They weren't summoned. They were expected.
The message was left not on scrolls or carved into sigilstone, but spoken in whispers through the walls. Dominion did not give instructions. Dominion gave challenges disguised as invitations.
By the time Nyra, Riven, Seraph, and Voss reached the chamber, the air had already changed. The temperature had dropped. Magic clung to the stone, thick as rot.
Before them stood an obsidian arch etched in mirrored runes that shifted whenever looked at directly. No door. Just shadow.
A Dominion operator appeared without a sound—hooded, faceless, a construct.
"You are to enter the ruin. It is not real. But what you feel will be. The ruin is built from you. Everything you fear. Everything you deny."
No further explanation. No instructor oversight. No reassurance.
Just a final warning:
"Each of you will carry a blade. It is yours—until it turns on you. Misuse it… and the simulation will feed on what you hide."
The blades appeared in flashes of silver light—one for each of them.
Nyra's felt cold, even in her hand. Her fingers twitched the moment it touched her skin. Like something inside it recognized her.
Riven rolled his shoulders with an exaggerated sigh. "Well. Nothing screams team-building like psychological bloodsport."
"Keep laughing," Seraph murmured. "The simulation might think you're ready."
But it wasn't Seraph who dominated her voice today.
Nyx surfaced—slicing in with her presence like a blade dipped in perfume. Her eyes glinted beneath Seraph's face.
"Let it come," Nyx purred. "I've been bored."
Voss remained near the back, arms crossed, eyes scanning every surface of the chamber as if expecting it to betray them.
Nyra caught it. The way his fingers wouldn't stop twitching. The faintest tremble in his magic.
He was too quiet.
Seraph stood centered, serene—but Nyra saw the tension in her jaw. Riven moved casually, but his hands never left his weapons. Nyx radiated anticipation, barely contained.
And Nyra?
She heard it.
A whisper inside her skull. No words. Just pressure.
Something was waiting for her. Specifically her.
They stepped forward.
And the arch swallowed them.
The simulation unfolded.
The ground became cracked temple stone, bleeding into rotted battlefield mud. Scattered bones and half-remembered buildings twisted between time periods. Architecture defied logic—one corner a childhood cell, the next a royal hallway half-consumed by flame.
This was no single memory.
This was a collection of wounds.
"Look familiar?" Riven muttered as he stepped onto a floor that reformed into the bloodstained path of a noble's estate.
"Too familiar," Voss murmured, still scanning.
"Don't trust what you see," Seraph added. "It's reading us."
And then the environment shifted.
The temple cracked. A storm of whispers echoed through the ruins. Each of them heard something different:
— For Voss: Nyra's voice screaming in pain. — For Riven: a laugh, soft and cruel, that hadn't existed since the night his sister died. — For Seraph: Nyx sobbing—something Seraph had never once heard. — For Nyra: her mother singing a lullaby, only the lyrics were wrong.
Nyra staggered.
Her blade pulsed.
The edge shimmered with a sigil that hadn't been there before. The moment she tightened her grip, the whisper inside her became a heartbeat.
Something inside the simulation responded to her.
Not an illusion. Not a fear.
A presence.
"You feel it too," Voss whispered, stepping closer.
Nyra nodded. Her voice was low. "This wasn't made by Dominion alone."
And still, they stepped deeper into the echo.
Through doors that should not open.
But now, would never close again.
The simulation did not begin with a flash.
It breathed.
The air collapsed around them like lungs tightening—then exhaled, dragging each of them into a separate corner of hell.
Fog. Thick and silver-gray. Not smoke, not mist—thought. It moved with intention, wrapping around their throats, their limbs, their memories.
The world around them bled into nothing.
They were alone.
RIVEN found himself standing in a forest made of swords.
The trees were steel trunks, sharp and groaning under the weight of regret. Leaves were thin, fragile blades that trembled with every breath. The ground beneath his feet wasn't soil, but ash.
