The Fortress of the Soulfather was a place of cold, damp stone. It was impregnable. It was crawling with the dead. And deep within the central chamber, the intruder had been brought to his knees.

  Maeve sat on her throne of black iron. She watched the prisoner with empty, cloudy-gray eyes. He was a scout from the border villages, bound and bloodied. The Drudges had dragged him from the perimeter traps.

  "You entered my home," Maeve said. Her voice was a flat, melodic monotone. "Why?"

  The scout didn't beg. He spat blood onto the pristine stone floor. "Do your worst, Witch," he snarled.

  Maeve tilted her head. She didn't recoil. She didn't scowl. She could not feel anger. She was a vessel, not a person. She felt only calculation.

  "Interesting reaction," she noted. "Defiance in the face of termination."

  From the shadows behind her throne, a figure detached itself. It was identical to Maeve, but where Maeve was robes and stillness, her Mirror Twin was leather armor and fluid motion. The Twin stepped into the light, drawing a curved blade.

  The scout’s eyes went wide, darting between the woman on the throne and the woman with the sword.

  "Two of them?" he whispered, his defiance faltering.

  "Shall I finish him off, sister?" the Twin asked, her voice a sharper, colder echo of the Queen's.

  Before Maeve could answer, a small, high-pitched cry echoed from the shadows of the hallway.

  "Papa!"

  A child—a girl no older than five—burst into the room. She had followed her father’s trail. She had walked right through the main gates, past the hundreds of undead soldiers.

  The Drudges had simply ignored her. To the mindless dead, a weeping child was not a target. She was just noise.

  The scout’s face went white. "Elara? No! What are you doing here?!"

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  The girl ran to him, placing her tiny body between the scout and the monsters. She looked up at the Twin, her eyes filled with tears and fairy-tale terror.

  "Don't!" she screamed, trembling. "Don't let the Pale Bride hurt him!"

  The Twin reacted instantly. Loud noise. New variable. Threat. She lunged. The blade arced down toward the small, screaming object.

  It should have been a clean kill. But inches from the girl’s terrified face, the blade stopped.

  It wasn't a block. It was a freeze. The Twin’s hand trembled. For a heartbeat, the Twin’s eyes—usually blank mirrors of Maeve’s—flickered with colors. She saw the girl. Small. Loud. Desperate.

  She remembered. A flash of memory, older than the fortress. A child, just as small, wrapped in silk, too still, too silent.

  I was that little, the thought whispered through the connection.

  The Twin looked at the crying child, then back at Maeve, and the emotion vanished, buried instantly beneath a mask of indifference. But the hesitation had happened.

  Maeve felt a phantom sensation—a dull, inexplicable ache in her own chest.

  "Stop," Maeve commanded, narrowing her eyes.

  The Twin immediately recoiled to Maeve's side, sheathing the blade. It stood perfectly still, but its fist was clenched tight against its side, hiding the tremor.

  "You hesitated," Maeve whispered to her shadow. "Why?"

  The Twin offered no answer. It was a part of her, yet it felt... separate.

  "Dissonance," Maeve concluded coldly. "A flaw in the connection."

  She looked back at the prisoners. The scout was no longer defiant. He was clutching his daughter, shielding her head with his bound hands, his face wet with tears.

  The "Witch" insult was forgotten. The bravery was gone.

  "Please," the scout begged, his voice breaking into a desperate sob. "Not her. Do whatever you want to me. Flay me. Burn me. But please... just let her go."

  Maeve tilted her head. First defiance. Now begging. The variables were shifting rapidly.

  "The previous subjects' vessels were too fragile, those who survived escaped to the cistern," Maeve noted, her voice as flat as the stone floor. "It is a failure to recreate the bark skin and their blood to ice before the graft could take."

  "Take them," Maeve ordered the Drudges standing by the wall. "Put them in the cells. They are... experiments."

  As the mindless golems dragged the screaming pair away, the Mirror Twin stood by Maeve's side. Maeve looked at her own hands. They were steady.

  She didn't notice that her Twin was staring at the floor, fighting to keep her own hands from shaking.