Chapter 154: HALL OF ECHOES

CHAPTER 154

KAEL

I didn't want to be here.

That was the simple truth. The festival had been Lance's idea and I had been blackmailed into it. I accepted only because the alternative was Lance walking around with information I didn't want circulating. That had been enough motivation.

But this particular corner of the festival grounds was not part of any arrangement.

Ember had seen the sign from twenty feet away and grabbed my arm before I could process what she was doing.

HALL OF ECHOES — ENTER IF YOU DARE SEE WHAT WAS AND WHAT MIGHT BE.

She tugged my arm, her fingers warm and insistent. "Come on."

"No," I said, planting my feet.

She pulled harder, her grip tightening.

I should have stayed with Ragnar despite our fight.

I walked in behind her anyway.

The entrance was narrow. The temperature dropped the moment we crossed the threshold, just enough to notice, like stepping from sunlight into cool shade. The air felt heavier inside, with a faint musty smell.

The hall opened up into something much larger than the exterior suggested. The ceiling disappeared into darkness above us. The walls on either side were mirrors, floor to ceiling, dozens of them arranged at slight angles. Wherever you stood, you caught your own reflection from multiple points at once.

Except the reflections didn't behave like normal reflections.

Ember stopped walking and stared at the nearest one. Her shoulders tensed.

"Kael," she called quietly, her voice echoing slightly off the surface.

I stepped up beside her, my boots scraping against the stone floor, and looked.

The reflection wasn't showing us standing in this hall. It showed an open green field. Two small figures ran through it — a boy with dark hair and a slightly younger girl chasing him, both laughing at something I couldn't hear.

I know that field.

Something cold moved through my chest.

I knew that field because I had spent the better part of three years running through it. The house at the edge of it. The smell of the grass in summer. The specific way the light fell in the late afternoon.

The boy in the reflection was me at nine years old.

I had not thought about that field in a very long time. I had not thought about it intentionally because I didn't want to think about it.

Ember leaned closer to the mirror, her breath fogging the glass slightly. "Who are they?" Her voice was soft.

"Nobody," I clipped out immediately, my jaw tight.

She turned and looked at me, searching my face. I kept my expression completely even and moved forward, past that mirror, toward the next section. My pulse beat hard in my ears.

She followed.

......

The next mirror showed fire.

It was not the controlled kind from training or combat. An entire building consumed itself from the inside, the blaze so total that the structure was already beginning to collapse. Dark smoke climbed into the night sky.

I knew that building too. It had been my mother's building. And the fire had been caused by me. The memories threatened to snap out of the box where I had shoved them. I shook my head forcefully, willing the memories back down.

Not today. I wasn't going to wallow in self-pity today. I've forgotten about it and nothing will make me go down that lane.

I turned away before Ember could read my face.

I need to move. Keep moving.

Ember caught my arm. Her grip was firm, fingers pressing into my sleeve. "Kael. That building. I know you recognise it. What happened there?"

"I don't recognise the building," I stated, keeping my voice flat.

She looked at me for a long moment. She didn't believe me. I could see it in the way her eyes narrowed.

She turned back to the mirror.

"There's someone in the doorway," she said, pointing. "On the ground. Is that—"

"Don't." My voice came out harder than I intended. My dragon stirred uneasily inside me. "Keep moving, Ember."

She held my gaze for three more seconds, her hand still on my arm. Then she let go and walked forward.

I exhaled once and followed.

The Hall of Echoes. Of course it had to be this.

My dragon was unsettled. I could feel him shifting in the back of my chest, responding to the images the way he always did to things that touched the sealed-off parts of me. He was restless and agitated.

Calm the fuck down, Azriel.

He didn't calm down.

......

The third mirror stopped us both.

Ember had moved ahead of me slightly, turning the corner into a wider section of the hall, and gone still so abruptly I nearly walked into her. Her back went rigid.

I looked up.

The mirror in front of us was larger than the others. Taller. The frame around it was deep black iron that looked older than anything else in this hall.

