Opening the Collected Works of Wallace D. Vex felt less like flipping a page and more like slicing open a reality. The letters shimmered and cracked as my Arte awakened within the ink, responding not just to my will—but to my essence. The text unfurled, ancient and aching, like a memory finally given voice.

And then I fell.

Not physically. But completely. The world shifted beneath my feet. The rotting, forgotten manor with its dust-laden furniture and silent maids dissolved around me.

In its place rose a world of belltowers.

Hundreds—no, thousands—of them. Each a different height, a different shape. Some were spires of rusted iron, others glass and gold, some made of interwoven bones that sang when the wind struck them. Every tower rang with its own eternal tone. Together they composed a symphony not meant for joy, but for remembrance. A hymn to what once was.

The music hurt.

Not because it was harsh. Because it was too beautiful. The kind of beauty that comes only after loss—when all that's left is longing.

I wiped my eyes. My cheeks were damp with tears I hadn't noticed forming. And then—

A voice.

"Here for the mask? The dagger? The windchime? What is it this time—"

A pause.

"You're not Alexandria. No. Too solid. Different weight in the air. But your aura—gods, it's almost identical. Same density. Same flavor. Different ingredients, but the same dish. Please, please don't be a mimic. I've already dealt with three this week. If you explode into teeth and emotions, I will scream."

I turned, slowly, toward the voice—and nearly recoiled.

The man standing before me looked like a portrait that had caught fire mid-brushstroke.

His left side was ruin. Charred skin fused to the bone in places, crusted and glistening with an ooze that shimmered with unnatural heat. The flesh beneath still glowed faintly, like banked coals. But his right side?

Perfection.

Golden-brown skin, unmarred, taut over lean muscle. Hair braided and tied with gold thread. An elegant waistcoat embroidered with a constellation I didn't recognize. Groomed nails. Clean lines. He was both king and corpse, saint and catastrophe.

Before I could speak, I felt movement behind me.

Lumivis stepped forth, forming from my aura like light condensing into form. The butler of liquid starlight gave a polite nod.

"Balth."

The burnt man—Balth—blinked. "Lumivis? You? Stars below, I thought you were bound to that puzzle-box maker in Dominus Virell's private Otherrealm. The one who built the cathedral of ticking clocks. What happened to him?"

"Failed a contract test," Lumivis said with immaculate poise. "This one succeeded."

Balth turned back to me, squinting hard. "So. You're his new contractor. That explains the shine. But it still doesn't explain her."

I didn't even try to restrain myself.

"You keep saying I feel like Alexandria. That our auras are the same, but our mana types are different. What does that even mean? Who is she? Why did she give me this book? Did she know what would happen if I opened it? Did she know about Danatallion's Halls? Or me? Or my family? Because the way she speaks to me—it's like she knows more about my life than I do."

I inhaled sharply, pulse hammering.

"And I'm just—done. I'm done being yanked around like a puppet in someone else's story. Ever since I awakened, I haven't had five uninterrupted minutes to figure out what's real anymore. I thought I was leading a recovery team. Instead, I'm standing in a symphony of towers being interrogated by a half-dead bard about my soulprint!"

Silence.

Then Balth slowly—slowly—sank down to sit on a floating copper step that shimmered into existence beneath him. He leaned back, draped an arm across his knee, and gave me a look that sat somewhere between pity and amusement.

"Kid."

He didn't say it cruelly. He said it like he'd said it a thousand times, to a thousand different people, in a thousand different stories.

"You poor bastard."

He gestured lazily to the towers around us.

"I wasn't even supposed to be here. I was chasing a half-forgotten song that allegedly survived the unraveling. A whisper of it led me here—through three realms, four contracts, and a deal with a duck made of smoke and regret."

"...What."

"Don't worry about it," he said, waving a hand. "Point is, I was looking for a song. Instead, I got you. And the ghostprint of someone I buried a long, long time ago."

He leaned forward, serious now.

"Alexandria didn't just give you a book. She gave you a map. One inked in blood, betrayal, and brilliance. And whether she meant to or not, she's tied you to everything she left unfinished."

My breath caught.

