Chapter 7 · free to read
The Council of Nine Frames had not been convened in sixty years. They opened it for me — not as a criminal, but as a piece of broken equipment.
One of them wanted me broken and one of them wanted me opened. In four hundred years of this hall, nobody had ever asked a third thing.
The heir had been raised on a single sentence: the mirror-servant exists so that you may not be hurt. Nobody had ever finished the sentence in front of her before.
The verdict split six to five, so they did what councils do with a question they cannot answer. They locked it in the dark and adjourned until spring.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.