Kael reached for the mirror. His fingers, now entwined with veins of mercury, hesitated for a moment before breaking the black surface.
The glass didn't shatter. It dissolved, like sugar in boiling water.
A chill like the space between stars crept up his arm.
"What the...?" His voice sounded alien, as if someone else were speaking with his vocal cords.
The Girl smiled, showing teeth that were too long, too sharp.
"It's not a memory I gave you, Kael," she whispered. "It's a hole."
The pain came later.
It wasn't physical. It couldn't be. It was as if someone had taken a spoon and emptied something fundamental from his chest. Kael bent at the waist, gasping, but no air would enter his lungs.
"Breathe!" Lirya's voice came distorted, as if through a long tunnel. "Don't let me take that away from you!"
But it was too late.
Kael touched his face with trembling hands. It was dry. There were no tears. No sweat.
And then he understood.
"Fear," he murmured. "You stole my fear."
The Girl clapped her hands, a sound like glass breaking underwater.
"Correct! Now you're... interesting."
Without Kael's fear, reality began to fray at the edges.
The black desert sand turned to crushed glass that crunched beneath his feet. When he looked down, he saw that the shards didn't cut his skin. Worse: he didn't care that they did.
"Kael," Lirya grabbed his shoulders. "Listen to me. This is important. Fear is the only thing that—"
His voice broke off as Kael's quicksilver arm moved of its own accord, forming a sharp dagger that stopped millimeters from her throat.
"What are you doing?" she whispered.
Kael watched the scene with clinical curiosity.
"I don't know."
And it was the truth. Without fear, without that basic instinct of survival, all his actions were equally valid. Killing Lirya. Helping her. Staying still. Nothing had any weight.
The Girl laughed, a sound that made Kael's teeth rattle.
"You see, Mother? This is what happens when you play with things bigger than yourself."
Lirya backed away, her mercury tears forming a thorny crown around her head.
"No," she said, and for the first time, Kael heard something like panic in her voice. "Not again."
Her body began to disintegrate, not into blood or flesh, but into hundreds of mercury figurines that fell to the ground with a sound like breaking bells. Each had a different face: men, women, children. All with their eyes wide open in eternal terror.
"What...?" Kael tried to ask, but her voice was lost as the figurines began to move.
The Girl sighed, as if this were boring.
"It's always the same. You try to save them. You fail. You turn them into this." She pointed at the figurines. "How many copies of him have you buried in the sand, Mother?"
The figurines swirled, forming words on the ground:
I PROMISE YOU THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT
Lirya (was it still Lirya?) raised what was left of her face to Kael.
"You are different. That's why I chose you."
The Girl stepped between them.
"Lies. Everyone says the same thing at first." She turned to Kael. "Do you want to know why he really chose you?"
She reached out a hand, and the air rent, revealing a scene:
Lirya, centuries ago, kneeling before a mercury figurine with Kael's face. He whispered something to her as he injected the Shard into her chest.
"You're her favorite experiment," the Girl said. "The only copy that has survived more than a week."
Kael looked at her quicksilver arm. The silver veins gleamed, revealing something new:
Memories that were not hers.
Screams. Pain. Broken promises.
"I can fix this," Lirya said, her voice like a perpetual echo. "Give me time."
The Girl laughed.
"Time is the one thing you don't have, Mother."
Kael made a decision.
With precise movements, like a surgeon, he plunged his quicksilver arm into the Girl's chest.
She blinked, surprised.
"What...?"
"I'll steal this," Kael said, and for the first time since touching the mirror, he felt something: hunger. "And everything else."
The Girl screamed as the Way of the Echothief activated, but it wasn't a human sound. It was the crackling of timelines breaking.
When it was over, Kael straightened, feeling the new power course through his veins.
"What did you do to him?" Lirya whispered.
Kael smiled. It was a blank expression.
"What you taught me."
Out in the desert, something large and ancient opened its eyes.