The fire crackled in the dark, casting long shadows across the ruined chamber where they'd made camp. The remnants of an old shrine, its ceiling long caved in, moonlight filtering through broken beams, held the silence like a held breath.
The boy had fallen asleep by the wall, curled beneath Alpha's cloak. For once, his face looked peaceful. As if the ghosts of the day hadn't followed him into sleep.
Alpha sat with his back against a stone pillar, Vanitas resting across his lap. He turned it slowly, letting the dying firelight catch on the blade's black edge.
It didn't shine.
It drank.
Across from him, Selene sat cross-legged, elbows on her knees, staring into the fire with eyes that were older than they should've been.
She still held the obsidian shard Caelen had given her. She hadn't put it down since.
"You haven't said much," Alpha said quietly.
Selene didn't look at him. "There's not much left to say."
"That man, Caelen. He was your twin-wielder?"
She nodded once.
"He couldn't kill you."
A pause.
"No," she said. "But he did leave me to die."
Alpha let that settle. The wind outside whispered through cracks in the stone.
"What happens to an Echo when the other dies?" he asked.
Selene finally looked at him. Her eyes were sharp, but no longer defensive.
"They fade," she said. "Like mist in the sun. But if the ritual is left incomplete… they linger. Fractured. Lost. Half of a soul with no place to go."
She held up the shard, watching it glint.
"This was meant to bind the real and the reflection. The final seal. One kills, one lives, and the fragment burns away the other's name from the world."
Alpha frowned. "So no one remembers the Echo?"
"No one even knows there was a choice," she said. "They just remember the survivor."
She lowered the shard, her voice turning quieter.
"I remember both."
Alpha stared into the fire.
"Why did he run?" he asked.
Selene was silent for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible.
"Because I begged him not to."
She turned her head, meeting his eyes. "And in that moment, he saw me, not as an Echo, not as a copy, but as someone he loved. Someone he couldn't kill. But that mercy became a prison. For both of us."
She ran a hand through her silver-white hair. The strands caught the firelight like strands of ash.
"I think he hoped time would fix it. That I'd fade anyway. But I didn't. I clung to the sword. To my name. To my grief."
A bitter smile touched her lips.
"I didn't survive because I was stronger. I survived because I was angry. And because I wanted to know why I wasn't enough to die for."
Alpha didn't flinch. He understood that kind of rage.
And that kind of loneliness.
He leaned back against the pillar, fingers brushing Vanitas.
"…Will I have to face mine?" he asked.
Selene looked at him, and in that glance, there was no cruelty. No cynicism. Just a strange, aching softness.
"Yes," she said.
"When?"
She shook her head. "When it decides."
The fire cracked again.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Then, softly, Alpha asked, "If you had to choose again… would you let him kill you?"
Selene turned back to the flames.
Her voice was a whisper wrapped in centuries of silence.
"No," she said. "I would kill him this time."
Alpha didn't ask anything else.
Because for the first time, he understood her.
She hadn't been born cruel.
She'd been left behind.
Sleep came slowly.
Even with the fire dying to embers and the boy curled safe against the stone, Alpha couldn't quite slip into rest. Something in him thrummed, nervous, wrong. Like a wire pulled too tight.
When his eyes finally closed, it wasn't peace that found him.
It was glass.
And a voice.
A breath behind his ear that sounded like his own, only sharper.
"You're walking in my shadow."
He stood in a field of mirrors.
They stretched into the dark horizon, jagged and fractured, each one catching glimpses of a thousand Alphαs, but none of them were quite him. One had eyes that were too cold. One bled from the mouth and laughed. Another stood with Vanitas pierced through his own chest, smiling serenely as if he'd finally figured it all out.
Alpha turned, and in the distance, something moved between the mirrors. Its steps were his own. Its weight, familiar.
But it didn't blink.
Didn't breathe.
He backed away, hand reaching for Vanitas
..but it was gone.
The mirror nearest to him shimmered, and in it, he saw himself… but not quite.
