The Stranger in the Mirror
The fire found me first.
Before sight, before sound, before I understood I possessed a body at all, there was the memory of heat—an inferno clawing up stone walls, smoke thick as wool in my throat, and a voice, my own, roaring something that might have been a name. Duskbane. The word arrived unbidden, heavy as a blade laid across my palms, though I could not have said whether it belonged to a sword, a man, or some curse I had once sworn.
Then the fire receded, and there was only darkness, and the darkness gave way to a ceiling I did not know.
I lay still for a long moment, staring upward at carved beams of pale wood, at a canopy of blue silk stitched with silver thread, trying to reconcile what I saw with what I remembered. The last true memory I trusted—if trust was even the word for something so fractured—was of cold rain on a battlefield, mud sucking at my boots, and a woman's scream tearing through the clash of steel. She had called a name across that chaos, desperate and raw, and I could almost taste the shape of it on my tongue even now. But when I reached for it, it slipped away like water through open fingers.
My own name. Gone.
No—not gone. Aric. That much remained,…
