The cavern was still. No wind. No insects. No sound but Cael's breath and the slow drip of water onto ancient stone.
Before him stood a mirror.
Not glass. Not polished silver. It was made of obsidian—liquid-black and veined with living glyphs that shimmered with shifting light. Around its base, runes pulsed in slow succession, arranged in an old-world script Cael had only seen once, buried in a collapsed ruin. Mireth said this was one of the Eyes of Origin, relics rumored to show not truth, but possibility.
"Don't look too long," Mireth whispered behind him. "It might show you something you're not ready for."
Cael stepped forward anyway.
The reflection stared back—himself, yes. Cloaked in gray and wrapped in the glyph-threaded shawl Mireth had stitched. But his eyes were hollow. Where pupils should be, glyphs spiraled inward endlessly. He raised his hand—and in the mirror, the reflection lifted a blade of pure Void.
A sword of letters.
No, not a sword. A pen. Every strike wrote reality.
He blinked—and the image was gone.
Instead, the mirror showed a different world. The sky burned lavender, and floating runes orbited shattered continents. A fractured moon hung above a dying city.
"Is that the future?" he asked.
Mireth said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the mirror—her own reflection was screaming silently, hands pressed to the glass.
"It's showing me…" she began, then stopped. "It doesn't matter."
Cael placed a hand on the mirror. It was cold. And then it opened.
A hiss of ancient stone. The mirror split vertically, revealing a narrow alcove behind it—at the center, hovering gently, was a quill.
No inkpot. No parchment. Just a dark, almost living feather that pulsed with Essentia.
"The Glyphweaver's Quill," Mireth breathed. "They said it could transcribe thought. Or… emotion."
Cael stepped forward and reached out.
The moment he touched the quill, a word forced itself into his mind. A glyph he hadn't seen before, spiraling like a whirlpool made of intent.
He scratched it onto the wall with the quill.
The air screamed.
A hole tore open midair—no light, no dark. Just absence.
Then it closed. Reality stitched back together, reluctantly.
Cael fell to one knee, gasping.
Mireth helped him up. "You're not ready for that."
"I had to try," he said. "If I don't understand the limits, how will I ever fix this world?"
She looked at him sadly. "Some limits exist to be respected, not broken."
Cael looked again at the mirror—now blank, dull, no longer a window but a grave.
They left the chamber, and behind them, the mirror crumbled into ash.