A figure appeared at the center of the clearing. Barefoot. Covered in blood. Twelve years old.
Himself.
His younger self held a rusted dagger, its edge notched with hesitation. His eyes—mirrors of Riven's own—burned with unrepentant fury.
"You let them live."
Riven drew his blade slowly, eyes narrowed. "I spared the ones who didn't deserve it."
"They all deserved it."
"You know that's not true."
"They laughed when she begged."
Riven flinched.
The boy's voice cracked. "She screamed, and you ran."
"I didn't run," Riven said, though the words rang hollow.
"You still do."
The boy lunged.
They clashed. Metal bit metal. Sparks flew.
But Riven's blade turned on him. Every strike he landed echoed through his own body like a curse rebounding. Blood soaked his tunic. His ribs pulsed with fractures.
"Pain makes you honest," the boy whispered, driving the dagger into Riven's shoulder.
Riven fell to one knee. "I'm not that boy anymore."
"Then prove it," the boy said. "Kill me."
He did.
The child dissolved into smoke.
But the blade remained in Riven's side. Bleeding.
SERAPH opened her eyes into fire.
The altar beneath her glowed red-hot, carved with runes she recognized—runes from Nyra's curse, runes from her own soul bindings.
Flames raged around her, licking her heels.
Ahead stood two figures.
Nyra, writhing in shadow.
Nyx, ablaze with rage.
Both screamed. Both begged. Both reached for her.
"You have to choose," a voice crooned above her. "Only one survives."
Seraph clenched her fists.
"I will not be their executioner."
"But you always have been," the voice replied. "Every time you hesitated… one of them paid the price."
Nyx hissed. "You always choose her."
Nyra sobbed. "You said you'd protect me."
The flames climbed higher.
Seraph dropped to her knees, whispering an ancient synchrony chant, one not spoken since the old wars.
Threads of silver light extended from her chest, reaching toward both of them.
"Join," she whispered. "Hold. Be one."
The light bound them.
The flames died.
But something inside her cracked.
Her limbs shook. Her spirit had bent the simulation's law. And it had cost her.
"I'm still here," she whispered. "But I don't know for how much longer."
VOSS stood on cracked stone beneath a sky of black water.
It rained illusions.
Every droplet showed Nyra dying.
Burned. Torn. Drowned. Alone.
He didn't speak. Didn't cry.
He moved through the storm like a soldier through gunfire.
One version of Nyra stepped forward. Her eyes were gone. Her mouth was sewn shut.
"You didn't save me," she said.
Another appeared.
"You're afraid of me."
Another:
"You would rather watch me burn than admit you feel anything."
His breathing grew ragged.
He tried to summon his graviton veil.
Nothing.
His magic had been silenced.
So he dropped to one knee, placed his palm against the stone, and whispered:
"Not again."
A pulse radiated from his chest.
The illusions paused.
But they didn't vanish.
They only watched.
And Voss watched back, shaking but unbroken.
Outside the chamber, the simulation dome quivered.
Observers whispered.
Grand Magister Kaldros rubbed his hands together. "They've stepped past the initial veil."
Mistress Sylva watched the energy readings spike. "Their illusions are growing sentient. The system is reacting to their emotions."
"Correction," a technician said. "It's not reacting. It's evolving."
Xypher Rhaegis stepped closer to the viewing lens. His eyes glinted.
"They're not unraveling," he said softly.
"Not yet."
He smiled.
"But one of them will."
The simulation bent around Nyra like a second skin, wrapping her in a silence too deep to be natural. She called out to the others—Riven, Seraph, Voss—but her voice was devoured before it could echo.
She stood alone now.
The terrain beneath her shifted with every breath. One step was marble—smooth and pristine, the next, blackened ash that cracked under her boots. Shadows oozed from the ground, curling like tendrils seeking her pulse.
