The Fractured Reflection
The world felt different.
Alaric had left the ruins of his home behind, but something had come with him. A presence, an echo, something unseen yet unmistakably there. It lurked in the corners of his vision, slithered through the air when he exhaled, and whispered through the silence of the path ahead.
It was inside him.
A piece of the past.
A shard of what was broken.
The night stretched endlessly above, a black void fractured by stars that glowed too dimly, as though they, too, were dying. The wind carried the scent of dust and something metallic—iron, rusted and wet. It clung to his tongue, bitter and wrong.
Alaric's fingers tightened around the hilt of his blade, but the steel felt different. Heavier. As if something unseen weighed upon it, warping it, twisting it into something unrecognisable. He looked down, and his breath caught in his throat.
The blade was cracked.
Not broken, not dull—fractured.
Jagged lines ran along its surface, splitting its reflection into a thousand disjointed fragments. And in each of them, he saw a different version of himself.
One with hollowed eyes.
One drenched in blood.
One without a face at all.
A cold dread coiled around his spine.
This was not the same weapon he had carried through the trials.
This was something else.
Something is watching him.
The Shadow in the Glass
A whisper slithered through the trees.
Soft.
Familiar.
Mocking.
"Do you see now?"
Alaric turned sharply, his breath burning in his throat. The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, woven into the fabric of the darkness itself. His fingers trembled against the hilt of his fractured blade, his pulse thudding like war drums in his ears.
Then, a figure stepped forward.
Or rather, it peeled itself from the air, like something shedding an unseen layer of reality.
Alaric's breath hitched.
It was him.
Not a distorted version, not an illusion of the crystal's magic—him, exactly as he was. The same clothes, the same scars, the same exhausted weight in his eyes.
But there was something wrong.
The other Alaric's face cracked, just like the blade, fine fissures spreading across his skin like glass about to shatter. His lips curled into a smirk that did not belong to him.
"Do you know what happens to broken things, Alaric?"
The voice was his own, yet not his own—a perversion, layered with something old, something vast.
Alaric's grip tightened, his breath coming in sharp, controlled bursts.
"Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head, and with a sound like glass grinding against itself, it split apart—cracks deepening, shards peeling away from its body, floating in the air like fractured reflections.
Alaric saw faces in them.
His father.
The blacksmith who had once taught him how to wield a hammer.
The elder who had warned him of the prophecy.
All of them—watching, waiting, whispering.
The pieces spun, twisting around him, forming a spiralling vortex of memories and lost time. The whispering grew louder, a chorus of voices that did not belong to the dead but to something far worse—something that had been waiting for him all along.
The crystal had not shown him everything.
There was still a price to be paid.
The Weight of the Shards
The other Alaric stepped closer.
The shards of his face glowed with an eerie, spectral light, flickering between existence and something else entirely.
"You think you've escaped?" The voice slithered through the air. "You think you can defy what has already been written?"
Alaric said nothing.
He could feel the weight of the glass shards pressing against his chest, the cold of them sinking into his skin. They were trying to become a part of him, to drag him into the reflection where he had no will of his own.
"You are already broken, Alaric."
The other Alaric raised his hand, palm up, revealing a single shard resting in his palm.
Alaric recognised it instantly.
It was the piece that had been inside the crystal—the one he had seen when he had first touched it, the one that had burned itself into his soul.
His final choice.
"Take it," the reflection whispered. "And everything will make sense."
Alaric's fingers twitched.
For the briefest moment, he wanted to.
The whispers in his skull grew deafening. He could hear the voices of the ones he had lost. His mother. His father. His people.
"Come back to us."
"You were never meant to leave."
"You belong here."
His vision blurred. His breath hitched.
And then—
He dropped the blade.
The sound of metal against earth shattered the illusion.
The vortex of shards collapsed, the faces within them screaming as they spiralled back into the darkness. The reflection of himself cracked apart, pieces of his twisted doppelgänger falling into dust.
And then—
The world broke.
The Shattering of Fate
Alaric gasped as the ground beneath him split, the sky above fracturing like a mirror struck by a hammer. The stars flickered, then bled, streaks of silver and red dripping through the heavens like dying embers.
The glass shards that had haunted him, whispered to him, tried to claim him, shattered all at once, dissolving into nothingness.
Alaric fell to his knees.
His hands trembled. His breath came in ragged gasps.
It was over.
The presence that had followed him, the weight that had pressed upon him since the moment he touched the crystal, was gone.
And yet—
The silence that followed was the most terrifying thing of all.
Because now, for the first time in his life, he was truly alone.
No fate guiding him.
No prophecy binds him.
No whispe
rs telling him who he was meant to be.
Just himself.
And the unknown path, ahead.