It began with the drums.
Not the ritual ones, these were faster, angrier. Hollow beats carrying across cane fields and mountain slopes, lit by the flicker of torches. Then came the cries. Not screams yet. Cries of rage, of release.
The revolution had begun.
Elias raced through the trees, breath tight in his throat. Smoke already filled the sky. The plantation was burning. Screams now, real ones, pierced the canopy. Not just from the enslaved, but from overseers and masters alike.
He had seen it coming in visions. Fire licking through rafters. Chains broken by sharpened blades. Blood on white linens.
But it was worse in real life.
The house was a fortress under siege. Men and women flooded its outer walls, armed with tools turned weapons, sugarcane knives, farming hooks, rusted guns stolen from the shipment ledgers Elias helped decipher. Jean-Noël had found them. Had led them.
And yet, Elias felt hollow.
He wasn't one of them. Not truly.
He wasn't Papa Louvier.
He was Elias Vale, displaced in time and body. But he couldn't just watch.
He sprinted through the side fields, dodging a group of fleeing servants. Flames consumed the far barn. Horses screamed from inside. Lucien's voice bellowed orders from a veranda already half-crumbled.
Then he saw Jean-Noël, blood streaked across his shirt, eyes wild with grief and fury, dragging a wounded boy out from the hedges.
Their eyes met.
Jean-Noël froze.
"You," he whispered. "You're not him, are you?"
Elias couldn't answer.
Jean-Noël looked closer, searching his face, beyond the skin, beneath the borrowed flesh. "He's gone," Jean-Noël murmured. "Papa's gone."
Elias stepped forward. "I didn't mean—"
"You gave us what we needed," Jean-Noël said, almost kindly. "The ledgers. The fire. That was enough."
Another explosion rocked the house. A slave ran past, howling in pain, shirt scorched.
Jean-Noël let go of the boy and placed a hand on Elias's shoulder. "Go. Before the rest see what I see."
Elias hesitated. "The mirror. I need it."
Jean-Noël didn't ask why. He just nodded toward the hut.
Elias ran.
He reached it as the sky cracked open with more fire—a second plantation igniting in the distance. Inside, the mirror waited beneath the floorboards. The relic shimmered, alive with heat. Symbols glowed in pulsing rhythm, as if celebrating the chaos outside.
Rae's reflection flashed in the glass.
Her lips moved again, but this time Elias heard her.
"Run."
He turned back toward the door. The flames had reached the trees.
It was now or never.
He slashed his palm, blood trickling across the relic's surface. The mirror opened, not like a portal, but like a wound.
And the voice returned.
The Watcher.
"You already left more behind than you took."
The world twisted.
Light bent.
And Elias fell once more, out of this era, out of this war, out of Papa Louvier's body.
Back through the seams of history.