Chapter 3 – Shadow In The Mirror

The thick white mist of the Velmaer highlands always began the day by seeping through the gaps around the rotting wooden window frame, crawling like a living thing across the cold, black stone floor of my private room. The early light filtering through the window was faint and weak, a mere ribbon of grey silk insufficient to illuminate the cramped space where the shadows of the old night still clung densely to the corners. I woke with a chill tracing a path down my spine. Last night had been terrifyingly silent. Ever since the contingents of the Cleansing Hand sect arrived in the valley below the Seventh Temple of Velmaer, the air within the temple had felt perpetually thick with tension.

I sat up, my chest heaving, exhaling thin wisps of vapor. As a defensive habit forged over seventeen years, I pressed my palm to my left breast, counting softly. Beneath the coarse fabric of my mist priestess robes, two slow, synchronized heartbeats still tapped out their strange rhythm. A shallow, rapid beat that was mine, and a deep, languid pulse belonging to the entity parasitic within this flesh. Vesh Anukor—or whatever ancient being slumbered deep beneath my ribs—had been silent all night. After the strange upheavals of the day before, his silence offered no peace. It felt like the drawn-out hush before a Velmaer blizzard ripped across the desolate black peaks.

I walked to the corner of the room, picking up the pristine white ceremonial robe I had neatly folded the night before. The rough texture of the fabric against my skin evoked a false sense of calm. I was a second-tier mist priestess; my duty was to maintain the rites for the temple of the Seventh Progenitor God—a deity unprayed to for five centuries. Yet now, I carried a fragment of that very ancient god’s soul within me. If First Master Caedmar Ostral ever discovered this truth, his sacred Cleansing ritual would tear my soul into tiny pieces to purge the realm of Iethan from the remnants of the Progenitor Gods.

I sat down before the small pine vanity table, its wood polished to a dark sheen. On its surface, the ancient mist priestess bronze mirror stood still, a silent witness. Its gold-red reflective surface was no longer gleaming, but dulled by time and stained with mottled streaks around its edges, making my reflection appear pale and distorted, like a wraith. I picked up my mother’s green jade comb. It was her only relic remaining after the horrific night at the Velmaer Mist Chasm seventeen years ago. The jade was usually cool to the touch, but this morning, as my fingers tightened around the comb’s body, I suddenly realized it was radiating an unusually warm current. The heat was not my own; it thrummed into my palm, stirring a deep unease.

I raised the comb, beginning to brush my long black hair that fell over my shoulders. The steady scrape of the comb against my hair mingled with the faint whistle of wind through the window crack. In the mirror, the twenty-four-year-old girl looked back at me with eyes tired from lack of sleep, her skin pallid in the weak morning light. I wondered, how much of this body truly belonged to Yvera Thaal, and how much had been gnawed away by that parasitic soul fragment?

"You are afraid."

His low, resonant whisper erupted directly within my ribs, bypassing my ears to transmit straight into my consciousness. It was his voice—that sound carrying the desolation of an ancient cosmos, cold yet possessing a strange allure.

I stopped combing, pressing my lips together without answering. I didn’t want to admit my weakness before this entity. I feared him, feared the insidious control he was slowly asserting as the five-hundred-and-second blood-moon approached.

My defiant silence seemed unable to repel his presence. On the contrary, I felt an intense fluctuation in the flow of spiritual energy within my body. Vesh Anukor’s depth of awakening was increasing at a dizzying pace. From its usual faint level two, it abruptly surged straight to level four.

The constellation birthmark beneath my ribs pulsed with a cold ache, as if a thousand tiny needles pierced my flesh. Immediately afterward, a powerful and alien warmth surged, running along my shoulder blade and then spilling down my right arm.

The arm holding my green jade comb suddenly froze in mid-air.

I wanted to lower my hand to place the comb on the table, but all the muscles in my right arm suddenly stiffened, completely beyond the control of my will. The green jade comb slipped from my powerless fingers, falling onto the wooden table with a dry clatter before rolling into a dark corner. Yet, my hand did not fall with gravity. It hovered in the damp air of the room, then began to move in the opposite direction, slowly and gracefully.

