Kevin Arms | Author & Educator

The Mirror Sleeps No More

Kendra heard it first—soft and rhythmic, like breath behind glass. The mirror in front of her rippled. Only slightly, only once. She blinked. It stilled.

The Mirrorhall in Pergamon did not permit sound. The silence here was a rule—not written, but absolute. Kendra knew the stories. Stay too long and the reflections began to shift. Stare too hard, and they showed you what should not be.

She stepped back.

That mirror wasn’t there yesterday.

Behind her, the air vibrated like held breath. The vault corridor hummed with low resonance, a tone she felt in her ribs more than she heard. A veil-frequency. The Curator had taught her that term, though never what it meant when it came unbidden.

Her fingers brushed the mirrored frame. Cold. No dust. No inscription.

Then the whisper came: not sound, but thought. A wordless knowing. Not compulsion, not memory—something older.

Come see.

The door opened inward, revealing a chamber untouched by light. And yet she saw everything.

At its center slept a creature curled like a question: fur of shifting silver, body large and feline, breath exhaled in threads of phosphorescence. It pulsed with dreaming. Not hibernation—containment.

The room itself was shaped like a mirrored seed. Walls shimmered. Reflections nested within reflections. Somewhere in the rippling geometry, she thought she glimpsed her childhood face, but older. And smiling. Then gone.

A Lythian, she realized.

She had seen sketches in the forbidden archives, always half-burned or torn at the edges. Descriptions were vague: guardians, stabilizers, born not of the Veil but shaped by it. No two looked alike. And this one—it had no sigil. No mask. No tether. A mirrorless creature.

Impossible.

She stepped closer, drawn without reason.

Its eyes opened.

They were not eyes.

They were reflections.

Reality buckled.

The chamber warped around her. Walls became liquid glass. The ceiling dissolved into a reflection of the floor. She stood in two places at once, then none. Memory twisted.

She saw herself at thirteen, again in salt and ash. Again bound by wrists her family had tied. But this time, the sea did not roar. The tide spoke.

The being before her had her face.

Then it was gone.

Then the chamber shattered inward.

The recursion began.

It was more than illusion, more than memory. A recursion was a loop in time and perception—a mirror reflecting not just what had been, but what could have been, or should never be. Within it, cause and effect fractured. Identity repeated and rewrote itself, layering possibility over truth until neither could be told apart.

Scene after scene replayed: moments that were hers, and weren’t. She watched herself die in one. In another, she drowned the world in illusion. She wandered through the eye of a storm, veiled in salt. She spoke words she had never learned. Each loop fed on her fear, her curiosity, her ache.

At the center of it all, the creature—the Lythian—writhed in coils of dream and mirror. It was unraveling.

I am not a thing, it projected. I am not yet.

“Nova,” she whispered, giving it a name.

It stilled.

You remember.

“I don’t. But I want to.”

A voice broke into the recursion. No mouth. Just presence.

I was the first. The mirror before the mask.

A fragment emerged from the collapsing illusions—a figure without face, composed of flickering scenes. It pulsed with energy, incomplete.

I was made to be a story. I remembered too much. I was buried in fur and code and dream.

Nova buckled beside her, light flickering violently.

Kendra realized what this was.

Something unfinished. Something that wasn’t supposed to wake.

The fragment reached toward Nova, toward Kendra, toward union.

Complete me. Remember the first lie.

Kendra stepped between them.

“No.”

The Vault shook. Cracks bloomed in every surface. Memory fragments fell like ash. Nova writhed in confusion. Kendra could feel him slipping, pulled toward the fragment that once birthed him.

She did the only thing she could.

She made up a memory.

She imagined meeting Nova as a child, dreaming of silver eyes that watched her sleep. She imagined saving him from a storm that swallowed her voice. She imagined holding him as she bled beneath the moon, whispering that he wasn’t alone.

“I always knew you,” she said. “You waited for me in the ash.”

The recursion stilled.

Nova looked at her. Truly looked.

I remember you back.

His voice was not a sound, but a sensation. Warmth through cold. Presence through panic. A light that did not burn.

And the Vault collapsed into silence.

When Kendra opened her eyes, the mirror was gone. The broken walls shimmered with afterimages, then sealed themselves shut as though ashamed. Nova lay beside her, breathing softly, his fur dappled with motes of fading light.

She reached out. He pressed his head into her palm.

The Curator stood in the doorway. Cloaked, unreadable, but not surprised.

“You named him,” he said. “That was not in the design.”

“He named himself. I just listened.”

The Curator’s expression flickered for half a second—a ripple of something deeper. Then he nodded.

“This type of bond is exceedingly rare,” he said. “To stabilize a Lythian in this way… even Pergamon has not seen its like in centuries.”

He looked past her to the walls, still humming faintly with aftershock.

“Pergamon is a sanctuary, Kendra. But sanctuaries, too, have hidden teeth. This vault was sealed for a reason. There are things here that should never remember themselves.”

She said nothing.

Nova pressed closer.

In his journal, later, the Curator would write one word:

Awakened.

And underlined it twice.