Elarin’s Secret

The silver chamber rippled like a wound torn into the world. The floor trembled beneath me, veins of fractured dreamlight running in jagged lines across its surface. Shards of the mirrored corridor floated in the air around us, each shard flickering faintly before dissolving into nothing, as if the Veil itself was bleeding.
My body still shook from the unstable spell—Seran velith. The words lingered in my bones like an unhealed scar, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat. I could taste metal at the back of my throat.
And then there was her.
Elarin stood untouched at the center of the chamber, her long silver hair glowing faintly as though each strand was woven from moonlight. Her eyes—steady, unblinking, impossibly deep—never left me as I staggered toward her.
“You shouldn’t have used that,” she murmured. Her voice was calm, but it carried the weight of an entire world pressing down.
I swallowed, forcing the dryness in my throat to give way to words. “You… knew about it. Didn’t you?”
Her silence was heavier than an answer.
I sank to my knees, palms braced against the trembling floor. Cracks of dreamlight spread faintly across my arms before fading, each one stinging as though fire was coursing beneath my skin. “If you knew… then why didn’t you stop me?”
Elarin lowered herself to my height. Her hand hovered just above my shoulder—close enough to feel its cold radiance, but she did not touch. “Because I wanted to see if you would choose it.”
Her words were sharper than silence.
“Choose it?” My voice cracked. “You mean… destroy myself?”
Her gaze softened, but her words remained steady. “That spell is not destruction. It is a doorway. A fracture that cuts past the illusions of the Veil. You opened it, Lucen. And for a moment, you touched what should never be touched.”
The floor’s light pulsed faintly, almost in agreement.
I clenched my fists. “Then tell me. What am I? The Mirrorborn called me a fragment. You—” My throat tightened. “—you speak as if I’m not even real.”
Her eyes flickered with sorrow. “Because the Veil forged you differently. Lucen… you are both memory and dream. Not one, not the other. That is why your name echoes louder than most. And that is why the forbidden magic answers to you.”
The chamber quivered. A low hum, like a heartbeat too vast to belong to one person, vibrated in the walls.
Finally, I whispered: “Then tell me the truth. All of it. No more riddles.”

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For a long moment, she said nothing. The silver glow around her dimmed, as if even the Veil itself was holding its breath.
“I once had a name,” Elarin began. Her voice trembled faintly—something I had never heard from her before. “It was mine, as yours is yours. And I had someone I wished to save. Someone who had been erased—swallowed by the forgetting of this world. I scoured every ruin, every shattered archive, every echo of spellcraft.”
Her hands curled into fists. “And then… I found it. The forbidden spell. The one that could restore all memory. The one that reached past every law the Veil binds us to.”
My heart stilled.
She closed her eyes. “I spoke it. For an instant, I felt everything—every forgotten face, every erased life, every name the Veil had devoured. They returned. A thousand voices, a thousand souls, flooding through me.”
Her voice broke. “But I faltered. I could not pay the cost. The spell demanded existence itself. And I refused. So they vanished again. All of them. And the one I loved… remained gone.”
The silence that followed felt like the weight of a grave.
“And you hid this from me?” My words tore out, harsher than I intended.
Her head bowed. “Because knowing it is a curse. It tempts you. It whispers promises that you can undo loss itself. But the cost is everything. To cast it is to vanish—not die, not fade. Vanish, as though you were never born.”
The chamber seemed to constrict around me. My stomach twisted; my breath caught. Was this the end waiting for me? To restore… and then cease?
Finally, she raised her gaze again, and her silver eyes shone with sorrow. “I did not want you to walk the same road. I wanted to shield you.”

---
A low hiss shattered the silence.
From the far edges of the chamber, where fractured shards had landed, a ripple of darkness stirred. Shapes pulled themselves from the silver dust—half-formed, twitching things with faceless heads.
Mirrorborn. But these were not whole—they were remnants, malformed echoes crawling from the cracks my unstable spell had left behind.
“They’re not gone,” I muttered.
Elarin rose, strands of her hair lifting as if caught in an unseen tide. “No. They feed on fractures. You opened one, and now they gather.”
The remnants shrieked, the sound like glass shattering against bone, and surged toward us in a wave.
My hand shot out on instinct. “Lumae verin!”
Silver light erupted from my palm, a spear of radiant energy tearing through the first wave. The blast scattered them into mist, but more poured out, their faceless bodies writhing as they crawled up the walls.
Beside me, Elarin whispered words I’d never heard before: “Ithrel suven.”
Her magic was different—her dreamlight did not explode outward. Instead, threads of silver unwound from her fingertips, weaving together into a lattice of shimmering lines. The net spun outward, catching half the swarm midair, constricting them until they shattered like brittle glass.
We moved as one—my spells breaking the front line, hers binding the openings, sealing the cracks with each sweep of her hand. Still, they kept coming, shrieking and clawing, until the chamber itself shook with the force of our battle.
I forced another blast from my hand—“Veyra lumeth!”—a word I hadn’t learned but somehow knew, burning my tongue as it left me. A ripple of silver flame spread across the floor, consuming the creatures in its path.
At last, silence returned.
The remnants dissolved into ash, the air thick with fading echoes. The chamber’s fracture sealed itself with a resonant hum, the light returning to stillness.
I staggered back against the wall, chest heaving, arms trembling from the strain.
Elarin stood over me, calm even in exhaustion. “You see now. The Veil is breaking. And your name… is both its wound and its key.”
Her words pressed down on me harder than the battle had.
She knelt, this time taking my hand. Her grip was ice and fire all at once—cold, but unyielding. “Lucen. You must decide. Will you walk the path I could not finish? Will you speak the spell that restores all—and pay the price I could not?”
Her silver eyes locked onto mine, searching.
And I understood.
The true secret wasn’t just the spell she kept hidden.
It was that she wanted me to succeed where she had failed.

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To be continued…

---Author’s Note 
This chapter was one of the hardest to write, because it unveils the truth Elarin has been hiding since the beginning. The forbidden spell—magic that can restore every lost memory finally takes shape here, and with it, the cost that will define Lucen’s fate...
I wanted this fight against the Mirrorborn remnants to mirror Lucen’s inner struggle: his bursts of raw, instinctive magic against her precise, woven spellcraft. Together they form balance, but that balance won’t last forever..
From here, the road to the end grows darker, and the choices heavier. Chapter 33 will bring Lucen to a moment of decision the first real step toward the destiny the Veil has forced upon him....
Thank you for reading, and as always this story lives because of you.