The banners of bone and breath unfurled at dawn, rippling in the windless air. The city of Djariné-Sa, built on the veins of the sleeping god, had not known wind in over three centuries, not since the pact. The stillness was sacred. Any stirring air was a bad omen.
So when the air moved that morning, it was taken as a sign.
The Festival of Living Bones had come.
Elias stood atop the southern balcony of the Sanctum, wearing Kéon's robes, woven with filament-thread and embedded with dreamstones. They itched. Or maybe that was just his body rejecting the priest's skin.
Below, the Temple Grounds came alive. Veiled dancers swung lanterns filled with ancestral ash, and the old women of the Bone Choir sang the warbling, throat-deep hymns meant to summon past lives to walk the streets once more. It was the holiest of days, the time when the boundaries between soul and self blurred, when the ancestors could speak through their bloodline.
And Elias, inhabiting a man he didn't know, was expected to lead it.
They brought the reliquary to him at midday.
It was a coffin-shaped container carved from vertebrae too large to belong to any human. Inside: fragments of bones, teeth, and tongues preserved in spirit amber. Each had once belonged to a Keeper of Memory, a prophet, a judge, a soul-mender. They would be used in the Rite of Inheritance, the central ritual of the day.
Each honored participant would drink a distillation made from the fragments. Their souls would briefly give way to whatever ancestor chose to answer the call.
Ayélè stood across from him in ceremonial war-armor. Her face, as ever, unreadable. Her hands rested on the hilt of her spiritblade.
"Are you certain?" she asked, voice low. "This rite is dangerous even when the soul is whole. You, whoever you are, may not return if something else answers instead."
Elias looked down at his hands. They trembled slightly. Kéon's hands.
"What happens," he asked, "if the wrong spirit shows up?"
Ayélè said nothing for a long moment.
"Then we put it down."
The elixir burned.
They fed it to him drop by drop, and each one felt like fire being poured into his bones. The room tilted. The voices blurred.
Then, the mirror appeared again, not before him, but inside him.
He fell.
When Elias opened his eyes, he was no longer in the sanctum. He stood within a place of impossible dimensions: walls that bent like cloth, floors that pulsed like skin. Shapes moved around him, ghosts without form, thoughts without owners.
One stepped forward.
It wore his face.
But it was older. Sterner. Scarred.
"So this is where we meet again," the other Elias said. "I was the first to leap. You are the last."
"Who are you?"
"I am the reason the mirror exists."
The First Elias circled him like a teacher circling a child caught cheating. His voice was low and quiet, but each word carried weight.
"Do you know what the mirror does? It doesn't just connect time. It doesn't merely divide. It feeds."
"Feeds on what?"
"Uncertainty. Choice. When you hesitate, it grows stronger. When you doubt, it adapts. And when you break, truly break, it replaces you."
"Replaces me with what?"
The First Elias smiled. It was not a kind smile.
"Another version. A worse one."
Elias tried to reach for him, but the world began to shatter.
From the cracks spilled other selves, dozens, maybe hundreds, all calling to him, all demanding to be the "true" Elias. A young boy sobbing beneath a ruined tree. A soldier impaling his friend. A queen with her hands covered in mirror shards.
They fought to enter him. To be chosen.
This was the duel.
It wasn't with blades, but with identity.
Elias screamed. Not from pain, but from the pull. To become. To be one of them. Or all of them.
But then, one voice cut through.
"You are not theirs."
Ayélè's voice.
"You are mine. Come back."
The ground collapsed.
He awoke in her arms, covered in sweat. Blood leaked from his nose and ears. The bone-priests stood around him in silence.
"Which ancestor answered?" one asked.
Elias looked at the shards of the reliquary. Many of the bones inside had turned black. Cracked.
"None," he said. "Or maybe… all of them."
Ayélè narrowed her eyes.
"You saw something."
"I saw myself. Too many of them."
That night, he returned to the underground library.
There, deep in the stacks of worm-chewed manuscripts and ossified prayer-scrolls, he found a diagram etched into a tablet of volcanic stone.
It showed a mirror, yes.
But this time, it was shattered.
Behind the cracks, a word had been scratched in blood-ink.
HOST.
And beneath it:
"He who leaps, feeds it. He who questions, strengthens it. He who breaks, ends it."
Elias looked at his hands again.
They didn't tremble this time.
They burned.