The walls of the chamber reshaped, unfurling into a ruinous throne room that stretched toward a ceiling of darkness laced with violet lightning. Flames danced along the arches, licking stone columns wrapped in barbed chains. Shadows spilled from torn silk banners overhead, marked by brands she remembered from her slave days—seared into her own skin.
The scent hit her like a whip to the chest.
Burned flesh.
And blood.
Bodies lay strewn across the chamber floor.
Slaves.
Some she knew. Some she remembered only in screams. All of them silent now, glassy-eyed, with melted chains clutched in cold hands.
Their mouths moved. But no sound came.
At the far end of the room stood a throne carved from obsidian bone, its surface cracked and oozing fire. It was shaped like agony frozen in time. Upon it sat a figure—
Her.
But not her.
This version was crowned in jagged gold and wreathed in violet-black flame. Her skin shimmered like molten steel, and her chains no longer bound her—they draped her shoulders like ornaments. Her hair spilled down her back in waves of embers, and her silver eyes glowed with something ancient.
The Tyrant Flame.
A version of herself forged from pain and unrepentant fury.
She leaned forward slowly, her lips curling into a smirk that dripped with contempt.
"Finally," the Tyrant said, her voice like molten glass poured over ice. "You came."
Nyra didn't move. "This is just a test."
"Is it?" the Tyrant purred. "Because it feels like home."
The flames around the throne flared, casting long shadows across the corpses. They twitched in response, like puppets on charred strings.
"You've already tasted what I can give you," the Tyrant whispered. "You've felt the weight of power unshackled. Let me finish what they tried to erase. Take the seal off."
Nyra's hands curled into fists. "No."
"Be who you were before the brand. Before the chains. Before mercy made you weak."
"I'm not weak," Nyra hissed. Her flame stirred beneath her skin.
"But you're still bound."
The crown gleamed atop the Tyrant's head. It was shaped like fire caught mid-burn, wrapped in jagged celestial sigils. From it pulsed something older than anger. Older than flame.
Destiny.
Nyra stepped forward. The obsidian floor cracked beneath her boots.
The air thickened with pressure, vibrating against her ribs. Her heartbeat synced with the pulse of her hidden seal.
"Take it," the Tyrant said, rising from the throne with terrible grace. "Break the leash. Be the weapon they fear. Be the goddess they tried to kill in chains."
The voice was her own, but it echoed like prophecy.
Her fingers hovered near the invisible tether inside her. She could feel it—glowing, trembling, ready to be shattered.
One word. One breath.
And she could end kingdoms.
The seal surged against her spine, aching to be released.
Power surged inside her. The throne room pulsed with anticipation.
"I could make them all bow," she whispered.
"You would," the Tyrant whispered back. "And none could stop you."
She closed her eyes.
Images flooded her mind:
Nobles screaming in a rain of fire. The Queen's crown melting into slag. Voss, bleeding. Reaching. Riven, silent. Broken. Seraph… afraid of her.
A sob escaped her throat.
The Tyrant stepped closer. "They don't understand you. But I do."
"No," Nyra said, voice cracking.
Cracks webbed across the floor. Chains shattered. The corpses vanished in bursts of embers.
"No," she said louder, and violet fire flickered from her palms.
The Tyrant raised a hand, and the crown lifted into the air.
"Take it—"
"I said NO!"
A burst of violet-black energy erupted from Nyra's chest.
The entire chamber exploded.
The throne split apart. The fire screamed. Reality buckled.
Above her, the simulated sky split open.
A single eye stared down—enormous, celestial, iris spinning with ancient glyphs.
It blinked once.
And the illusion shattered.
Nyra dropped to her knees, panting. Her seal throbbed in agony. Her chest ached with restraint.
But she was still herself.
Barely.
Outside the simulation, Dominion alarms flared. Arcane sigils across the outer shell scrambled in panic.
"She altered the environment," said one observer. "That's not supposed to be possible."
"She didn't alter it," Grand Magister Kaldros whispered. "She rewrote it."