"You're not just similar to her, kid. You're...echoes. Mirrors. Entangled paths."

The towers continued to sing, each one a note in a sorrowful choir.

"And you'd better figure out why," Balth added, "before the melody ends. Because if you don't—someone else will. And trust me. You don't want them writing your ending."

A howl tore through the symphony, and like a conductor's final motion, the music stopped.

Balth went still. "Too late," he hissed. "Damn it. Okay—"

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

He grabbed me by the collar before I could protest, dragging me across the threshold of a nearby belltower. The door creaked open like a groaning jaw, the hinges humming a single, pure note. He slammed it shut behind us, then produced a thin, silver nail—curved like a crescent—and pressed it into the center of the wood. A small burst of mana flowed from his hand into the nail, and the whole room shivered in response.

The sound outside dulled to a hush, the tower growing quieter than it had any right to be. Not silent—protected. As though we were now inside the pause between words, the breath between verses.

The interior was spartan—worn brick, a narrow spiral staircase, ropes dangling from above like coiled nerves—but the air felt sturdy. Weighty. We weren't just in a building. We were in a sealed stanza.

Balth turned to me with a sigh, brushing soot from his sleeve.

"Alright. Introduction time. I'm Balth, as your starry butler already said. Best way to put it—I'm a hunter. More specifically, I'm one of the administrators of Vex's legacy. My job's to hunt down his works, catalog them, and make damn sure they don't reassemble."

He paused, as if waiting for something to click.

"When Alexandria entered this book, we got pinged. Light, subtle, like a string being plucked in a dead room. All the signs pointed to her. But when I finally pulled the cover open…"

He gestured to me, eyes narrowing.

"I found you."

I straightened, trying to gather the pieces. "My name's Alexander. Alexander Duarte-Alizade."

The moment I said it, his head jerked.

"You're what?"

He took a half-step back, almost in reflex. His expression twisted—part confusion, part something deeper. Grief? Alarm? Nostalgia?

"You're—Alexander?" he echoed, slowly, like the syllables were made of ash.

"Yes," I said, guarded. "Is that... a problem?"

He let out a low, bitter chuckle. "Of course you are. Of course she'd do this." He rubbed his temples, muttering, "Does she just name people after herself now? What is this, dramatic reincarnation fanfiction? No, no, wait—don't answer. I don't want to spiral."

I frowned. "She didn't name me."

"Sure. Maybe. But you carry her aura like it's stitched into your bones. Same cadence. Same weight. Only thing different's the mana type, which makes this even worse, somehow."

I hesitated. "She gave me this book. Alexandria. That's the only reason I'm here. I opened it because—because I thought there might be answers."

Balth's eyes sharpened. "What kind of answers?"

"I don't know." I looked away, voice soft. "She knew things. About my family. Their names, their order. Their Artes. She acted like she knew them. Knew me."

"And you think she knew about your walk through Danatallion's Halls?" Balth asked.

"I—I don't know. Maybe not. But it felt like she saw more than I told her. And the moment I think I'm catching up—learning anything—the world just twists again and leaves me behind."

He watched me, the burned half of his face unreadable, the perfect half pulled into something almost sympathetic. Almost.

"Yeah," he said finally. "That's how it goes. Welcome to the aftermath."

I drew in a slow breath. "So... were you hunting me?"

Balth shook his head. "You? No. But if you'd started collecting more of Vex's work—started reciting it, spreading it, treating it like theater—then, yeah. I'd be here for cleanup. You think these verses are illegal in just one realm?"

He leaned against the stone wall. "Everyone who sees them, hears them, performs them? They vanish. Just—gone. Doesn't matter if you're a Dominus or a kid with a cracked spine and a dream. These works consume. So people like me? We prowl."

I squinted at him. "So… does that mean you have Lexicon Manipulation too? You're like me? A Bibliokinetic?"

He laughed again, hoarse and humorless. "Nope. Not even close."

"Then how did you enter the book?"

He gave me a sly grin. "I cheat. Outsourced help. You Tome-Keepers have your pretty tricks—wordcraft and ink-mancy. I work with things that live in the footnotes. You don't want to meet them."

"That's… cryptic."

