It began on a night without stars.
The palace was silent, save for the soft rustle of banners shifting in windless halls. Victoria stood barefoot in her chamber, her long white nightgown brushing the polished stone. She had lit no lamps. The moonlight through the balcony doors was enough.
Her reflection stared back at her.
Not from a mirror, but from a pool of suspended water, hovering in the center of the room like a fragment of dream. This was not natural water—it shimmered with threads of silver and memory, always rippling inward but never spilling. It had arrived without warning. Without sound.
And Victoria had known what it was.
Nahliv.
The shapeless god. The Mirror-Sky.
The one who had once shown her all the selves she could become.
Victoria knelt before it. The water responded, undulating toward her cheek like a lover's hand.
She did not flinch.
"Why do I feel incomplete?" she asked it softly.
The water pulsed.
Her own reflection shifted.
A thousand versions of herself. One wearing her mother's crown. One in rags. One standing alone on a battlefield. One holding a child.
None were wrong.
None were right.
She understood, then: her mana core could never form the way others did.
It was not meant to crystallize around a single identity.
It had to be shaped by choice.
---
"You cannot build your core like a soldier builds muscle," said the echoing voice of Nahliv, not spoken aloud but pressed into her thoughts like rain on glass. "You must remember what you were not. And find the you that walks between them."
The air shimmered. The water split apart into a spiral of images: spells she had tried, versions of herself casting them correctly, incorrectly, desperately.
"I see them all," she whispered. "But I don't know which one is me."
"You are the seam," said the god. "You are not the mirror. You are the breath that fogs it."
And then, like a slow tide turning, she began to feel them—not just as visions, but as truths. Regrets she had never lived. Triumphs she had never earned. Mistakes she had yet to make.
One by one, she accepted them.
And the pool folded inward, into her chest.
Where a core should be, a mirror formed.
Not glass.
Not light.
But a clear, spiraling surface that showed nothing—and everything.
---
Her aura pulsed for the first time with its true shape. It did not blaze. It reflected.
Spells she once struggled to cast now adjusted to her instinctively. They didn't grow stronger; they grew deeper, more tailored to the exact moment.
She stood and extended her hand. A ripple of frost danced along her palm—too small for war, but impossibly precise. It turned midair, cutting through a falling petal.
She could now shift her stance by echoing a version of herself that had already dodged. Change her voice to match one that had already persuaded. Adjust a strike, not by guess, but by memory of potential.
Nahliv had given her the greatest gift: the permission not to choose one future.
But to live through them, and shape a core that breathed.
---
When dawn came, Victoria was still standing. Still humming the forgotten song. Her mirror-core pulsed gently beneath her ribcage, glowing with the echo of all she wasn't.
And yet, finally...
She felt whole.
---
In the days that followed, Victoria found herself no longer second-guessing. Each moment held a sense of clarity. She could anticipate a guard's stumble before his boot even caught the stone. In her swordplay, she no longer calculated movements—she remembered them, lived already in a future where she had survived.
It was not perfect precognition. It was something more refined. More human.
She made mistakes. But never twice.
"You've changed," remarked one of her instructors, Master Calthis, as he watched her weave a perfect wind veil spell around her opponent's blade. "You no longer fight like a student. You fight like someone who's already lost and learned."
She merely bowed her head. "Because I have."
The mirror-core deepened with each echo she accepted. Every failure became not shame, but foundation. She began recording her thoughts in a silver-bound book she kept close, marking each version she felt most deeply.
A Victoria who had fled instead of fought. A Victoria who ruled through compassion. A Victoria who never spoke, but always listened.
Some of them frightened her.
Others comforted her.
But all of them taught her.
---
In a moment of rare quiet, she returned to the mirror-pool—still hovering in her room, unchanged.
"Why me?" she asked.
The water pulsed again.
And the god's voice whispered like breath on a blade.
"Because you asked."
Victoria exhaled. The answer did not confuse her. It confirmed what she had long suspected. Magic did not belong to the gifted. Power did not belong to the chosen.
It belonged to the ones who searched, even when they did not know what they were looking for.
She pressed her hand to the surface of the pool. This time, her reflection smiled.
It was not a smile of victory.
But of recognition.
She had formed her core—not by following the path of others, but by seeing every path she could have walked and walking none of them completely.
She had become the seam, the breath, the echo.
And her journey had only begun.