It was nearly dawn when Elias opened his eyes.
The mirror still hummed.
Low and deep, like a heartbeat coming from far beneath the ground.
He sat up in the dark, the edges of the dream clinging to him like ash. Rae's face flashed across his memory, her mouth open, screaming, but no sound. Only a white burst of symbols behind her like stars in collapse.
The name etched on the ledger page still pulsed faintly.
R. Darwish.
A whisper from another life.
He wrapped the mirror again and stepped out into the fog, drawn by a pull he didn't understand. Something in his skin buzzed, along his spine, in the space between thoughts. The relic had awakened.
The jungle behind the plantation was dense and twitching with life. Elias ducked under vines, stepping carefully where roots jutted up like ribs from a buried beast. The deeper he went, the more the air changed, thicker, heavier, tinged with the sharp metallic scent of rain and blood.
And then he found it.
The ruins.
A structure swallowed by the jungle, part temple, part grave. Stone columns leaned like broken fingers toward the sky. On one wall, carved deep into black rock, was the symbol from the mirror. That twisted S.
Below it: veves, Vodou sigils, intricate and spiralling.
And something newer.
Carved with a blade, not centuries of time.
"The cipher is a mirror. The mirror is a gate."
The words weren't in Elias's handwriting.
But he had written them before.
His hand shook as he placed the relic against the carved wall.
The stone responded.
Lines began to glow, thin etchings of light that spread out in every direction. The mirror vibrated, and symbols shifted inside it, aligning like clockwork gears. They rearranged into a map. Not of land. Of time.
Each line intersected a moment. A place. A flash of fire. A scream. Rae's name. Professor Darwish's handwriting. Papa Louvier's face overlaid with Elias's own.
Then, a flicker.
A new symbol joined the cipher.
R.Like Rae.Like Relic.Like the next letter in something ancient and unfinished.
Suddenly, footsteps cracked behind him.
Elias whirled, mirror drawn up like a blade.
But it was Jean-Noël.
"Found you," the boy said, breathless. "We've been looking all night."
"For what?"
"For you. And this place." He looked around, eyes wide. "They say there's a chamber underground. Papa Louvier once sealed it. Before he… changed."
Elias turned back to the wall, heart racing. "Then let's unseal it."
They cleared vines, stones, soil, until a small entrance revealed itself, hidden beneath collapsed stone. A tunnel led downward. The air inside was colder, older. The walls were lined with crude paintings, scenes of people in masks, flames, and a mirror held aloft like a sun.
At the bottom: a room.
Circular.
Its walls etched with more cipher symbols, repeating in hypnotic sequences. In the center sat a pedestal of obsidian. Empty, but surrounded by dried blood.
Jean-Noël stepped forward. "This was a place of power."
"It still is," Elias said.
He drew a shallow line across his palm and let the blood fall onto the pedestal.
The mirror responded instantly.
Its surface split into segments, revealing flashes from different times, an execution under colonial flags, Rae burning paper in a modern lab, Darwish writing on a stone wall by torchlight.
The past and the present were bleeding together.
And the mirror was no longer a tool.
It was watching.
"Jean-Noël," Elias said quietly, "this… isn't just about revolt."
Jean-Noël looked up. "What is it about, then?"
Elias closed the mirror.
"Something bigger. Something that's been happening for centuries. We're not just fighting for freedom here, we're standing at the crossroads of time."
Jean-Noël hesitated. "Then we better choose the right direction."
Above them, the jungle shivered.
And far away, in the grand house, Lucien Jourdain stood staring at a freshly burned veve that had appeared on his study floor. He didn't know what it meant.
But he knew it was a warning.