Mistress Sylva narrowed her eyes. "The seal is slipping."
"Should we shut it down?" another technician asked.
Xypher Rhaegis shook his head, slow and fascinated.
"No," he said. "We let her fall."
He leaned closer to the scrying mirror.
"And see who she is when she rises."
They found each other again by instinct, not coordination.
The simulation pulled them together through smoke and ruin, past flickering illusions of pain and unspoken guilt. One by one, they emerged from the fog, bruised, bleeding, and not the same.
Riven arrived first, limping, blood seeping through his shirt. His usual smirk was gone, replaced by an unreadable tightness.
Seraph appeared next, quiet but shaken. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes haunted by something even Nyx refused to speak of.
Voss came through the dark last, his footsteps like the ticking of a warclock. He kept looking toward Nyra without saying a word.
And Nyra stood still at the center of the gathering place, shrouded in silence, eyes blank with ash.
She hadn't spoken since the explosion.
"Nyra?" Seraph asked gently.
No response.
"Are you—"
"She's not okay," Riven snapped, voice sharp with frustration. "None of us are."
Nyra blinked slowly, but didn't look at them.
"Something happened to you in there," Seraph said, approaching slowly. "You're colder."
Nyx surfaced briefly, her voice quiet but tight with unease. "She saw herself wearing the crown. And she didn't throw it away."
Nyra's jaw tensed.
"I didn't put it on."
"But you thought about it," Seraph whispered.
"That's enough to change you," Riven muttered. "And none of you trust me either. Not since the Woundpit. You all act like I'm the one who might snap."
"No one said that," Seraph said.
"You didn't have to."
"Enough," Voss said, voice calm but edged with steel. "This place is trying to tear us apart. It's succeeding."
He didn't look at Nyra when he spoke, but she still felt it.
She turned away. "There's a chamber up ahead. We need shelter."
They followed without speaking, letting the simulation guide them through a series of twisted hallways lined with warped statues and broken arches.
At the end of the corridor stood a door carved from mirrorstone.
The moment they entered, the door vanished.
They were locked in.
The chamber rippled—walls lined in reflective glass that didn't show their present selves.
Only their fates.
One by one, the mirrors activated.
Nyra stepped forward first.
The reflection didn't blink.
She stood amid a battlefield of noble corpses, their insignias still burning, their mouths wide open in silent screams. She held no weapon. She was the weapon.
Flames licked her body, shadow coiling around her feet like smoke.
But she was alone.
Utterly alone.
Even the air around her seemed afraid.
She stared at the mirror a long time.
Then turned away.
Riven's mirror showed him kneeling.
His blade pressed to Seraph's throat.
Blood covered his hands.
His face was blank—devoid of emotion.
Seraph wasn't resisting.
She smiled.
"Do it," her reflection whispered. "You're not afraid of losing us. You're afraid of being seen."
Riven backed away from the mirror. "It's not real."
No one replied.
Seraph faced her mirror with trembling resolve.
In it, she stood above a shattered world—sky split open, cities burning, the seas boiled away.
In her arms, Nyra.
Alive.
Safe.
And behind her, corpses of gods and mortals alike.
"I broke the world," her reflection said. "For one person."
"And I'd do it again."
She turned away, pale.
Voss stood before his.
His reflection was still.
Nyra walked ahead of him—toward someone else. A silhouette whose face never appeared.
She held their hand.
She never looked back.
Voss remained standing, alone in the cold.
He didn't blink.
But his fist clenched hard enough for blood to fall to the floor.
"She has to choose," the mirror said.
"And you already know she won't choose you."
He didn't speak.
But his silence said everything.
The chamber dimmed.
They stood in a room of truths—not prophecies, not fictions.
Possibilities. Real ones.
And they couldn't unsee them.
Voss finally looked at Nyra. "Whatever's inside you… it's bleeding out. You know that, don't you?"
"I know," she said softly. "But I haven't let it take me."