A choked gasp caught in my throat as I tried in vain to control my fingers. "My hand…"

I wanted to use my left hand to grasp my rebellious right wrist, but my body seemed to have been split in two. My right hand—now a not-hand, guided by Vesh Anukor’s will—slowly moved towards my neck. It was a possessive caress, a touch that transcended every physical boundary I had ever imagined.

My own fingers gently brushed the sensitive skin beneath my ear. A numbing electric current shot from that point of contact straight down my spine, making me tremble. My skin flushed hot beneath my own touch, but the sensation was utterly alien. It was the strength and rhythm of a man’s caress—slow, heavy, imbued with endless curiosity and an undisguised hunger for possession. His finger slid along the curve of my neck, lightly tracing the softest, most sensitive flesh, then paused at the hollow of my protruding collarbone.

The heat radiating from my palm was now so dense I could smell the cold mist mingling with the warm scent of my skin. A second breath, deeper and heavier than my own, seemed to ghost against my ear, though the room was utterly empty.

"Do not resist," his whisper came again from deep within my chest, carrying a weary yet authoritative tone. "I only wish to feel this skin, this heartbeat…"

Panic erupted in my mind like a wildfire. This touch, this forced intimacy that trespassed the very boundaries of my soul, was drawing me into a binding pact I had never willingly accepted. If I surrendered, if I allowed him to continue his insidious caress, I would forever forfeit my human autonomy. I was no soulless puppet for an ancient evil to manipulate at will.

I gritted my teeth, pouring every ounce of my remaining mental strength and will to survive into my restrained right arm. Two heartbeats hammered in my chest, battling fiercely for control over the blood surging through my veins. I could not let myself drown in this gentle yet dangerous embrace. With a superhuman effort, I tensed my shoulders, a raw gasp tearing from my throat as I fought to reclaim my body.

"No."

I ripped my hand from my neck. In the mirror, the other girl replaced my hand—and smiled.

My throat was raw and burning, as if scorched by fire. My frantic footsteps echoed on the cold, black flagstones of the corridor, pursuing me like an invisible phantom. I dared not look back at the bathing chamber, where the bronze mirror had just revealed a horrifying reality—a strange face lurking behind the mist, and a second, sinister heartbeat thrumming out of sync beneath my ribs. I needed to see the Mistress. I needed an explanation from the only person who had brought me out of the Velmaer Mist Chasm on that fateful night seventeen years ago.

I pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped into Mistress Esh Vorrim’s chambers. The room was steeped in the familiar scent of old parchment and dried herbs, a silent space filled with heavy wooden shelves laden with ancient tomes detailing the lost Iethan Ancestor Gods from five centuries past. On the rough, large wooden table, dusty stacks of archived documents formed towers of varying heights, obscuring the room’s darker corners.

In one corner of the ancient oak table, an untouched cup of hot tea still released a thin wisp of steam. The delicate vapor curled slowly before quickly dissipating into the cool air of the room, the surface of the tea as still as glass, as if to contrast with the chaos and fear raging violently in my chest.

Mistress Esh sat there, as still as an ancient statue carved from Velmaer mountain stone. A smoldering oil lamp cast a warm, yet melancholic, red glow, silhouetting her hunched back against the black stone walls behind her. Her slow, hoarse voice spoke before I could even approach: "Why such haste, Yvera? A mist priestess should not let the outside mists disturb her mind."

"Mistress… the mirror…" I gasped, my breath ragged, my hands clutching the edge of the wooden table to keep my knees from buckling. "In the mirror… there was something. I just saw another face… and two heartbeats…"

Mistress Esh slowly set down her quill. Her gaze, though clouded by age, held a chilling, penetrating clarity as it lifted from the ancient pages and fixed on me. She showed no surprise or alarm. Her cold composure lingered in the silence, so profound I could hear the soft sizzle of oil in the lamp’s wick.

Instead of answering about the mirror, Mistress Esh sighed softly, pushing the hot tea cup gently towards me. Her blatant evasion was like a bucket of ice water thrown over me, erecting an invisible wall of suspicion between us.

"Drink some tea," her voice deepened, slow and carrying an indescribable weight of unanswered secrets. "The mist is colder tonight than usual. It can make one overthink, and see illusions in the shadows."

