Chapter 22: The First Crack
The mimic's voice clung to the air long after he vanished. It wasn't just the words It's not her name. She never told you the truth. It was the way Kael looked at Lyra afterward.
Like he didn't know her.
Like maybe he never had.
They walked in silence, the mist crawling back over the cobblestones as if sealing the town behind them. The sky above Whisperwood was the color of bruises purple, gray, sickly blue. Even the moon looked half-sick, veiled behind sheets of fog.
Kael hadn't said a word in almost an hour.
But Lyra could feel the storm gathering in him.
They found a half-collapsed house at the edge of town. The bones of the place were old wood stripped down to gray, floorboards cracked. Moss crept up the walls like the past refusing to die.
Lyra started a small fire with the flint she kept tucked in her boot. She didn't look at Kael as she lit it. Didn't speak.
She knew better than to speak too soon.
He sat against the far wall, away from her, eyes locked on the flames like they might flicker into answers. His pendant swung slightly from one hand, catching the firelight. He turned it over once. Twice. Then stilled.
"You knew him," Kael said quietly. "The mimic. Rourke."
Lyra paused, blade in hand. She was sharpening it more for the rhythm than the edge.
"I knew of him," she said. "Not him. Not like that."
Kael didn't look at her. "But he knew you."
"People say a lot of things when they're trying to scare you."
He laughed once, hollow. "He wasn't trying to scare me. He was trying to tell me the truth."
Lyra finally looked at him. "And you believed him?"
Kael met her eyes, and there was something hard in his gaze she hadn't seen before.
"I don't know, Lyra. That's the problem." He tapped his temple, eyes flaring. "I don't know what's mine and what's been taken. What if everything I believe about you is a lie someone else wrote in my head?"
Lyra's jaw clenched. "I've protected you since the moment I found you."
He stood, suddenly. "Or since the moment you let me find you."
The words hit harder than a blade.
Kael paced to the broken window, arms crossed. "Why didn't you tell me what the pendant means? Why do you keep flinching when I ask about the night I came here?"
"Because I don't have all the answers," she snapped. "Because this place this curse eats memory and truth like it's feeding off us. And because you asked me to stop reminding you."
He turned. "No. You decided I couldn't handle it."
Silence stretched between them, taut as wire.
Then Kael closed his eyes. "You know what's worse than forgetting?"
Lyra didn't answer.
"Wondering if the only person you trust is the one who's rewriting you."
That night, Kael didn't sleep.
He sat against the far wall, the fire burning low between them. Lyra lay curled near the hearth, eyes closed but breath tight.
And Kael watched her.
She looked peaceful, almost fragile, but Kael knew better. She was anything but fragile. She was dangerous in the way steel was silent, sharp, and forged in heat.
And now… he didn't know where the edge was pointed.
Sometime after midnight, he drifted off.
And he dreamed.
He stood in a clearing. A well sat in the center, ringed with black stone and overgrown with moss. The trees around it leaned inward, branches like reaching fingers.
A girl stood beside it.
Not Seren.
Not Lyra.
Someone else.
Her back was turned, hair long and tangled with leaves. She hummed softly, the tune familiar.
Kael stepped forward, heart pounding. "Do I know you?"
The girl turned.
Her face was missing.
Just a blank mask of skin where eyes and mouth should be.
But the voice that came from nowhere was Lyra's.
"Don't ask about the well, Kael."
Kael woke with a jolt, drenched in cold sweat.
And in the silence that followed, something scraped across the floorboards outside.
A single sheet of paper is slipped under the door. Kael picks it up. Scrawled in red:
"You were there, Kael. Ask her about the well."