Season 2, Episode 4 – Tayo The Ritualist - “Marked in the Mirror”

It began with mirrors. Cracks, first—barely noticeable hairlines on bathroom glass, car side mirrors, phone screens. Then, faces appeared. Not reflections. Copies. Some smiled. Some screamed. All of them watched.

Tayo knew something was wrong when Dayo refused to look at his own reflection. “She’s inside them,” he said, curled beneath a silver emergency blanket. “She wears my face when I’m not looking.”

Kemi examined surveillance footage from The Pulse’s base. At 3:33 AM every night, every reflective surface warped. For 11 seconds, everyone’s face vanished in the mirror. Even the cameras blinked. “She’s crossed over again,” she muttered. “Through the glass.”

The Warden had found a new medium: reflections. She was embedding herself in identity, mimicking the marked, distorting memories. Survivors were turning on each other, unsure of who was real. Paranoia spread like wildfire.

One survivor—Leila, a former Circle escapee—claimed she watched her own double walk out of her closet mirror and live her life for three days. “When I returned, no one noticed I’d been gone,” she whispered. “They loved her more than me.”

Kemi began distributing Reflection Covers—tech-infused stickers that disrupted mirror resonance. But it was only a patch. The deeper issue was clear: The Warden had evolved from symbolism to identity theft.

That night, Tayo stared into the mirror. His face stared back. But then blinked twice, too fast. And smiled—wrong. The smile didn’t belong to him. His double mouthed something silently: “You are not enough.”

He smashed the mirror. But the damage was done. The question haunted him: What if the Warden didn’t just mimic you… what if she replaced you?

The next day, a Pulse member turned on them. Nia—a tech whisperer—stabbed another survivor, claiming they were “a mirror wraith.” She was wrong. It had been the real person. The Warden was winning without lifting a finger.

Dayo offered an answer. “We need to look beyond the glass,” he said. “Find her source. Her real face. Or she’ll make us all question our own.”

They followed the mirror trail—shops where all the glass had been cracked inward, hospitals where patients vanished during X-rays, even a mansion where every room reflected into the next endlessly.

They found her signal there—deep in a circular chamber lined with one-way glass. At the center stood a woman. Her back to them. Tayo raised his blade. “Warden!”

She turned. It was Tayo.

Not a copy. A perfect match—voice, stance, scars. “I’ve worn you before,” the Warden said. “Your face is familiar to me. So easy to doubt. So easy to bend.”

The mirror chamber reacted violently. Kemi’s devices scrambled. The walls began to reflect each of them differently—Tayo as a child, Kemi as her dying mother, Dayo as a screaming infant. The room fed on trauma.

Tayo gritted his teeth and stepped forward. “I know who I am,” he said, voice shaking. “I survived the Circle. I carry the Ledger. I’m not yours.”

The reflection flickered. Cracked. The room dimmed. The Warden hissed. “Then let’s see if your Pulse holds when you forget.”

They fought back with memory. Tayo reading the Ledger aloud. Kemi projecting Pulse recordings through a hacked speaker. Dayo drawing sigils in a circle around them. With each memory spoken, the room shattered piece by piece.

The Warden’s reflection screamed, then collapsed into glass dust. The real room returned. Quiet. Still. For now.

But Tayo looked at his reflection one last time before leaving—and saw his mirror self blink just half a second too late.