror fracturing from the inside out.
The lake screamed.
No water. Just sound. Memory. Rage.
The Mouthpiece's mask shattered, revealing—
Nothing.
Just eyes. Green flame. No skin. No lips. Just hunger.
"You've only delayed the reflection, exorcist."
Pedro pointed his rod.
"Delay's all I need. See you never, creep."
The lake exploded.
When Pedro and Mara awoke, they were on the far bank. The cult was gone. The obelisk was dust. The gate had sealed.
The mirror shard Pedro carried had cracked down the middle.
"He felt that," he whispered.
Mara groaned beside him, bruised but conscious. "Was that… all of them?"
Pedro scanned the lake.
"Not even close. That was one voice. There are seven more. And the eighth…"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Far away, in a ruin where no man had walked in decades, a figure stood before a wall of silent mirrors.
Each one cracked.
Each one pulsing.
The figure ran a hand across their surface.
A whisper echoed.
"Someone said the name. I felt it."
The Monarch stirred.
But did not rise.
Yet.