"Yet," he corrected.
They didn't sleep.
The mirrored sanctum watched them through the night.
Waiting to see who would break first.
Beyond the veil of the simulation, Dominion's control chamber thrummed with restless energy.
Dozens of lenses shimmered in the air—projecting layered visuals from inside the Shadow Simulation. Each screen was unstable, pulsing with flickers of emotion-mapped readings, distortion flares, and resonance spikes that defied containment.
Mistress Sylva Noctis stood in shadow, arms folded, her violet eyes narrowed but unflinching. "Let it continue."
Her voice was cold. Detached. Edged with curiosity like a scalpel.
"They're unraveling exactly as intended. The illusion feeds on fracture. If they break, we learn. If they survive, they evolve."
"Your obsession with pressure as a teacher borders on recklessness," Grand Magister Orin Kaldros replied from across the observatory, his pale blue eyes glowing beneath his hood. "One of them has begun contaminating the illusion itself."
He gestured toward Nyra's lens—warped, no longer projecting standard hallucination metrics. Instead, it shimmered with celestial glyphs and spatial anomalies even Dominion's strongest wards couldn't explain.
"Her seal is destabilizing," Kaldros warned. "The throne illusion wasn't coded into the simulation. Neither was the celestial eye."
Sylva's lip curled in a faint smile. "Then we've struck a vein. Let her rupture."
Kaldros stepped forward. "If she loses control—"
"She hasn't," Headmaster Xypher Rhaegis said quietly.
The room fell silent.
Xypher stood at the center, behind the largest viewing scry. His arms were behind his back, posture statuesque, face unreadable. But his eyes burned with something deeper—an anticipation so still it felt like fate on pause.
"She hasn't lost control," he repeated. "She's resisting. Barely. That's what interests me."
Kaldros frowned. "And what happens if she stops resisting?"
"Then we see what she truly is."
"You want one of them to break," Sylva said, not a question.
Xypher didn't deny it.
"They were forged in fire," he said. "We need to know which one is brittle… and which one becomes the sword."
At the back of the room, a subtle ripple of distortion pulsed through the air.
A figure emerged from a scrying alcove—a masked courier bearing the seal of the Queen.
Xypher turned slowly. "You're early."
The courier bowed low and said nothing, only extending a scroll bound in crimson thread. No spoken words. Just a command.
Xypher unraveled it.
The Queen's handwriting was delicate. Controlled.
"If Nyra Vale breaches the seal, You are to prevent her escape by any means. An extraction kill order is hereby sanctioned. She must not leave the simulation chamber alive."
Kaldros read over his shoulder.
He didn't speak for several seconds.
When he did, his voice was quiet. "So she fears her now. Not just politically."
Sylva stepped forward. "A Queen protects her throne. And Nyra… well. She was never meant to live past infancy."
Xypher's eyes remained fixed on the center screen—where Nyra stood alone in the mirrored sanctum, staring at a reflection of fire and silence.
"She's not just a threat to the Queen," Xypher said at last. "She's a threat to the game itself."
He handed the scroll back to the courier without a word.
Then turned to the instructors.
"Prepare the extraction team," he ordered. "Shadow protocol. No survivors if it breaches."
"But don't deploy them yet."
He smiled faintly, cold and deliberate.
"Let her walk closer to the edge."
The sanctum walls quaked.
The mirrors flickered and hissed, distorting as if the reflections were trying to escape. The floor cracked, not with sound, but with memory—an echo of every pain, every choice, every fracture that had rippled through their souls inside this simulation.
Something deeper stirred beneath the surface.
The shadows around them surged upward, like ink spilling through water, forming a thick storm of smoke. Magic pulsed from the stone, unnatural and wrong. Then, from the dark, it emerged.
A shape.
Massive. Inhuman.
It walked with too many limbs, dragging chains made of guilt and fear.
A hydra-like creature—four heads, each face warped into a monstrous parody of one of them.
