CHAPTER 1573: STORY 1573: THE MIRROR’S WOUND

The cavern erupted in chaos. The fog thickened, coiling around the survivors as their hollow doubles lunged forward, each a distorted echo of flesh and will.

Kael met his twin first. The hollow’s shrieking blade screamed with every strike, a sound that rattled marrow and cracked thought. Kael parried, sparks hissing in the fog. His own blade, fractured but true, sang a jagged counter-note. “You’re not me,” he spat, though the hollow’s silence-eyed stare mirrored his scars too perfectly.

Elara stumbled back as her double advanced. The hollow cradled a husk shaped like the boy, its glow sickly and wrong, pulsing in rhythm with the Unborn’s maw. Its lips moved, whispering words Elara could not hear but felt—a hollow lullaby, promising surrender. She clutched her son tighter, whispering fiercely, “No. You don’t get to sing him quiet.” Her chant rose, broken but sharp, cutting into the mimic’s phantom song.

The widow faced her reflection with trembling legs. Her double had no mouth, yet it screamed—a hollow, endless shriek that poured straight into her bones. She coughed blood, knees buckling. But then she grinned through crimson teeth. “Screaming’s my art, not yours.” With a ragged inhale, she forced a sound from her ruined throat—short, cracked, but hers. The mimic convulsed, its mouthless face shuddering as if split by that defiance.

The scarred woman clashed with her twin, each strike of her spear mirrored by the hollow’s echoing thrust. But where hers carried weight of pain and will, the echo’s came empty, hollow reverberations. Her ribs cracked as she deflected another blow, yet she snarled, “A scar without blood means nothing!” She twisted her weapon, driving it through the mimic’s chest. The hollow split apart into fragments of sound that hissed and dissipated.

The farmer beat his drum in counterpoint to his twisted reflection. The hollow’s drum boomed with every beat of his heart, rattling his chest with pain. Sweat poured down his face as he struck harder, his rhythm erratic, unpredictable. Each off-beat splintered the mimic’s resonance until cracks spread across its form. “You don’t own my pulse,” he growled, hammering a final discordant strike that shattered the figure into echo-dust.

The boy’s glow surged unevenly, reacting to every clash. His chant threaded silence and sound into broken defiance. The hollow forms staggered under its pulse, unraveling with each jagged syllable. The cavern shook, veins flaring brighter, as though the maw itself recoiled.

The Unborn’s voice thundered through the storm:

“You wound your own flesh. You strike your own shadows. Every scar you give them deepens within you.”

Kael reeled as pain stabbed through his scars, each strike against the hollow mirrored in his own body. The widow collapsed, coughing harder as her double’s scream echoed inside her lungs. The boy convulsed in Elara’s arms, his chant faltering as if crushed by his own fractured glow.

The battle against the hollow was not only survival—it was self-destruction.

Still, Kael roared, raising his blade again, voice tearing through blood and echo alike: “Then let our scars bleed louder than your lies!”

And the cavern split with that jagged defiance, a wound carved into the Unborn’s hollow choir.