Three hours. Sylene's breathing sounds like static between radio stations.

  I clean blood from her face while she sleeps, each crimson drop revealing stolen moments—laughter, prayers, the exact second hope dies. Her dreams move behind closed eyelids, tracking things that aren't there.

  Morwyn materializes beside me, tail rigid. "There's a place we didn't destroy. A place you hid even from yourself."

  "What kind of place?"

  "The kind where you kept the things too dangerous to remember." She sniffs at Sylene's unconscious form. "She's leaking soul-fragments. If we don't anchor her soon, there won't be enough left."

  She leads me to unmarked wall. When I speak the name Sylene whispered—my real name—stone simply ceases to exist.

  The passage beyond vibrates when I remember truth. Words cover the walls in my own desperate handwriting:

  DO NOT REMEMBER HIM.

  THE HUNGER WILL AWAKEN.

  HE FORGAVE YOU EVEN AS YOU BROKE HIM.

  That last one stops me cold. Letters carved deep, stained dark.

  "I wrote these before they hollowed me out," I say.

  "When you still remembered what you were running from."

  The vault opens before us. At its center: a mirror tall as a throne, surface made of soulglass that shifts between silver and transparency. Around its base, more warnings:

  ONLY SHOWS WHAT YOU FEAR TO SEE.

  REMEMBER: HE CHOSE TO FORGIVE.

  I approach, and nausea hits like a physical blow. The mirror's surface writhes, showing nothing but darkness shot through with silver veins. My reflection doesn't appear—because I'm afraid of what it might reveal.

  That's when Sylene screams.

  Not her voice. Higher, younger, cracked with pain: "Sister, no. Don't open it. You'll see what I was before you loved the monster more than me."

  She stands in the passage, eyes open but unfocused. The pale migraine-lance erupts from her skull, extending to pierce my chest. But this time she fights it—hands clawing at her own temples, trying to stop what's coming.

  "Get out of my head," she snarls at the presence using her voice.

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  "Sylene—"

  "I can hold him back," she gasps. "But not for long. If you're going to look, do it now."

  I speak my real name to the soulglass.

  The mirror explodes with memory.

  Seven years old. Garden of roses and burnt offerings. A boy barely five holds a carved wooden cat, hands trembling with channeled power.

  "For you," he says. "So you won't be alone when they make you do the bad things."

  The cat is perfect—every whisker rendered with precision. But hunger wakes in me as I take it. The hollow space recognizes what he's offering: not just a gift, but himself.

  The wooden cat cracks in my grip.

  So does he.

  "You'll forget me one day," he whispers as I drain him. "But I'll remember for both of us."

  No blame in his eyes. No hate. Just understanding.

  "I love you anyway, sister."

  The vision shatters. I'm on my knees, retching. Behind me, Sylene collapses as the presence releases her.

  "The Breach-Maker," I whisper.

  "Your brother," Morwyn confirms. "You didn't kill him. You broke time around him. Made him a wound that lets gods in."

  Sylene pushes herself up, eyes clear for the first time since the monastery. "He's been trying to reach you through the stolen memories. Leaving messages." Her voice hardens. "The Blood Tithe doesn't just maintain barriers. It feeds the wound you made of him. Keeps him sedated while they use him as a battery."

  "For what?"

  "A new throne. One that doesn't need a queen—just infinite suffering to power their ambitions."

  The blood-clock ticks above us: sixty-six hours remaining.

  "Then we break it open," I say, standing. "Find my brother."

  "You'll need me," Sylene says. "To make sure you don't become what they fear."

  "Then let's become it together."

  Morwyn leaps to my shoulder, claws digging in. "The vault has more levels. Tools you hid from yourself. But everything you locked down there—you locked for a reason."

  She leads us deeper, through passages that bend according to principles I can't grasp. The air grows thicker, more dangerous. Power radiates from somewhere below—not the hollow kind that consumes, but something that creates and destroys in equal measure.

  We descend until the passage opens into another chamber. Identical to the first, but wrong. The soulglass mirror here is cracked, surface bleeding actual blood that pools at its base without clotting.

  Above the mirror, etched in silver flame that burns without heat:

  THE BREACH-MAKER

  "This is where you tried to fix what you broke," Morwyn whispers. "Where you learned it couldn't be undone. Only... redirected."

  The bleeding mirror shows nothing at first. Then shapes move in its crimson depths—not reflections but glimpses of somewhere else. A cathedral made of screaming stone. Throne carved from willing sacrifice. And sitting on it:

  A boy who isn't a boy anymore. Older, stretched, transformed into something that exists in the spaces between heartbeats. His eyes are holes in reality, but they recognize me across dimensions.

  They forgive me still.

  "Hello, sister," he says through the bleeding glass. "I've been waiting."

  The mirror cracks wider. Blood pours faster.

  Something is coming through.

  Sixty-six hours and counting.

  Time to find out if some wounds are meant to be healed, and others are meant to teach us how to bleed with purpose.

  Time to discover what I locked away from myself in the deepest places.

  And why I was so afraid of remembering it.