The reflection inside it wasn't showing the past.

Ember stood in the centre of it, but not the Ember beside me. A future version. Her hair was longer, with silver streaks running throughout. Her amber eyes were open and burning, literally burning with gold light. She wore something dark and formal that I didn't recognise. Around her head sat a crown made from compressed fire, solid and blazing at the same time.

On her outstretched hands, all four elements moved — fire and air and earth and water cycling around her in a controlled orbit, responding to her the way breath responds to a living body.

She looked like a queen.

She looked exactly like what Mordecai and Michal had been discussing in careful voices when they thought I wasn't near enough to hear.

The Fire Queen.

Ember stood completely still beside me, staring at herself. Her breathing had grown shallow.

I watched her face. Something complicated moved through her expression. She wasn't scared exactly. It looked more like recognition of something she had known was coming but hadn't been ready to see right in front of her.

I didn't speak. There was no need. The image in the mirror was self-explanatory.

......

Then the mirror to the left of it showed something else.

I saw it before she turned.

Velmora Academy.

But not as it stood. What was in that mirror was wreckage. The towers I had spent three years looking up at had collapsed. The grounds were scorched in a way that spoke of sustained elemental force rather than ordinary fire. Students were running or what had been students. The mirror didn't show them clearly and I was glad.

And at the centre of the destruction, standing where the main hall should have been, a figure in dark.

Not Ember.

Someone else.

The crown was wrong. The fire was the wrong colour.

The Dark Queen. Or something that serves her.

A low growl moved through my chest before I could stop it. My dragon reacted to the image the way he reacted to any direct threat to the territory he had claimed.

Ember turned toward the sound. Her eyes moved to the second mirror and she went very still again.

I watched her read it.

Her jaw tightened. Her hands balled slightly at her sides. She was doing what she always did when something landed hard — deciding whether to let it show.

"Is that what happens if I fail?" she asked quietly. Her voice was surprisingly steady.

"That's what we're going to make sure doesn't happen," I returned, my tone firm.

She looked at me.

I held her gaze.

Something cracked behind her eyes. Not breaking down. Just the specific moment when someone decides to let something real show for a second before they put it back.

She nodded once. Then I looked back at the mirrors.

......

The large mirror with the crowned Ember shattered.

Not from either of us touching it. It simply cracked from the centre outward with a sound like ice breaking on a river and fell into pieces on the floor of the hall. The sharp cracks echoed loudly around us.

The image was gone.

Ember stared at the empty frame, her body tense.

I had her arm before she could take a step toward it. My fingers wrapped around her wrist.

"We're leaving," I stated.

She opened her mouth.

"Now," I pressed, my grip steady.

She looked at my hand on her arm and then at my face. Whatever she saw there made her close her mouth.

I steered her back through the hall toward the entrance, past the mirror showing the burning building without slowing down, past the mirror with the field and the two small running figures without slowing down.

I felt her glance at me when we passed that one.

I didn't look at it.

Outside, the festival noise hit us again: loud music, the smell of food in the air, and the ordinary chaos of people who didn't know what was in that hall and what it had just shown us.

Ember stood beside me and looked at the entrance for a moment, the cool evening air brushing against us.

Then she turned to look at me properly.

"The girl in that first mirror," she said. "The one with the boy. Who was she?"

My jaw tightened. I felt the old weight settle back into my chest.

I said nothing.

She watched my face for a long moment, her eyes searching.

"Kael," she pressed, softer now.

I looked at her. Held her gaze for exactly long enough to make it clear I was choosing not to answer.

"Some things," I delivered, "I'll tell you when I'm ready."

She looked at me for another moment, then nodded slowly and looked away at the festival crowd.

I exhaled.

She's going to ask again. Not today. But she's going to ask.

And eventually I was going to have to answer.

The thought settled in my chest next to everything else I'd been carrying since I was nine years old standing in that field watching that building burn.

I kept my face even and said nothing.