It began with a whisper.
Days passed. The world shifted subtly. Reflections moved on their own. The sigil on Kael's hand pulsed under moonlight.
Then the raven returned.
It tapped once on his window, left a scrap of parchment. Floating. Ink danced and bled across it:
"You have been Seen.
The First Veil draws near.
Seek the Mirror that Dreams.
Complete the Ritual. Or be unmade."
The message caught fire. Disappeared.
Kael dug through rumors in backstreets and black market dens. Found whispers of a ruin below Astraven's catacombs—where time forgot itself.
There, he found a cracked mirror embedded in stone. It shimmered.
He looked in.
The reflection had no human eyes.
It spoke:
"To ascend, you must take from another what cannot be returned. A name never spoken.
Find the Dreamwalker in the Painted Corridor.
Steal the forgotten name.
Speak it into this mirror."
Kael entered the Painted Corridor, and the world seemed to hush around him. The air grew thick with a golden haze, and time itself felt slower, more viscous. The walls on either side stretched into infinity, painted with swirling murals that moved when he wasn't looking directly at them. Celestial figures with blank faces wept over burning cities; trees bore clocks instead of fruit; rivers flowed upward into skies inked with impossible constellations. Each step Kael took echoed strangely, as if the corridor existed between moments. A low hum filled the air, like the remnants of a lullaby sung by something ancient and asleep. At its center, suspended just above the floor, was a woman wrapped in a thousand veils of translucent light—The Dreamwalker. She breathed slowly, her presence shifting the murals around her into scenes of slumber and shadow. Kael hesitated only a second before reaching out to touch her forehead.
He fell into her dream.
Colors swirled. Memories shifted. Voices of the dead.
One name pulsed through the chaos:
"Velistra."
He spoke it aloud. Light tore through him.
He awoke, bleeding.
He returned to the mirror.
Spoke the name.
The mirror shattered—not broken, but transformed. The Veil parted.
A surge of energy hit him—raw, electric, like every nerve in his body had been struck by lightning and set ablaze. It rushed through his limbs like molten fire, his vision swimming with fractals of light. The ground rippled beneath him, though he stood still, and the air vibrated with a soundless hum. For a moment, Kael felt suspended outside his own body, both weightless and crushed by unseen pressure. His heart thundered with a rhythm not his own, ancient and unrelenting, as if the very fabric of reality had acknowledged his presence and whispered, You are now bound.
Phase Step: the power to warp through space.
But in the reflection—
His eyes were no longer fully human.