(You don't remember biting the god back. But the blood's still on your tongue.)
The train doors hissed open like a warning. Rust and old magic laced the air as Kai stepped onto the cracked marble platform of the Azrael Central Station.
He didn't look back to see if Elio followed. He already knew he did. They were tethered now—by past lives, broken spells, and whatever the hell that mirror awakened inside them.
Azrael City pulsed beneath them, a metropolis of bending light and muttering shadows. Spires leaned like they were eavesdropping. Neon sigils blinked across the skyline in tongues only ghosts could read.
Elio caught up, breath even, but eyes wild.
"You okay?" he asked, voice low.
Kai kept walking. "I remembered a spell. One that shouldn't exist."
Elio raised a brow. "We're past the point of what 'should' exist."
They crossed the street where the air shimmered with pasttime interference—ghosts looping through traffic like echoes, phasing in and out of different decades.
"Where are we going?" Elio asked.
"To the Pastlife Archive," Kai muttered. "We need answers."
The Archive was buried beneath a clock tower older than the city itself. No signs, no maps, no official entrance. You had to want it to find it.
Or be cursed enough.
They descended through layers of time-rot, past forgotten graffiti, broken tech, vines growing in reverse. The world fell silent the deeper they went, until even their footsteps were absorbed by the stone.
When they reached the final door, Kai didn't knock.
He placed his palm on the obsidian surface and whispered a word that didn't belong in any language:
"Valeth."
The door melted.
The Archive wasn't a library.
It was a creature.
The shelves moved on their own. Staircases coiled like tongues. Books whispered your name—if they liked you. If they didn't, they screamed.
A thousand candlelights floated without flame. Dust rose in strange shapes. Paper fluttered in breaths.
Elio paused at the threshold. "I hate this place."
Kai nodded. "That's how you know it works."
A voice rasped from the shadows: "You've returned."
They turned.
A figure stood between two shelves that hadn't been there a second ago. Hooded. Tall. Bandages over where their eyes should be.
"I was wondering when the loop would bring you back."
Elio tensed. "You know us?"
"I remember you," the Blind Archivist said. "Not all do."
Kai stepped forward. "We need the prophecy."
The Archivist tilted its head. "It changes every time you read it."
"We'll risk it."
The Archivist stepped aside, revealing a page suspended in glass. Ink moved like smoke across it.
Kai read aloud:
"One will love. One will kill. One will burn. One will forget. One will rewrite."
The ink swirled.
Then changed:
"They always fail."
Elio grabbed Kai's wrist. "Get what you need. This place wants our minds."
Kai opened a ledger of their past lives. It screamed the moment his fingers touched it.
Visions hit like lightning:
• A battlefield soaked in rain. Elio stabbed him through the heart.
• A palace garden. Kai drank poison for Elio.
• A spaceship drifting through stars. A kiss before obliteration.
• A guillotine. Elio weeping beneath the blade.
Kai dropped the book.
"I saw us," he gasped.
"So did I," Elio whispered. "But this time felt... different."
The Archive trembled.
"Something's waking," the Archivist said. "Something that feeds on endings."
The lights blinked.
"It's rewriting the loop from inside."
Kai turned to Elio. "We need to find the mirror."
Elio nodded. "Before it finds us."
But before they could leave, the Archive shifted.
The floor dropped beneath them—not falling, not breaking—just rearranging itself. Shelves spun like gears. Walls rippled like water. And suddenly, Kai was alone.
"Elio?" he called.
Nothing.
The shelves whispered louder. Names. Dates. Screams. Elio's voice.
Kai sprinted between aisles that changed with every step. A flash of moonlight. Then snow. Then sand. The Archive was cycling through timelines.
Then he saw it: a door shaped like a coffin.
He opened it.
And walked straight into a memory.
He was a priest. Elio was a king. They stood in a moonlit temple.
"You know what this will cost us," Elio whispered.
Kai smiled. "I was always yours to burn."
And then the blade slid across his throat.
Kai snapped back.
He was in the Archive again, trembling. The book was gone. But a symbol—the mirror sigil—was branded on his palm.
The Archivist loomed nearby.
"It's begun," they said softly. "You've been marked again."
Just then, Elio stumbled into view—face pale, eyes hollow.
"I saw the day I let you die," he whispered. "And I let it happen."
They stared at each other.
Not with anger.
But with memory.
And horror.
