Finn ran without knowing why. The scroll didn't explain. It never did. But he had learned to trust the sudden weight behind its commands. It never shouted. It nudged. A single word could tilt his blood the wrong direction. And so he ran.
Through alleys slick with night rain. Across bridges older than memory. Past the curfew bells that rang like questions. He ran until his breath burned and his boots felt like they'd fused to his feet.
When he stopped, he was somewhere unfamiliar.
The district had no name. Or if it did, no one said it aloud. The buildings leaned like they were listening. The windows held no glass. Just silence. The lanterns here didn't burn. They hummed.
The scroll had gone quiet.
Finn leaned against a low wall and unrolled it. One word, written in the center.
Wait.
So he did.
He sat on a broken stair, elbows on his knees, head bowed. He didn't close his eyes, not fully. But his thoughts wandered. Back to the voice in the Archive. Back to the Debtkeeper's breathless answer. A future that wasn't allowed.
What did that even mean?
Was he living a stolen path?
A sound. Footsteps. Deliberate.
He looked up.
A woman stood across from him, perhaps thirty steps away. She wore a mirror over her face, oval-shaped, framed in silver. Her robes were layered and thin, stitched from pages of text that fluttered when she breathed.
Finn stood.
"You're the one they warned me about," he said.
She didn't answer. She stepped forward.
Her voice, when it came, was soft and strange. "Do you know what a mirrorteller is, Finn Veleris?"
"No."
"Then let me show you."
She turned the mirror toward him fully. He expected his reflection. He saw something else.
Himself, yes. But older. Different. Standing on a tower. Holding a blade he didn't recognize.
He blinked. The image was gone.
"What was that?"
"A possibility."
He swallowed. "How many are there?"
She stepped closer. "As many as you allow."
The scroll pulsed.
The mirrorteller reached toward it.
Finn didn't move. She touched it with two fingers. A line of ink rose up from the parchment, floating in the air between them.
It wrote itself aloud.
He must choose to end.
"End what?" Finn whispered.
The mirror showed another image. A city burning. A scroll ripped in half. A child laughing amid ruin.
"End what?" he asked again, louder.
The scroll did not answer.
The mirrorteller turned and walked away.
Finn didn't follow. Not yet.
Instead, he unrolled the scroll and stared.
The next line was already there.
You have seen too much.
And beneath it, a smaller line, one he hadn't noticed before.
So has she.
He ran again. But this time, he knew where he was going.
He was going to the Temple of Names.
Because someone there still believed in fate.
And he was going to give them a reason to doubt.
He reached the Temple gates just before dawn. The light was thin and brittle. The guards had already rotated, half-asleep in their posts, and no one looked closely at a boy in a dark coat carrying nothing visible.
Finn moved with purpose. Through the side alley. Past the northern lectern where scrolls were counted before the day's reading. Into the shadow of the great bell, silent since the last King's Fate was declared. It had cracked down its side that day. People called it an omen. Finn called it a memory.
He waited.
The readers emerged just after sunrise, three of them. Robes white with silver trim, hoods pulled low. They carried the day's scrolls in open hands. One paused near him. A girl, perhaps twenty. Her hands shook. She didn't know why.
Finn stepped out.
"Read this instead," he said.
He held out the scroll.
She stared.
"Who are you?"
"No one. But this matters."
Her gaze flicked to the scroll. The thread was dark. Alive. The ink moved.
She took it.
For a moment, the world held its breath.
She opened the scroll.
The letters shimmered.
Then she screamed.
The other two readers turned. One shouted for the guards. The girl dropped the scroll. Her eyes were wide with something between awe and fear.
Finn didn't run.
He picked the scroll up and vanished into the shadows before anyone could stop him.
He didn't need to see it again.
He already knew what it had written.
The future is watching.
And it remembers your name.
Finn walked until the bells rang again, and this time, they did not sound right.
Something had shifted. He felt it in the way people paused when he passed. In the way the stones seemed warmer underfoot. In the whispers he didn't hear but understood anyway.
The scroll had spoken to more than just him.
He rolled it shut. Tight.
But it pulsed still.
Somewhere, the mirrorteller watched.
Somewhere, someone else was reading.
And the city had started to remember the boy it had erased.