"No, it wasn’t an illusion!" I cried out, my voice slightly off-key. My trembling hands clutched the rough fabric of my pristine white ceremonial robes, seeking some anchor to hold myself to reality. "I know what I saw. It’s under my skin. It’s watching me…"

At that very moment, a warmth bloomed deep within my ribs. Emergence-depth was at three. The parasite within me wasn’t dormant; he was silently observing everything from the inside. I felt his presence like a cold, subterranean current flowing down my spine, silent yet potent, awaiting a reaction from the woman opposite me. He was hearing everything.

Mistress Esh no longer looked into my eyes. She looked down at the green jade comb askew in my hair—my mother’s only keepsake, now radiating an unusual warmth against my scalp.

"Did you touch the Seventh Temple’s stone last night?" she asked abruptly, her tone shifting to one of sternness, yet laced with a subtle anxiety.

I froze. Her question was like a sharp needle piercing the secret I had always tried to hide. The anchor stone of the Seventh Temple—the shrine to the unprayed-for god, where every touch brought a strangely warm sensation, as if a living presence whispered beneath the ancient black stone. I had touched it. I always touched it whenever I felt alone in the Velmaer mist.

But looking into Mistress Esh’s deep-set eyes, I knew I couldn’t tell the truth. Our relationship, built on seventeen years of protection and reverence, suddenly felt strained and strangely distant. I felt an invisible defensiveness rising within me.

"Yes. As usual." I bowed my head, lying hesitantly. "I merely cleaned and tended the lamps, as a mist priestess must."

Mistress Esh watched me for a long time, her gaze seeming to pierce through my flesh, seeking the entity hidden within me. The tightly closed door separated us from the outside world, where wisps of mist stirred gently outside the window like lurking specters, making the atmosphere in the room even more suffocating and tense. She surely knew I was hiding something significant. And I, too, had a premonition that she held a terrible truth about that night in the Mist Chasm seventeen years ago, a truth she had never been ready to reveal.

Mistress Esh asked no further questions. She simply said, "Don’t tend the Seventh Temple’s lamps tonight." I nodded, not understanding why she sounded almost pleading.

Night in the Velmaer highlands always carried a peculiar silence. It wasn’t the gentle peace of a mortal village, but a dense, suffocating stillness, chilling to the bone. There was no rustle of insects in the grass, no beat of a snow owl’s wings along the black cliffs of the Seventh Temple of Velmaer. This silence was hollow and profound, as if the entire living world had been swallowed by the thick white mist blanketing the mountaintop, leaving me utterly alone in this cosmic darkness.

I lay on the narrow bed of a mist priestess, the rough wool blanket pulled to my chest doing little to ward off the cold seeping from the black stone floor. I was exhausted, my eyes fixed on the smoke-stained rafters above, but sleep refused to come. Insomnia had claimed me. My mind felt taut as an over-pulled string, and no matter how I tried to close my eyes, to regulate my breathing, I couldn’t quiet the insidious presence stirring beneath my ribs. In the corner, a slow-burning oil lamp cast a flickering yellow flame, dancing on the black stone wall, stretching distorted shadows that seemed to pulse like a second breath accompanying me through the late hours.

Suddenly, a wave of warmth surged from my left chest, precisely where the constellation birthmark throbbed gently beneath my thin white ceremonial robe. His voice rose. It didn’t reach my eardrums like a normal physical sound, but whispered directly in my bones, echoing down my spinal cord and spreading to my very fingertips.

"Don’t abandon me."

The plea carried a boundless, profound loneliness, the primal fear of a soul on the verge of complete erasure from oblivion should its vessel reject it.

"Leave me alone."

I retorted in my mind, gritting my teeth to prevent any sound from escaping my lips. I pressed my palms to my ears, attempting to create a physical barrier against the intrusion. But it was a futile effort. His voice wasn’t in the external world; it was rooted deep within my cells, my very bloodstream, transforming my skull into a perfect resonance chamber.

A suffocating pause stretched between us. Then, his invisible sigh echoed back into my joints.

"You don’t understand."

"I don’t want to understand."

