Villainous Instructor at the Academy

There was a crack in the world.

It wasn't loud. More like glass sighing after it's been shattered. Like reality decided it had endured too much and started peeling off its own skin.

I'd grown used to the pain in this place. The Festering Wager was designed to break men like me—those who had too much blood on their hands and not enough regrets in their hearts.

But this time…

This time, something changed.

The path ahead wasn't fire or ash or bone. It was glass. Smooth, perfect, waiting.

I stepped forward.

And saw myself.

Not just a reflection.

A version of me.

Younger. Less scarred. Wearing the old Drelmont uniform, the one I burned the day I left the capital.

He looked at me with something bordering on contempt.

"You shouldn't have come," he said. "You always knew what this place was."

I drew my blade anyway. "I've made peace with damnation."

He laughed. "You? You've never made peace with anything. You collect sins like trinkets. You wear guilt like a cloak to excuse what you still enjoy doing."

I stayed silent.

Because he wasn't wrong.

The Trial of Mirrors wasn't about fighting your past.

It was about justifying it.

Every step forward summoned a new version of me.

The loyal son.

The rebellious prodigy.

The man who abandoned his dying brother to escape the capital.

The man who killed Roderick Vaughn—in the original timeline.

I fell to my knees by the sixth reflection.

I wasn't bleeding from wounds.

I was bleeding from reminders.

"You said you'd protect your students," the seventh reflection hissed. "Yet you use them like pieces on a war board. Does teaching them mean anything to you? Or are you just playing god again?"

That one looked like me after the war. Eyes hollow. Hands trembling. The face I saw the day I left the northern front.

"I don't know," I whispered.

That was the truth.

And the mirror shattered.

Only one reflection remained.

He didn't speak.

He didn't move.

He just watched me.

Older.

Wiser.

Sitting alone on a throne of broken promises, in a tower buried beneath the bones of every student he failed to save.

Me.

I met his eyes.

And I saw—

Fear.

Not of the world.

But of hope.

Because hope meant someone could still reach me.

Hope meant I hadn't drowned yet.

And that was the most terrifying thing of all.

I reached out.

Touched the mirror.

It didn't break.

It turned into a doorway.

And the final path opened.

Not to the Wager's end.

But to something deeper.

Something Cassandra had unsealed.

Something that shouldn't exist anymore.

I took one breath.

And stepped through.

Because if she'd defied the Old Laws to reach for me—

Then I was going to meet her halfway.

Even if it killed me.

Especially if it killed me.

I dream in languages I was never taught.

Somewhere between sleep and waking, between silence and the pressure behind my eyes, I speak the words that cracked the sky.

I don't remember learning them.

I just… know them.

And they know me back.

When I woke again, it wasn't in the infirmary.

I was on a stone platform, surrounded by glass columns humming with song. Every note carried a memory that didn't belong to me—yet each one fit.

Footsteps approached.

Not Lucian's. Not Lysaria's.

Someone older.

Someone unwritten.

The woman stepped into view like the world had been waiting for her shape to form.

Tall. Pale. Not quite human.

Not anymore.

Her eyes held the same mist-glass glow I saw in my reflection last night.

"You've woken early," she said.

Her voice echoed, like mine had.

"Where is this?" I asked.

She smiled—not warmly. Not cruelly either. Just inevitably.

"The cradle beneath your bones. The place where old patterns wait for new hosts."

I tried to stand, but my legs weren't cooperating. They didn't need to.

Because the platform rose, and the glass around us began to spiral like a helix—one made of light and music and memory.

"You heard the Grimoire first," she said. "Because you're not a student anymore. You're a receiver."

"A receiver of what?"

Her hand extended.

And the space around me rippled.

Not time. Not magic.

Truth.

I saw a forest devour itself.

A star fall and splinter across the sky, each shard becoming a child.

A great library that bled when touched.

And a face.

Lucian's.

But not Lucian.

A man made of severed light and broken fire, walking into the end of the world with a Grimoire in one hand and a dying god in the other.

I gasped.

The platform lowered.

She stood close now, eyes soft.

"He's trying to save you," she whispered. "But he doesn't realize—you're the only one who can save him."

"Why?" I asked, barely able to speak.

"Because the pattern loves symmetry," she replied.

"And he is made of ash."

I blinked. "And me?"

She leaned in, lips to my ear.

"You are made of the first breath."

When I woke again, it was back in the infirmary.

Lucian sat beside me, asleep with the Grimoire open on his lap.

The patterns on the pages had changed.

They formed a circle.

Around my name.

And I understood.

The next Trial wouldn't be his alone.

I didn't dream.

I was pulled.

Through flame, through memory, through a screaming wound in the world that knew my name and hated me for it.

The Trial of Mirrors doesn't test your strength. Or your skill. Or even your fear.

It tests certainty.

And mine has always been a lie.

The Grimoire brought me back barely breathing.

I stumbled into my quarters like a man half-unmade, reeking of burnt silver and soul-scars.