This version of Alpha was younger, wearing the old cloak he'd buried months ago, his hair cropped short like it had been before the war.
But the eyes were wrong.
"You left me," it said.
Alpha's throat went dry. "I don't know you."
The reflection smiled.
"You will."
It stepped forward, no longer bound to the glass.
And then everything shattered.
He woke gasping, the cold sweat on his skin sticky and strange. It was still dark. The fire had died to a whisper of red, and the boy was still asleep.
But Alpha didn't move.
Because for a brief moment… he wasn't sure he had woken at all.
There was a faint echo in his mind, like a second breath.
A second presence.
Vanitas was warm against his side, warm, when it had always been cold.
He slowly reached out and took the blade into his hand.
The moment his fingers touched the hilt
You are not the first.
Alpha flinched.
The voice wasn't Selene's. Wasn't the sword's usual silence.
It was his own voice.
But… older.
Worn.
Tired.
He stared at the blade, eyes wide, but it only reflected his face in warped steel.
No whispers.
No voice.
Just the rising, sinking sensation of a thought that wasn't his.
The boy stirred, murmured something in his sleep. Alpha forced himself to stay calm, to not let the shaking take him.
But he felt it now.
Like a heartbeat beneath his own.
A version of himself.
Watching.
Waiting.
Breathing with him.
The fire had long since died, but Alpha was still awake.
Not by choice.
His body lay still, breathing evenly. But his mind had been pulled somewhere else, somewhere colder.
He stood in front of a house.
It was tall, too tall, a crooked silhouette against a sky without stars. The windows flickered with movement, shapes pacing inside, never stopping. There was no door. Only a wall of rotting wood and a scent of wet earth.
Something compelled him to knock anyway.
And the wall opened, not like a door, but like a wound splitting open, revealing the soft meat of memory beneath.
He stepped inside.
The floorboards creaked under his boots. Each creak whispered a name he didn't recognize. A hallway stretched in both directions, lined with mirrors that did not reflect him.
Instead, they showed lives that might've been.
In one, he was laughing with a woman whose face he couldn't see, but whose voice sounded like comfort.
In another, he stood over the body of someone he'd killed, weeping quietly, Vanitas clutched tight in trembling hands.
And in one mirror, he was young. A child again. But with eyes too old, too knowing.
"Which of us is real?" the child asked without moving his lips.
Alpha turned away.
The hallway twisted, became a stairwell spiraling downward, each step made of bone-white stone.
At the bottom, a room waited.
A single table. A chair. A second Alpha sat there already, waiting.
His back was turned. But the moment Alpha stepped inside, the second version spoke.
"You left me in the mirror."
Alpha swallowed. "I didn't know you were real."
"That's the point. I'm not. Or… I wasn't."
The second Alpha turned slowly.
His face was bruised. Scarred. His eyes were tired, rimmed with red, but behind them burned the same fire Alpha had always felt when battle loomed.
"But every time you look at Vanitas… I grow stronger."
The Echo stood.
And the room became a battlefield.
The table shattered. The walls burned. Screams echoed in reverse, from future deaths that hadn't happened yet.
Vanitas appeared in Alpha's hand.
So did a second one in the Echo's.
Twin blades. Mirror images. One pulsing warm. The other cold.
"You were supposed to kill me," the Echo whispered. "But you didn't. You left me alive. Now I get to show you everything you were too scared to see."
Alpha raised his blade, hesitated.
And in that moment, the Echo stepped forward and touched his forehead.
A flood of memories surged through Alpha's mind, not his own.
A war he never fought.
A betrayal he never committed.
A death he never died.
"I watched our world burn first."
He dropped to his knees.
The dream dissolved into light.
He woke with a gasp, the boy shaking his shoulder gently, eyes wide with concern. Morning had crept in.
But Alpha didn't speak.
Because now he knew what the Echo had shown him wasn't just illusion.
It was a memory.
And worse…
Part of him believed it.