I cut him off instantly, cruel and decisive. I wanted no part in being the vessel for a parasitic evil god, one the Cleansing Hand cult relentlessly hunted to purify with death. After my answer, he fell completely silent. But it wasn’t an empty silence; it was a wounded melancholy, a quiet, sorrowful retreat echoing from the depths of his soul, making my chest skip a beat.

That melancholic silence was the first crack in my formidable wall of defense. I lay still beneath the cold blanket, and a question I had never dared to face suddenly crept into my awareness. Was he… truly an enemy? Since awakening within me, he had never harmed me, never forced me to commit evil deeds, nor had he drained my life force as ancient texts described dark spirits. On the contrary, whenever I faced the temple’s chilling austerity or the doubts of those around me, his warmth beneath my skin felt like an unseen anchor. If he truly was a brutal evil god from five hundred years ago, why did his voice hold so much pain and loneliness? Why was he more afraid of me abandoning him than I was of him consuming me?

My breath began to quicken as conflicting thoughts swirled. And then, I felt a second, deeper current beneath my own breath, moving in synchronicity just below my larynx. It was a silent yet not silent state, two breaths layered, one fast, one slow, one warm, one cold, accelerating then abruptly slowing to regulate the turmoil within me. Two heartbeats in one chest, a soft collision in the hushed night.

This forced synchronicity suffocated me to the brink of madness. I wanted to scream, to tear open my own chest to expel this entity, but all I could do was lie still in utter helplessness beneath the fading oil lamp.

I covered my ears. I still heard. My hands finally dropped away — I realized covering my head was useless.

On the fourth night of the blood-moon, white mist draped the black rock ridges of the Velmaer highlands in a cold, dense shroud, so thick I could barely see my hand as I stepped out of the mist priestess quarters. Grand Matron Esh Vorrim had sternly warned me, with the quiet authority of one who had guarded these ruins for half a century, never to venture to the peak of the Seventh Temple of Velmaer. She said it held only the relics of an unprayed-for god, a void with no escape that could devour the soul of any weak mortal.

But I had no other choice. Four days of relentless sleeplessness, coupled with the rustling whispers like insects crawling beneath my skin every rising blood-moon night, had pushed me to the precipice of madness. Deep within me, beneath this ribcage, a second heartbeat pulsed, slow and alien, never quite aligning with my own. It was a silent parasite, an uninvited stranger from the Velmaer Mist Chasm fifteen years ago, and now, with the five hundred and second blood-moon drawing near, he was emerging with increasing clarity. I had to expel him. I had to perform this self-exorcism, at any cost, before the Cleansing Hand cult set foot on the Velmaer Temple peak and discovered the abnormal current flowing through my veins.

I ascended the steep stone steps, worn smooth by ages and wind. The path to the Seventh Temple of Velmaer’s peak held no torches, only the biting cold mist that flooded my lungs each time I tried to breathe deeply to calm my trembling chest. As I passed through the arched doorway of the dark sanctum, the first thing to catch my fearful gaze was the sacred stone at the heart of the ancient altar.

The anchor stone pulsed with a distinct warmth beneath my cold palm, radiating a strange, living heat that seemed utterly out of place in the glacial air. It wasn’t the comforting warmth of a hearth in a bedchamber, but an ancient, profound heat, as if the black stone preserved the very breath of some colossal entity slumbering deep beneath the earth. This warmth felt like an invitation, an invisible pull that stripped away my last defenses, drawing me closer, unconsciously, like a moth to a mesmerizing flame in the dark.

Above the altar, the sanctum’s single, flickering yellow lamp swayed violently as a gust of wind swept through a crack in the stone archway, casting long, distorted shadows across the moss-stained walls. Those weak, anemic streaks of light were barely enough to illuminate the small space around the ancient stone pedestal, leaving the rest of the temple plunged into the desolate darkness of dead gods. In that dim glow, the green jade comb nestled in my hair—my mother’s sole relic—stirred, its cold surface brushing my scalp like a silent reminder of the curse I carried.

I turned my head, gazing through the temple’s glassless arched window. Outside, the thick, dark mist of the fourth night swirled continuously from the abyssal Velmaer Mist Chasm below, completely engulfing the seven surrounding mountain peaks. The world beyond the temple seemed to have vanished, leaving only me, this solitary temple peak, and the entity writhing within my body. This absolute solitude was both a terror and the only shield allowing me to perform the forbidden ritual without fear of detection.

