There are enemies Elias can fight with steel, others he can outwit with strategy, and then there is this.

The Mirrorborn.

A figure that should not exist, and yet does. A fractured shadow, stitched together from the echoes of all the lives Elias might have lived… and lost. It is the soldier who fell where Elias stood, the coward who fled where Elias fought, the traitor who bent the knee where Elias resisted. Each broken thread of fate weaves into this abomination—a reflection of Elias Mercer born from his failures across time.

When he gazes upon it, he sees himself—not as he is, but as he could be. Hollow-eyed. Marked by the Eye’s curse, but consumed instead of chosen. A revenant who never died, because it was never allowed to live.

The Mirrorborn is more than just an enemy—it is prophecy made flesh. It whispers not with words but with existence itself: This is your end, Elias. This is what you are destined to become. Every move it makes is familiar, every strike uncanny, for it fights with Elias’s own instincts. To face it is to face inevitability.

Yet there is something worse hidden in its presence. Some say the Hollowing itself breeds such horrors—mockeries born from the void’s hunger for broken men. Others whisper that Elias himself gave it life, that in his darkest moment of doubt, he split the fabric of destiny and left this thing behind.

Whether spawned from shadow or self, the Mirrorborn does not rest. It stalks Elias through the smoke of battle, the edges of dreams, the moments when he doubts his strength. It is a curse with a face—his own.

And perhaps the most terrifying truth of all:

The Mirrorborn does not need to kill Elias.

It only needs to replace him.