"Good," Balth said, pushing off the wall. "That means you're still healthy."

He moved toward the staircase, then paused.

"You know," he said, glancing back, "for what it's worth? Alexandria doesn't give out books for fun. If she handed one to you, it wasn't chance. You've got a part to play in all this, even if you don't know the script yet."

He started climbing. The belltower rumbled faintly beneath us.

"Come on. Let's make sure you don't vanish before intermission."

We ran.

The wooden stairs groaned beneath our feet, spiraling ever upward around the hollow core of the belltower. I kept glancing down, half-expecting them to collapse beneath our weight, but Balth didn't so much as glance back. He ran like a man who didn't believe in falling. Every step he took was an act of defiance—against gravity, against decay, against whatever thing had howled and silenced the symphony below.

We spiraled higher, the air thinning into something dry and dusted with memory, until finally—another door.

Balth didn't hesitate. He threw it open.

Beyond it was a hallway, long and dark, lined with warped doors and ruined portraits. The style was old—like the sort you'd find in a crumbling noble estate, where every room remembered something you'd rather forget. The paintings were grotesque things: eyes scratched out, mouths torn open in frozen screams. The wallpaper peeled in long, curling tongues. But the structure was stable.

"Good," Balth said, stepping in. "This place is intact. Come in."

Before I could ask what "this place" was, he grabbed my wrist and yanked me through. The door slammed shut with a sound like a judge's gavel, and Balth didn't waste a second. He pulled out another nail—this one red. Not just crimson, but a color so deep and violent it made my eyes water. It looked less like paint and more like the exposed flesh of a dying star.

He jammed it into the wood, and the hallway gave a subtle shudder.

I finally caught my breath. "Alright," I said, voice hoarse. "I'm not going another step until you explain. What is going on?"

"Sire," Lumivis's voice chimed gently from behind me, "He believes you and Alexandria are doppelgängers."

"Correct," Balth said, exhaling sharply through his nose. "Exactly that. Happens more often than you'd think. Souls cycle. Get recycled. Echoes leave fingerprints, even across Realms."

He sighed and reached into his coat, pulling out a tightly wrapped cigar. He stuck it between his lips—on the burned side of his mouth, no less—and lit it with a casual flick of his gloved fingers. The flame danced gold against the backdrop of his ruined cheek.

"What doesn't happen often," he continued, smoke curling from the corner of his mouth, "is the doppelgängers meeting. That's rare. Not impossible, but rare. And when they're mirrors—perfect reflections in aura, temperament, and tone? Damn near unheard of."

He took a long drag, then pointed the tip of the cigar at me like a blade.

"You're a lucky son of a bitch, kid. I can feel it. Spirit beast miasma? Same as her. Aura from the first shell? Same. A volatile blend of dimension and nature mana? You guessed it. Just. Like. Her."

I blinked. "And that makes me lucky, how, exactly?"

He smiled, teeth catching the glow of the ember. "Because mirrored doppelgängers don't usually want to kill each other. In fact…"

He let the pause stretch.

"Tell me, kid. Ever heard of dual cultivation?"

I frowned. "Cultivation?"

"He means the process of binding miasma into your cores," Lumivis explained. "A technique usually practiced in solitude to evolve one's mana structure."

"Right," I nodded slowly. "That's normally done alone. I've read about it, but…"

Balth barked a laugh. "You are sheltered. No shame in that, I suppose. But listen closely. When doppelgängers of this nature—true mirrors—come together, especially ones bearing spirit-bound miasma? If they enter an intimate relationship, it doesn't just boost efficiency."

He leaned in, smoke haloing his words.

"It unlocks both their cores. Fully. Not one influencing the other, but both evolving in tandem. Efficiency, affinity, adaptability—all heightened. Your growth? Her growth? Tied together. Practically fused. Two souls walking one spiral."

I stared at him. "Are you saying—"

"I'm saying," he interrupted, "that if you and Alexandria do more than mirror each other—if you combine—you're going to be dangerous. More than dangerous. You'll be impossible to stop."

He straightened, taking another drag.

"Of course," he added dryly, "that's assuming neither of you tears the other apart first."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.