[300 Years Before Black Spire War]

  Gadriel, the Soulfather, cradled his daughter in the dark of their fortress-tomb. Maeve was alive. She breathed. She grew.

  But she was... empty. Her eyes held no light. She did not cry, or laugh, or feel.

  He had saved her body, but his forbidden spell had failed to recall her soul. He was a Paladin. He could not accept this. He sought answers, not in holy texts, but in the dark, heretical prophecies the cultists he once hunted had revered.

  He found it, scrawled on a worn scrap of vellum:

  “And the Soulless One shall be made whole. Her spirit, long slumbering, shall be awakened by the compassion born of a final, willing sacrifice.”

  It was a vague, poetic riddle. But Gadriel, a man of action broken by grief, saw only a formula. He misread "compassion" and "sacrifice" as ingredients. He believed he had to fill his daughter's emptiness with the captured essence of others.

  He began his dark work.

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  He looked at his undead soldiers, the shuffling, mindless "Ghoul" that is bound to his will. He knew how they worked. They were animated by a simple, artificial "pseudosoul"—a necromantic echo, a "force" of un-life.

  It was his last, most desperate resort. But Gadriel wanted more for Maeve. He did not want a slave; he wanted a daughter. He sought to give her a will of her own

  He laid Maeve on an altar. He performed the dark ritual.

  He tried to force it into her.

  His living daughter's body rejected it.

  The Pseudosoul could not inhabit her. But the ritual did not fail completely. It shackled. The Pseudosoul was not absorbed, nor was it dismissed. It became an external echo, bound to her being but separate from it.

  A shadow of a soul, tethered to her life.

  For years, it lay dormant. But as Maeve grew, she found she could call it. In a moment of need, the shadow would peel itself away from her, materializing in the physical world.

  It became her Mirror Twin.

  It was her protector, her weapon, and her only companion. But it was also her externalized conscience. And because the shackle was flawed, because it was one soul that had failed to become one, they shared a single life-force.

  Damage to the Twin was damage to Maeve. Pain to the Twin was pain to Maeve.

  It was a link Gadriel had never intended, and it would be her ultimate, terrible weakness.