Chapter 5 - The Seventh Night
For six long nights, the palace remained entombed in an oppressive, terrified silence. The guests had fled back to their respective domains, leaving behind only the echoing footsteps of decaying guards and the sound of Lysenne weeping in her lavish chambers as her skin sloughed away like dry leaves.
On the seventh night, the heavy obsidian doors of Selmora’s private chamber groaned open.
Lysenne staggered across the threshold, draped in heavy velvet robes that swallowed her shrunken, twisted frame. In her trembling, spotted hands, she clutched the Eclipse Mirror. The dark glass writhed and pulsed with an inner turbulence, casting jagged shadows across the stone floor.
Behind her walked Orion. For the first time since the wedding night, her son looked directly at the faceless mother standing by the window. His eyes, usually bright with arrogant starlight, were hollowed out by guilt and exhaustion. The silver bridge he walked every night flickered outside the window, pulsing with a weak, dying rhythm.
"Mother," Orion choked out, his voice cracking with the weight of a ruined world.
Lysenne fell to her knees at the hem of Selmora’s silver robes, pressing her withered face against the cold floor. Her breath came in shallow, rattling gasps as the mirror in her hands shook violently, as if desperate to escape her grip.
From somewhere deep inside the black glass of the Eclipse Mirror, thousands of lost, disembodied voices began calling out in unison. They were the echoes of every mortal and spirit whose face had been blurred by the curse, crying out into the void.
"Mama?" whispered a small, heartbreaking voice from within the dark surface of the glass—the voice of a child who could no longer find his mother in the waking world or the dreamscape.
Lysenne flinched as if struck by lightning, dropping her forehead against the stone.
May you like
Another voice followed, and then a chorus of a thousand desperate echoes, chanting Selmora’s true name into the quiet chamber. The mirror trembled between Lysenne’s claw-like hands—not with the violence of a weapon, but with the organic, rhythmic thrumming of something desperately trying to breathe.
The room grew so cold that frost crawled up the stained-glass windows. The distant, mournful groan of the palace foundations vibrated through the floorboards as the moon itself seemed to lean closer, demanding the restoration of its true face.