"To find the mirror," the Archivist said, "you must go where the loop first broke."
"Where's that?" Kai asked.
The Archivist turned slowly.
"The town of Ilyor. Buried beneath flame. Erased from all maps."
Kai's breath caught. "That place isn't real."
"It wasn't. Until you made it so."
The Archive shook again.
Books screamed.
Candles exploded.
The prophecy reappeared on the glass, rewritten in fresh red ink:
"You've remembered too much."
Then it burst into flame.
They ran. The stairwells tried to close behind them. The walls hissed with spectral heat. A chorus of their names echoed through the dark like a threat.
And just before they reached the threshold—
—a final whisper from the Archivist:
"The Archive has teeth. And you've fed it."
The door slammed shut behind them.
But the darkness followed.
A sliver of shadow curled into Kai's coat. He didn't notice.
Elio looked over his shoulder, panting. "I think it took something from me."
Kai's voice was hoarse. "What?"
Elio touched his temple. "A name. I knew it when we entered. I don't now."
Kai's hand trembled. "It's already started. The memory unravel."
They both looked back at the door.
It was gone.
Just brick wall now.
Just silence.
Elio slumped against a rusted pipe as they reached the surface, the stars above Azrael City blinking like watchful eyes.
The silence between them wasn't peace.
It was fear with a name.
"Elio," Kai said, barely a whisper. "What name did it take?"
Elio closed his eyes. "It was a woman. No—a child. I think she had silver eyes. She said I loved her once. I... I don't remember her face anymore."
A pause.
"Maybe it wasn't real."
Kai didn't answer. He was staring at his hand again, at the mark the mirror left behind—thin lines, etched in perfect symmetry like a brand from a forgotten god.
"It is real," he said. "All of it."
A gust of wind blew past them, and for the first time, it carried a whisper they couldn't place.
Kai's eyes flicked to a rooftop. Nothing.
"Do you feel that?" he asked.
Elio nodded. "Something's following us."
They didn't speak again as they walked down the alleyway that led to their safehouse, one foot in the present, the other in memories that didn't want to stay buried.
The safehouse was built into the side of an abandoned bell foundry, a cathedral long stripped of holiness and overtaken by moss and grime. They climbed the winding staircase by lantern light, past shattered stained glass and rusted gears, until they reached the attic.
Elio sat on the floor, legs crossed. "The Archive changed us."
"No," Kai murmured. "The mirror did. The Archive just... remembered."
He knelt beside Elio, taking off his coat, and placed it over the mirror sigil that still glowed through his sleeve.
Elio's gaze was fixed on the shadows in the corners of the room. "Do you think this will happen again?" he asked.
Kai looked at him, haunted. "I think it never stopped."
Sometime around midnight, the bell beneath them rang.
No wind. No gears turning. Just a single clang that sent a chill up Kai's spine.
They froze.
"I didn't touch anything," Elio whispered.
Another clang. Deeper. Closer.
Elio grabbed the lantern. "Something's in here with us."
The bell tower moaned, metal against time. Dust fell from the beams like falling snow.
Kai stood. "It followed us from the Archive."
Elio's hand shook as he pointed to the far wall—where the brick had just shifted.
A crack was forming. Not like damage. Like a door.
Kai approached it slowly. Elio stayed behind.
The crack widened, revealing a black void where there should've been brick. And in that void—eyes. Dozens. All familiar.
Kai stumbled back.
They were his eyes. Reflections of every version of him that had ever lived. Soldier. Sorcerer. Thief. Monster.
And they all stared back with the same hunger.
"Elio," he said, voice barely audible. "I think it's... us."
A hand reached through the crack. Pale. Shaking. Burned.
Then a voice, deep and layered like a thousand Kai's whispering at once:
"You broke it again."
The void closed. The wall returned.
But the silence after was deafening.
Elio let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
They didn't sleep that night.
By dawn, they packed. No plan. Just instinct.
"Ilyor," Kai said, rubbing his temples. "It keeps repeating in my head. Like it wants us to remember it wrong."
"What do you mean?"
Kai looked at Elio, terrified. "I think we built the town in a dream... and something made it real."
They stepped out into the early morning mist. The streets were nearly empty, except for a street preacher screaming at the sky.
"The gods are dead!" the man wailed. "The loops are tearing! Time's bleeding!"
Elio and Kai exchanged a look.
Another omen.
Another warning.