The words formed in script that matched Gideon’s handwriting from the letters.
Obsession disguised as devotion.
More text appearing below the first message. Not carved into glass. Written in light that pulsed from somewhere deep in the mirror’s structure.
Every lifetime you chose her was choosing a cage she designed.
False impressions. Gideon’s corruption attempting to reframe Charlotte’s work as manipulation. Bastien had expected this—mirror-born distortions using Charlotte’s creation against itself.
“No,” he said aloud.
The word hit the chamber’s acoustics. The text in the mirror shattered into fragments that dissolved.
He moved to another embedded mirror. More words appeared in the glass veins threading through the wall.
She didn’t love you. She loved what you represented.
Immortality through repetition.
You were never a partner. You were a project.
Each statement designed to twist truth. To make two centuries of choosing her look like compulsion.
“She chose me,” Bastien said to the empty chamber. “Every day for six years. And I chose her.That’slove.”
The words in the mirror cracked. Split. Gideon’s accusations breaking against Charlotte’s foundation.
He moved through the chamber methodically, approaching each embedded mirror, reading Gideon’s distortions in the glass veins, rejecting them aloud. One mirror tried to convince him Charlotte had manipulated him through magic. Another suggested she’d viewed him as tool rather than partner. A third claimed her preservation network was just another word for possession.
Each accusation broke when he spoke truth against it.
By the time he’d circled back to the altar, all the mirrors showed surfaces that still moved and distorted—proof of his integration with the network—but empty of Gideon’s false impressions.
Charlotte’s original design remained beneath the corruption. He could feel it in the way energy moved through the vault—steady pulse that matched her workspace in 1760. This place had been her heart. The physical form of work that transcended any single lifetime.
And Gideon had tried to make it a weapon.
Bastien knelt beside the altar. Ran his hand across the crest’s surface. Silver warmed under his palm, responding to touch in ways metal shouldn’t. The mirror shard at the center pulsed with light that matched his own frequency—gold and steady, anchoring the network to something that wouldn’t fluctuate with emotion.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. Not to the vault. To Charlotte. Wherever she was now, whatever she’d become between lifetimes. “For building something that could survive corruption. For choosing me clearly enough that no one can twist it into coercion.”
The vault hummed. Low sound that came from stone and glass and water flowing through invisible channels.
He stood and started back toward the passages that would lead him to the ladder. The mirrors watched his passage—or tried to, surfaces distorting as he moved past them but struggling to hold his image. In one of the larger mirrors embedded near the altar, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection.
Not absent. Not invisible.
Distorted. Fractured into geometric patterns that his eye wanted to resolve into a human form but couldn’t quite manage. Like looking at himself through a kaleidoscope, each facet showing a different angle but none of them adding up to a complete picture.
But there. Present. Real.
The integration hadn’t erased him from mirrors permanently. It had changed how they saw him. Made him part of their language instead of their subject.
Halfway up the passage, he paused and looked back at the chamber.
Something moved in the water. He saw a brief ripple that spread from the altar outward, touching each tunnel wall where mirrors were embedded. The vault was settling. Accepting his presence as permanent fixture rather than intrusion.
He continued walking. His boots splashed through water that grew shallower with each step. By the time he reached the ladder, only dampness remained on the stone.