The mirror in my room was cracked. Not physically. But something in it was wrong. It didn't reflect me. It reflected a version of me that smiled too wide and held Cassandra by the throat.

I covered it with a cloth. Immediately.

Cassandra.

She wasn't in the infirmary anymore.

Lysaria had moved her to the East Wing's soul sanctuary—an overgrown chamber with living wards, kept for students on the edge of magical collapse. Or evolution.

I didn't know which one this was yet.

But I was going to find out.

She was waiting for me.

Not asleep. Not dazed. Waiting.

The moment I stepped through the threshold, the runes flickered—not in warning, but in recognition.

Her eyes met mine, and I felt something in me recoil. Not because I feared her.

Because I understood her now.

Or, at least, the version of her that was still choosing to remain Cassandra.

"You saw it," she said quietly.

I nodded. "The Trial."

"The fire that isn't fire. The breath that wasn't yours."

I swallowed. "Yes."

She stepped forward, and the wards let her. They moved with her, like cloth, like smoke.

"I saw it too," she whispered. "But from the other side."

I looked down at the Grimoire in my hand. It trembled.

And then something strange happened.

It opened.

Not to my will.

To hers.

She didn't even touch it.

She simply looked.

And the pages bent.

Not turned. Not flipped.

Bent.

Reality around us hummed like a held breath. And in the empty air above the book, the patterns began to form:

A spiral.

A heart.

A grave.

A gate.

Cassandra touched none of them.

But I could feel her choosing.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

Her voice was soft.

"Listening."

"To what?"

"To the Pattern that remembers the end of the world."

The book glowed. Not bright. Not wild.

Steady.

And the page it settled on bore no language I knew.

But I understood it.

A prophecy, perhaps. Or an equation. A spell written in the grammar of fate.

Cassandra looked up at me, that mist-glass stare unwavering.

"I know how to open the door beneath the nursery."

My blood chilled.

"And?"

Her voice didn't waver.

"I know what's inside it."

That night, I didn't sleep. Neither did she.

We sat together beneath the flickering wards, a dying book between us and a future we weren't ready for pressing in from every side.

We weren't student and professor anymore.

We were witnesses.

To the second beginning.

Or the last end.

And the Grimoire?

It had already chosen.

You'd think a place like Noctis Ardentis Academy wouldn't have a nursery.

But it did. Not for babies, of course—not anymore.

Not since the last war.

The place was a relic—tucked between two abandoned towers, overgrown with vines that no longer grew naturally. It smelled like dust and memory, and the moment we crossed the threshold, the air changed.

Like we were stepping into a story that had already ended, but still hadn't stopped being told.

Cassandra didn't flinch.

She walked like she remembered this place. Like the walls whispered in her ears.

I followed. Grimoire in hand, sword at my back.

Below the rotting cribs and broken lullaby crystals, there was a trapdoor beneath the floorboards. It wasn't sealed by magic.

It was sealed by birthright.

And when Cassandra touched it—no spell, no chant, just presence—it opened.

With a sound like breath being drawn for the first time in centuries.

We descended.

The stairs weren't stairs.

They were vertebrae.

The remains of something ancient, lined in obsidian symbols. They pulsed as we passed, each step echoing not in the air, but in my bones.

"What is this place?" I asked.

Cassandra didn't look back.

"Not a prison," she murmured. "Not a tomb. Not even a vault."

She turned her head, just slightly.

"It's a womb."

The Grimoire in my hands reacted—its pages fluttering open, trying to keep pace.

At the bottom of the staircase, the space opened up.

A cavern of silver light, veined with roots from trees that hadn't existed for millennia. The heart of the academy's forgotten magic.

And at its center—floating above an altar of coiled runes—was a cradle.

But no child rested there.

Instead...

A mask.

White.

Cracked.

Fused with something pulsing beneath it. A face that wasn't human, and yet familiar. My stomach turned.

Cassandra stepped closer. "That's mine," she said.

"What do you mean?"

She looked over her shoulder at me.

"I mean... it was me."

The Grimoire burst into flame.

Not real fire. Rune-fire. Memory fire. It didn't burn—it translated.

And from it, the voice came.

___

"The Echo-Born are not born.

They are returned.

The Pattern does not forget.

And it does not forgive."

___

I staggered back, the weight of revelation crashing down.

"Cassandra... are you saying—?"

She nodded, solemn.

"I didn't reincarnate."

"I awoke."

Silence filled the chamber. Not peaceful. Not still.

Warning.

The roots above us stirred like breath.

And the mask in the cradle twitched.

The voice of the Grimoire returned, deeper now. Older.

___

"The First Pattern is incomplete.

The Child of the End remembers.

And the fire returns with her breath."

___

She stepped back.

The cradle cracked.

And from within it—

A second Cassandra began to rise.

Eyes closed. Skin pale. Body glowing with rune-fire.

And that's when I realized:

This wasn't a tomb.

This was a backup.