Lynchie awoke before the second chime of morning bell, breath caught in her throat as if some unseen hand had lifted her from a dream she could not name. The canopy of her bed shimmered faintly, the silver embroidery trembling in the half-light. She pressed a palm to her chest—her heart beat not fast, but deep. Like the toll of a bell in the marrow.
Outside the dormitory windows, the sky had not yet decided what color to be. And yet, as Lynchie rose and draped herself in her uniform robes, the feeling remained—that the world was listening. Or watching. Or both.
She passed students in the corridor, each a blur of familiarity and forgotten names. None of them noticed the way her footsteps echoed more loudly than they should, or how the walls breathed ever so slightly with her passing.
The Librarium's upper galleries opened before her like the inside of a ribcage—arched, hushed, reverent. She made her way past the Codex trees, past the glass-walled observatories where star-scribes traced the breath of dying constellations.
Archivist Vyen was already waiting beside the Spiral Wards, eyes rimmed with sleepless red, fingers twitching slightly.
"You're early," he said.
"I had a dream. Or... I think I did."
Vyen tilted his head. "Did it speak in a language you understood?"
She hesitated. "No. But I remember understanding. It was a name. Not said aloud. Not written."
"The glyphs are stirring. You've felt them in your blood, haven't you?"
She nodded, afraid to admit how deeply.
"Then we begin today. The trial of Witnessing. The Spiral Mirror will show you what you cannot yet face."
As they descended the narrow steps into the Mirror Vault, Lynchie felt her vision blur—not from fear, but from something older. As though the moment had already happened long ago, and she was only now catching up.
The Spiral Mirror was not glass, nor metal. It was memory—made visible.
She stood before it and did not see herself.
She saw wings. Shattered. Stained with a shadow that moved like smoke across the stars. A burning city made of singing stones. A child held out to the sky—and the sky weeping in return.
She saw herself—but not herself. A girl carved in starlight, holding a name she didn't know how to say.
Then a voice—not hers, not Vyen's, not even the Mirror's—spoke into the breathless hollow of her skull:
"You are the echo of a vow unfulfilled."
And just like that, the vision shattered into silence. Vyen caught her as she collapsed.
"It's begun," he whispered. "The codex remembers her now."
Lynchie's eyes fluttered open.
And for the first time, she knew.
The wings had not been broken.
They had been torn.