Darkness consumed them entirely, yet Eili felt this was more than the mere absence of light. Here, the shadows seemed to have a texture, a weight, and perhaps even a will of their own.
“Lumis, do you hear that?” she asked, clutching the shard in her hand.
He nodded, glancing around. The faint sounds that surrounded them resembled footsteps but lacked rhythm, appearing and disappearing as if playing tricks on their senses.
“An echo?” Lumis suggested, though uncertainty lingered in his voice.
“An echo of what? We haven’t made a sound yet,” Eili countered.
Suddenly, a faint glow flickered ahead, reflecting off the smooth, mirror-like walls. The chamber revealed itself in all its peculiar beauty, its uneven angles shifting as though defying geometry.
On one of the walls, their reflections materialized. Eili froze. The figures looking back at them were familiar, yet subtly, unnervingly different.
“What is this?” she whispered.
Her reflection smiled faintly and raised a hand, pointing toward something behind them. Lumis spun around sharply, but there was only emptiness.
“They… mimic us, but not entirely,” he said, his gaze fixed on the wall.
Eili stepped closer to her reflection, reaching out to touch the surface. Her fingers met cold metal, yet the figure in the mirror moved differently, stepping back and gesturing toward the shard in her hand.
“They’re trying to tell us something,” she guessed.
Lumis began pacing, examining the reflections on each wall. They were all different—some blurred, others unnervingly sharp, but always with slight deviations.
“Maybe they’re fragments of ourselves,” he speculated. “Echoes of our choices—or what we might have been.”
Eili studied her reflection intently. It stood motionless, but its eyes glimmered with an urgency that felt like a warning.
“If we don’t understand what they’re showing us, we’ll never leave this place,” she said.
“And how are we supposed to figure it out?” Lumis sighed.
Eili held the shard up to the wall. Symbols began to emerge on its surface, resembling those on the door earlier but shifting, evolving into new patterns.
“The shards show us what’s right and what isn’t,” she murmured. “This is a test.”
Lumis followed her lead, raising his shard. One of the symbols on the mirrored wall flared brightly, and for a brief moment, their reflections changed—revealing a vision of their journey far beyond anything they could comprehend.
“We have to choose the correct symbols,” Lumis said. “Or we’ll be trapped here forever.”
The chamber came alive, pulsing with an otherworldly energy. The walls shifted, the reflections grew restless, and an oppressive sense of urgency pressed down on them. Time, it seemed, was no longer on their side.