The clash of steel and the roar of war still thundered in Nora’s ears, but suddenly the world around her fractured like glass struck from within. Sound fell away. Movement blurred.
She stood alone on a barren plain beneath a sky split in two. One half burned with a hungry, red light. The other drowned in a pale, endless void.
Her breath clouded the silence, though the air was neither cold nor warm. In the distance, shadows gathered—armies without faces, their weapons raised not in rage, but in silence, as if awaiting a signal that had not yet been given.
A voice, deep as stone cracking, threaded itself through her skull.
“The war you see is not the war you fight. The true battle moves beneath the surface. Seek the root, or all branches will wither.”
Nora’s eyes fell to the earth. The plain beneath her feet was no longer stone but a vast, tangled web of roots, pulsing faintly with light. Some were healthy and strong. Others blackened, shriveled, bleeding ash instead of sap. She touched one, and fire surged up her arm—visions flashing so quickly she could barely comprehend them:
She gasped, stumbling back. The sky above fractured further, cracks of white light splitting across the red and the void. From those cracks, whispers poured out—not words, but syllables that felt older than language itself, twisting in her chest, filling her lungs until she thought she would drown on sound alone.
Then came silence.
A hand—human, warm, real—touched her shoulder. She turned. No one was there.
The vision shattered. The battlefield returned with brutal force: blades clashing, cries of the dying, smoke choking the air. Yet Nora staggered as though she had fallen from a great height. The roots, the tower, the mirror-faced figure—none of it left her.
She knew now that the war she fought with flesh and steel was only a reflection. Something deeper waited beneath. Watching. Waiting.
And it had chosen her to see.