Kael stood alone at the threshold of the third floor.
The door behind him dissolved into mist, a whisper of stone turning to air, as if it had never been there. Before him stretched a corridor carved from obsidian-black glass, walls rippling faintly like disturbed water. His reflection shimmered on both sides—fractured, multiplied, wrong. Each version of himself had a different expression: some sneering, some screaming, one weeping blood.
A voice drifted from nowhere."Step forward, Kael of the Severed Path. Speak the truth, or be undone."
The name—Severed Path—still curdled in his gut. A title he'd earned with blood. A doctrine etched in scars.
He exhaled slowly, fingers grazing the handle of the bone dagger sheathed at his hip. Useless here. The Tower demanded more than blades.
It demanded memory.
He stepped forward.
With the first footfall, the corridor darkened. A sound swelled in the silence—soft at first, like distant wind. Then it sharpened into a voice.
"Kael! Run!"
His mother's voice. Not how he remembered it in quiet moments, humming lullabies in the cold corners of the city—but that one night, the night, when her blood soaked the cult's altar and Kael was held still by black-robed hands.
The corridor shifted.
Suddenly, he was there again—age seven, hidden in a corner of the stone sanctum beneath the Severed Path's temple. The Hollow Circle stood around her, featureless in their white bone masks, chanting in a tongue that bent the air. His mother fought with everything she had—a fire poker, a scream—but they broke her wrists. They slit her throat as an offering to the Broken Gods, to "awaken the sleeping seed" in her son.
He tried to scream, then.
Now, in the Tower, he did not.
The illusion peeled back. The corridor returned. The Tower waited.
"Necessary," he said aloud, voice flat. "She was never going to survive. I had to watch. I had to learn."
"Did you?" the Tower murmured, now with her voice. "Or did something else break?"
Kael took another step.
The black glass turned red.
A new voice rose. Raspy. Afraid.
His father.
The night after the Offering, Kael remembered sneaking back into their ruined shack. The smell of blood hadn't yet left his clothes. His father wept. Cursed the gods. Cursed Kael. Tried to kill him with a broken bottle.
Kael moved faster than he thought possible. He buried the shard in his father's throat. The act completed what the cult called The Severing—the moment when the past becomes ash.
"The first cut is memory," the high priest had told him."The second is identity. The third is freedom."
He was ten.
Another step.
Now came the faces of the Uncut, the other children taken into the Severed Path. The Tower showed him their eyes—frightened, empty, burning. The ones who didn't survive the Trial of Blades. The ones who begged him for help before he turned away.
Then came the girl. Lira.
She'd once tried to run with him, long before he abandoned the idea of escape. He remembered her fingers wrapped around his as they sprinted through the bone-lit tunnels of the cult's sanctum. Remembered the moment he let go.
The moment he let her fall behind.
They caught her.
Her screams were etched into his bones.
The Tower echoed them now.
"Who are you now, Kael? Who are you without what you've done?"
At the end of the hall stood a final mirror.
It did not reflect Kael as he was.
It showed the version of him who refused the Severing. Who never slit his father's throat. Who saved Lira. Who stayed small, hidden in the gutters of the world.
A boy shaped by grief. But not by blood.
Kael hated that version.
He raised his hand. The mirror hesitated. Cracked. Then exploded outward in a burst of silver shards.
Silence fell.
"You have passed the Trial of Echoes," the Tower intoned, voice once again neutral—but colder."But every echo leaves a scar. You carry yours like armor. For now."
The floor split open. Darkness rose to swallow him.
Kael did not flinch.