The warning came three weeks later, delivered by a cultivator Liriel had never seen before.
His name was Thorne, and he arrived at the temple in the borderlands where Seraph had established a temporary base. He was young—probably mid-twenties—with scarred hands that suggested military training.
"One of Kessian's lieutenants wants to defect," Thorne explained. "He's seen what Kessian intends to do if he breaks the seal fully, and he's not willing to participate. He wants to work with you, to help you stop Kessian from the inside."
Seraph's hand immediately went to the sword at her hip. "Why do you trust this person? How do we know you're who you say you are?"
"Because I know him," Thorne said calmly. "Because he came to me in secret and told me the truth about what they're planning."
Liriel felt the Void Resonance inside her stir, responding to Thorne's presence with something that felt almost like recognition.
"Bring him here," she said. "Let me speak to him."
Thorne returned two hours later with a man in dark robes, hooded and careful in his movements.
When the man lowered his hood, Liriel's breath caught.
She knew him.
"You," she said. "You were one of the guards who arrested me when the Council turned on me. You were there in my cell."
The man nodded slowly. "My name is Vex. I've been working with Kessian since before you were even conscious of the Void Resonance. He brought me into his organization when I was a disgraced guard with nowhere else to go. He offered me power, and I accepted it."
Kael's hand immediately moved toward his sword. "This could be a trap."
"It could be," Vex agreed calmly. "But it's not. And I can prove it by telling you something that only someone working directly with Kessian would know."
"What?" Seraph asked.
"He's planning to do something that goes beyond what any of us agreed to," Vex said. He moved to the table and placed a scroll on it. "He's not just going to break the seal. He's going to use it as an anchor for a ritual that will merge all the Void Resonance users in existence into one consciousness. He's going to create a hive-mind of cultivators, all connected through the Void, all serving him as their central point of will."
The room went completely silent.
"That's not possible," Seraph said weakly. "You can't merge consciousnesses like that."
"It's possible," Vex said. "I've seen the ritual texts. Yun showed them to me years ago. He said he had them as a precaution, in case someone tried to weaponize the Void Resonance completely. He wanted me to know what the worst-case scenario looked like."
"And Kessian has access to these texts?" Liriel asked.
"He created his own versions," Vex said. "They're not exactly the same as Yun's texts, but they're close enough to work."
Vex's eyes met Liriel's directly. "You need to stop him before the next full moon. That's when he's planning to attempt the ritual. If he succeeds, he'll control every cultivator in the world who carries Void Resonance. The world will become one consciousness wearing billions of faces."
Liriel stood and walked to the window, looking out over the borderlands. She could feel the truth in Vex's words through her connection to the Void itself.
But there was something else—a wrongness that she couldn't quite put her finger on.
She turned back to Vex slowly. "Show me your core."
"What?" Vex asked.
"Show me your spiritual core," Liriel repeated. "Let me see your Resonance. Let me touch it with my power so I can verify that you're telling me the truth."
Vex hesitated just long enough for Liriel to realize the truth.
"You can't," she said quietly. "Because you're not really here. You're not really Vex at all."
The figure in dark robes wavered, the illusion beginning to crack around the edges.
"Very good," a woman's voice said. The figure transformed, the illusion dissolving.
"Kessian," Liriel said.
"Not quite," the woman said, and her form continued to shift. "More like a part of Kessian. A fragment of his consciousness that he split off and sent ahead to test you."
"Or to see if you could be convinced to destroy yourself," Thorne said from across the room, and his form also began to shift. Another fragment of Kessian.
They had been manipulated. So thoroughly, so perfectly, that Liriel felt sick.
"The ritual Vex described was real," the first Kessian-fragment said. "But not in the way I explained it. It's something he's planning to offer you. A chance to merge fully with the Void, to become something transcendent."
"And if I refuse?" Liriel asked.
"Then we go to plan B," the fragment said.
And suddenly both pieces of Kessian were attacking.
They moved with inhuman speed, their Void Resonance so perfectly controlled that it was like fighting liquid shadow. Kael tried to intercept them, but he was thrown back against the wall with casual force that drove the breath from his lungs.
Seraph moved to help him, and suffered the same fate.
Liriel found herself alone in combat with pieces of her mirror.
They knew her fighting style because they were her, in a sense. They knew what she would do before she did it.
For a moment—just a moment—she couldn't move. Not because she didn't have the power, but because part of her didn't want to.
But then she felt Kael's pain echoing through their bond. She felt Seraph's terror.
And that indecision shattered like glass.