Riven's face twisted in shadow, eternally sneering, eyes gleaming with violence and betrayal. Seraph's visage was pale and weeping, her mouth stitched shut, her magic dripping from her skin like cracked porcelain. Voss's head looked burned out—silent, cold, bleeding shadows instead of words. Nyra's face was the worst.
Crowned in celestial flame, her smile was hunger made flesh.
Their shadows made flesh.
Their trauma made real.
The Mirrorborn.
It struck first.
A wave of crushing energy rolled through the room, knocking them off their feet.
Riven barely rolled aside before a tendril of guilt slammed into the ground where he'd been. He leapt up, daggers flashing—but the creature parried him with a whip of shadow.
"This is wrong!" Seraph shouted. "This wasn't in the simulation!"
"It's us!" Voss growled, flinging up a gravity field that barely slowed the monster's advance. "It's what we left behind!"
"Then we end it!" Nyra snarled.
They moved together.
Riven was first, ducking low and slicing through one of the creature's legs. Shadow ichor spilled across the floor, but the head bearing his likeness laughed, lunging with a blade that mirrored his own.
"You remember her scream, don't you?" it whispered. "The one you let die?"
Riven faltered—just for a moment.
The blade sliced across his shoulder.
He fell back, bleeding.
"I remember," he muttered, shaking. "But I'm not hiding anymore."
He stood. "You want my secret?"
He turned toward the others.
"I killed her."
Silence.
"She begged me to end it. And I couldn't let her suffer."
He stepped forward and drove both daggers into his own shadow's throat.
The head cracked and fell away.
The beast roared, now down to three.
It swung toward Seraph, flooding the sanctum with waves of burning emotion—fear, grief, betrayal.
Seraph's hands shook.
Nyx surged forward inside her. "Let me."
"No."
"You can't win this part."
"I have to—"
"Then we die."
Seraph screamed.
And let go.
Nyx took the body, eyes flashing with lunar rage. Her movements were faster, more chaotic.
She hurled fans of moonfire at the creature, driving it back with slicing blasts of light and shadow. Then she leapt—landing on its spine, carving into its core.
"I am not your lie," she screamed. "I am the part Seraph was too kind to show!"
She jammed her blade deep into the reflection of her stitched-mouth face.
It shrieked.
And broke.
Two heads remained.
Voss raised his hands, the graviton fields building around him in waves. His muscles tensed. Blood seeped from his nose.
"No," Seraph warned. "It'll kill you."
"She needs me," he said softly, staring at Nyra. "She still needs me."
He crushed the graviton core between his palms.
The energy bent the air, creating a singularity that pulled the monster's torso in on itself. Its Voss-head screamed, its silent mouth finally breaking open.
But Voss collapsed, coughing blood, his legs barely holding.
The head shattered under the pressure.
Only one remained.
Nyra's.
It stood taller than the others, fire wreathed around its face, eyes glowing with ancient light.
It stepped forward.
"You know who I am."
"I do," Nyra whispered.
"I am the goddess waiting inside your bones. I am the truth. Take the power. Unleash it."
The seal inside her pulsed. The eye from before flickered again above the chamber.
One release. One word.
And she could destroy it.
The others looked to her.
"Nyra?" Riven asked, warily.
She raised her hand. Fire crackled across her knuckles.
But she paused.
Looked at them—Seraph, still trembling. Riven, still bleeding. Voss, nearly unconscious.
If she unleashed it now…
It would consume them all.
She lowered her arm.
"No," she said. "Not today."
She stepped forward, blade in hand.
And fought.
The final strike was not magical.
It was raw. Physical.
She plunged her blade through her shadow's heart.
And everything stopped.
The beast fell.
The room went still.
They stood in silence.
Their reflections had shattered.
But the door didn't open.
No light. No exit.
Only a voice.
Cold. Amused.
"You've survived your shadows."
"Now let's see how you survive each other."