I knelt on the cold stone floor, two heartbeats suddenly pounding in my chest, distinctly out of sync. One was fast and shallow, born of sheer terror; the other, slow and heavy, as if mocking my futile efforts. I squeezed my eyes shut, intertwining my trembling fingers before my chest, trying to gather the meager spiritual energy left in the veins of a mist priestess to utter a prayer. I faced the endless void above the stone pedestal, using every ounce of strength from my constricted throat to whisper the ancient plea:

"Oh, realm of forgetting, take what is not mine."

I repeated the prayer once, then twice, my voice trembling and echoing between the crumbling stone walls. I waited for a purifying light to descend, for a tearing pain or a cold torrent of exorcism magic from the Ancestor Gods to cleanse my blood, to expel the parasite. But nothing happened. The sanctum remained steeped in terrifying silence, save for the faint crackle of the flickering yellow lamp.

Then, abruptly, a searing heat, like molten iron, surged from the very core of my ribs. It didn’t come from outside, but emanated from within, coursing along the swollen veins beneath my skin. I felt the entity’s depth rise at a dizzying pace, crossing the vague boundaries of the past few days to press against the surface of my consciousness. He was surfacing, stronger and clearer than ever, as if the very location of the Seventh Temple of Velmaer and the anchor stone were imbuing him with boundless power.

In the silence of my mind, a deep, husky voice, carrying a profound second breath, resonated through every fiber of my flesh and bone:

"You don’t understand. I am NOT the enemy."

I froze, my breath catching in my throat. These were no longer the fragmented, vague whispers I’d grown accustomed to in dreams or moments of weakness. This was a complete sentence, brimming with power, carrying an ancient, proud cadence yet imbued with a solitude so profound it tightened my chest. He was defending himself. He was speaking directly to me, using my own vocal cords to vibrate those somber tones.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find my own voice as horror choked every thought. I realized my self-exorcism ritual had failed miserably. The anchor stone was not a tool to banish him; on the contrary, this place was his home, his anchor, allowing him to root deeper into my soul. My sneaking up here had only tightened this parasitic link.

In a surge of absolute panic, my mind reeled, and my hand instinctively reached for the anchor stone once more, like a drowning person grasping for a solid foothold in a raging current. But the moment my palm touched the rough, cold surface of the stone, the anchor stone’s warmth immediately resonated with the abnormal pulse in my chest, sending an invisible shockwave along my spine. The constellation birthmark on my side flared with a searing pain, as if a red-hot iron had been pressed against my flesh, forcing me to bite down on my lip to stifle a scream. He didn’t want to leave, and this stone wouldn’t release me.

I pulled my hand from the stone. I left. But the stone remained warm where my hand had been—long after I was gone.

The steep path from the Seventh Temple down to the valley was shrouded in a thicker-than-usual band of night mist. The opaque white mist of the Velmaer plateau coiled into dense clumps, clinging to the cold black stone beneath my feet. The faint yellow lights from distant temples couldn’t penetrate this thick fog; they were merely dim, solitary specks, like dying stars in the endless void.

I pulled my white mist priestess cloak tighter around my shoulders. Wind whistled through the rock crevices, carrying the bone-chilling cold of this sunless land. Tonight was the fourth night since the new cycle began, with the blood-moon reigning over the plateau sky. At twenty-four, I thought I was accustomed to Velmaer’s solitude and cold, but tonight, the silence carried an unusual weight, like a fragile mask concealing an impending danger.

Beneath the thick, coarse fabric of my cloak, the constellation birthmark on my left ribs throbbed faintly. The pain wasn’t intense, just a light, warm touch, like an invisible finger tracing along my bones.

I am still here.

I didn’t hear his voice echo in my mind, but the thought materialized there, imbued with the low, ancient chill of Vesh Anukor. Since my return from the Seventh Temple of Velmaer after the failed prayer, he had retreated, sinking into the fourth depth of my consciousness to evade scrutiny. He no longer wrestled for control of my body, no longer tried to borrow my hands to scrawl strange glyphs onto ancient stones. He chose silent observation. Yet, the silence of a parasitic god was never an absence. I still felt that second, deeper, heavier breath moving in rhythmic counterpoint beneath my own, a constant, intimate reminder of the blood pact forged seventeen years ago.

