Ayla didn't sleep that night.
She never really did anymore, not since she was eleven. But after the tower, after the second letter, and after that silent message etched in mirror-glass, sleep wasn't even a possibility.
Instead, she studied the symbol.
Over and over.
A crescent moon — tilted backward like it was watching her.
It wasn't in any of the spirit books she kept hidden behind her legal documents.
It didn't match any death cults, nor any of the cursed legacy sigils she'd seen before.
But it felt familiar.
Not like she'd read it.
Like she'd dreamed it. As a child. As a baby. Maybe even before she was born.
By morning, she was back at Noctra's underground archive — the sealed part of the building that no one but her and the dead could enter.
She lit the silver flame lantern and whispered to the dark:
"I need something old. Before names. Before cities."
One ghost stirred.
Vellin, the archivist. Once a monk. Then a grave robber. Then both.
He appeared in smoke, humming a hymn Ayla had never heard in this world.
"You called me from forgetting," he said. "What do you seek?"
She drew the symbol into the dust.
He recoiled.
"That's not for the living to know."
"Then I'm not asking as the living."
Hours passed. Pages turned. Candles flickered.
Eventually, Vellin found it — a fragment of parchment sealed in bone wax, older than most languages.
The mark was there.
And beneath it, a phrase in spirit-tongue:
"He Who Owns the Glass, Owns the Dead."
The translation shook something loose in her memory.
"Glass...?"
Suddenly, she remembered something from the elevator in the tower:
The man's reflection had been perfectly clear.
Too clear.
Ghosts often blurred in mirrors, like smoke trying to mimic shape.
But his wasn't blurred.
It was sharp. Dominant.
Like the mirror answered to him.
Ayla closed the book and whispered to Vellin:
"Have you ever heard of a man who ghosts can't pass?"
The ghost gave her a look she'd never seen before — fear.
"There are stories of one. They call him the Monarch of Mirrors. The Glassborn. The one who sees without being seen."
"Is he alive?"
"No. But he's not dead, either."
She left the archive with more questions than answers — and a name stuck in her mind like a hook:
Glass Monarch.
Whoever he was...
He knew her name.
He marked her tower.
And he was watching.
That night, in a hidden boardroom four cities away, eight men sat around a crescent-shaped table.
One of them, cloaked in grey and shadow, tapped a finger against a black-glass folder.
Inside: photos of Ayla. Buildings she owned. Letters she'd touched.
"She's moving faster than expected," someone whispered.
The cloaked man didn't respond.
He simply drew the crescent moon in the condensation of his glass.
And smiled.
End of chapter 7