Marissa

The shattered mirror realm received us into a silence made of facets. It looked of the interior of a vivisected diamond, its corridors shivering with a light that had entered but could no longer recall the way out. Here, in this gallery of trapped photons, warfare had been rendered as art.

Melody, that diminutive architect of bedlam, danced through the air in a desperate ballet against a silhouette carved from some light-devouring material. The stranger’s movements were not like shadow; they were the clean, economical lines of an executioner's diagram. A cape of the same absolute black fell behind her, while an epaulette of pressed raven feathers sat on one shoulder—a rank insignia from some unknown schism. The lightning that coiled around her fist was not a wild crackle but a controlled, humming filament as she pursued her quarry with the cold logic of a closing theorem.

The collision was a moment of perfect alchemy where two forces were mutually un-made, Melody's form a brief, shallow intaglio pressed into the mirror's surface before it bloomed outward in a silent, intricate lacework of fracture, and she landed beside me with the dry, rustling sound of a shed cicada husk, all intricate emptiness.

"YOU!" The witch's accusation tore from her throat like fabric ripping as she befell me, though her eyes already sought escape routes rather than vengeance.

The combatant spiraled down from the battle above, her descent a slow, controlled fall like a single black ash flake from a dying fire. A small, self-satisfied smirk curled her lip—the quiet punctuation at the end of a successful hunt.

"Marissa," Serena stated, her tone impersonal, as if reading a name from a long-closed file.

The name seemed to etch itself onto the mirrored walls, a sudden, chilling glyph. Ami’s ghostly form shimmered, her curiosity a palpable thing. Beside her, Xiao Ru’s bow simply was, appearing in her hands with the silent finality of a drawn blade.

"Why do you haunt these fractured halls?" Ami inquired, her translucent fingers tightening around her violin's neck.

A sound of breaking crystal came from her throat, a laugh stripped of all warmth. "Ushering in darkness proved less romantic than the poetry suggested," Marissa said. "I discovered I have little appetite for serving creatures who simply shriek commands from the shadows."

I turned to Serena. "You know her?"

Serena’s gaze remained on the figure, a strange, analytical curiosity in her eyes. "She was a prodigy—the finest aspirant the Royal Guard had seen in a century. Her pride was… considerable after single highhandedly stopping an army of clones within the epicenter of a black hole. She believed she could hold her own against a god." A slight pause. "She was mistaken. The failure was public."

"They didn't need to sentence her, Cleodiana has rarely ever done such a thing regardless. The shame was its own exile. She ran, vanished from the upper world entirely. I found her, years later, a ghost haunting the underworld. She served me for a time. Then, as now, she simply left."

I looked from Serena’s ambivalent expression back to the smirking woman before us. A shamed prodigy, a runaway assassin. "So you stand against Marvalyn?" I ventured, stepping forward despite the filaments of ozone that still writhed around her knuckles.

Her response was a cascade of theatrical laughter that belonged in opera houses rather than caverns of broken light. "Ohohohoho!"

The sound set my teeth on edge, a vibration tuned to the frequency of old iron scraping stone. Beside me, Xiao Ru winced with an embarrassment that was not her own, while Ashley began a minute inspection of the mirrored ceiling.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Marissa purred, the sound a veneer of charm over a core of pure malice.

"Yes," I replied, my voice flat. "That is the purpose of a question."

She cleared her throat, a small, theatrical gesture, like an actress who has just realized her audience is empty. She conceded that our purposes might, for a time, align—a proposition that felt like swallowing a mouthful of powdered glass.

But a flicker of motion drew my eye. Melody stirred from her defeat like a broken clock attempting to strike midnight. Blood pearled at the corner of her mouth as she struggled upright, her voice carrying the defiance of autumn trees refusing to acknowledge winter.

"I am not finished with you yet."

Marissa approached the wounded witch with the casual brutality of a cat retrieving a mouse, lifting her by the collar until her boots dangled free of the crystal-strewn ground.

"Wait," I said, my hand finding Marissa's shoulder. "Why do you hunger for such darkness to devour the world?"

Melody's laughter erupted like water from a burst dam, flooding the cavern with manic joy that belonged in madhouses rather than battlefields. The sound continued until even our most patient souls began to fray.

"Do you consider it just," she gasped between peals of hysteria, "to genuflect before a single sovereign who claims dominion through beauty and strength alone? For the strongest to be the fairest…"

"What does beauty have to do with governance?" Xiao Ru asked, her head tilting with the innocent curiosity of one who has never learned to distrust simple questions.

But Melody had already moved beyond such pedestrian concerns. "Marvalyn shall birth a new epoch, just as occurred billions upon billions of rotations past. From chaos shall emerge true freedom!"

"What assurance do you possess that this creature would spare even you?" I pressed.

Her smile carried the serene madness of martyrs preparing for immolation. "If death is the price of authentic liberty, then death becomes sacrament."

"But surely," I interjected, "the difference lies not in who rules, but in how they choose to wield power? Cleodiana permits coexistence while your champion would—"

"You understand nothing!" Melody shrieked, her composure finally cracking like ice under spring's assault. "This world requires purification through fire! Most deserve the grave they have earned! Everyone carries corruption in their hearts!"

Tears traced silver paths down her cheeks even as she laughed, creating a portrait of such pathetic contradiction that even Marissa's patience expired. She cast the witch aside like a broken toy, her expression suggesting she had just discovered something unpleasant adhering to her boot.

"Onward," she commanded, "to the core."

We left Melody there among the shattered reflections, her form curled into itself like a question mark written in despair and delusion. Her sobs followed us deeper into the mirror realm's heart, a lamentable soundtrack for pioneers marching toward whatever revelation awaited in the ambient light ahead.