My fingers tightened around the green jade comb nestled in my hair. My mother’s comb, it seemed to radiate an unusual warmth, like an anchor holding me steady against the encroaching mist that threatened to swallow everything. My mother had died at the bottom of the Velmaer Mist Chasm seventeen years ago, on that fateful night I was cast into the abyss and saved by this fragment of a soul. Sometimes I wondered, did she know her daughter would live a life sharing every breath, every heartbeat, with a phantom of the past?

I stepped through the black stone archway of the Mist Priestess Hall. The place was as still as an ancient tomb. The other mist priestesses had likely long since fallen into slumber, or were deep in prayer within their private cells under the watchful eye of Grand Matron Esh Vorrim. The oil lamps in the ceremonial corridor had been extinguished hours ago, leaving only the faint, diffuse glow of the mist seeping through the high ventilation slits.

My footsteps were feather-light, barely disturbing the silence on the damp stone floor. I moved through long corridors where headless Ancestor Gods stood sentinel, looming like specters guarding the past. My heart felt heavy. The failed prayer at the Seventh Temple of Velmaer still haunted me—the unanswered pleas, the anchor stone’s strangely warm pulse in my palm, and the silent, yet fierce, resistance from the parasitic entity within me.

Something is wrong.

The thought flared in my mind, sharp and sudden enough to halt my steps in the empty corridor. The wind outside had ceased its howl, but the mist seemed to be seeping indoors, coiling around my feet like invisible tendrils.

I placed a hand over my chest, where my heart hammered. And then, I felt it more clearly than ever: the second heartbeat, slower, out of sync yet inextricably bound to my own life, now trembling faintly. It was his instinctive reaction to a danger I couldn’t yet perceive. Though he still held himself at a safe remove, his vigilance pulsed through my nervous system like a chilling current.

I continued my walk, but each step now felt heavy as if weighted with stones. My destination was the small room at the end of the western corridor—my private altar, where I folded my white ceremonial robe each day, the only place I could find a semblance of false peace in this tumultuous realm of Iethan.

As the final turn came into view, I froze. The light spilling from beneath my door was not the familiar warm yellow glow of my small oil lamp, but a spectral, cold, and eerie gray.

My altar door stood ajar. I always secured it with the heavy oak bolt before leaving. No mist priestess was permitted to enter another’s private chamber at this hour, and Grand Matron Esh Vorrim never arrived unannounced.

I crept closer, trying to breathe as softly as possible. The second breath beneath my ribs seemed to cease as well. Vesh Anukor’s silence now was not an absence, but the extreme focus of a predator hidden in the shadows, awaiting its moment or preparing to confront an enemy.

I gently pushed the thick wooden door. The hinges shrieked a dry, grating sound, tearing through the stillness of the corridor.

Inside the room, thick darkness clung to every corner, save for the stone altar at its center. The strange gray light emanated from a small censer placed upon it—an unfamiliar incense, smelling of cold lightning and ash, utterly unlike the gentle frankincense of the Mist Priestess Hall. And there, directly before the altar, a dark figure stood tall.

It was a tall figure, cloaked in the long, ash-gray robes of the Cleansing Hand cult. Their face was completely hidden beneath a deep hood, yet I felt razor-sharp, cold eyes fix on me the moment I stepped inside. In their hand, a short staff of black wood, inlaid with silver-gray veins, pulsed with an overwhelming spiritual energy. Caedmar Ostral’s purifier. He had found his way here. He stood motionless, like an ancient stone statue, but the killing intent radiating from his body thinned the air in the room, making it suffocatingly difficult to breathe.

Someone. In my altar.

I wanted to recoil, to turn and flee, to scream an alarm for Soren or the Grand Matron, but my feet felt nailed to the cold black stone floor. Utter terror choked my throat.

It was then that I felt a sudden, searing heat erupt from the constellation birthmark on my left side. It swirled like a flow of molten lava, coursing down my arm and pooling at my wrist. Beneath my thin skin, the veins on my wrist began to shift to the dark, greenish-black of ancient shadow.