The air in the City of Broken Mirrors smelled of spilled divine ink and unfulfilled promises. Kael walked among the black crystal towers that rose like the teeth of a dead god, each reflective surface showing versions of himself that never existed—or perhaps they did, in some forgotten corner of the multiverse. A Kael crowned with the thorns of broken clocks. A Kael turned into a statue of mercury, his eyes empty. A Kael who had never stolen his first echo, living an ordinary life that felt as alien as it was repulsive.
"Which of them was me?" he wondered, not with nostalgia but with the clinical curiosity of a surgeon examining his own corpse. "Does it matter? We all end up the same: broken, forgotten, replaced."
The sky was an inverted ocean of suspended fragments, each mirror dripping with a thick substance that was neither mercury nor time, but the physical condensation of everything lost. The drops fell slowly, forming puddles that reflected not the present, but what might have been.
Their powers manifested then, like hungry beasts awakening:
The Way of the Echo Thief:
His right arm glowed with a sickly silvery glow, mercury flowing like living blood. The black veins that crisscrossed his skin intertwined, forming primordial runes that burned with cold light.
"I stole my first echo from a beggar who smelled of cheap wine," he remembered—or perhaps imagined. "It gave me the ability to see in the dark... What did I give in return? I no longer remember."
The Book of Flesh (Way of Screaming Gates):
The volume pulsed at his waist like an anxious heart. At his touch, the bound leather shuddered beneath his fingers, warm and damp.
"Where do you wish to go, O Bringer of Oblivion?" The book whispered in a voice of a thousand overlapping agonies. "Each threshold demands a tribute. What name will you sacrifice today? That of the one you claimed to love? Or perhaps your own?"
The Book of Bones (Path of the Remembering Shadow):
The pages of human rib creaked like old bones as they opened slightly of their own accord. A moan escaped from between its leaves.
"I remember what you cannot bear," the volume murmured. "Do you want to know the truth of that night in the statue garden? Or would you rather continue lying to yourself, thief of mirages?"
Kael felt—not fear, never again fear—but a pressure in his chest, as if his own being were becoming denser, more real with each manifested power.
The ritual began:
With hands that did not tremble (when was the last time they trembled?), he opened the Book of Flesh. The pages twisted beneath his fingers, revealing a map of veins that beat to the rhythm of some distant heart.
"To the Plane of Dried Tears," he commanded, the words leaving his mouth wreathed in black smoke.
The book moaned like a wounded animal.
"The price is a name, O destroyer of realities. What identity shall I erase from your fragile mind today?"
Kael stared at his reflection in a nearby puddle. The face staring back at him wasn't exactly his own—the eyes were darker, the mouth crueler.
"Lirya," he said, not because he wanted to forget her, but because he doubted she had ever existed. Perhaps she was just another stolen echo, another ownerless reflection.
The name faded from his mind like sand between his fingers. Something in his chest tightened—not pain, never hurt—only an emptiness that hadn't been there before.
The Gate opened then: a threshold of intertwined teeth and nails that screamed in forbidden tongues as they parted. The sound made the city's mirrors bleed mercury.
The Plane of Dried Tears revealed itself before him:
It was not a place, but a cosmic wound, a rupture in the fabric of the possible. The ground was composed of mummified eyelids that opened at his passage, revealing dry pupils that followed him with accusing gazes. Each footstep caused the eyelids to blink in sequence, like a wave of silent agony.
The trees were petrified vocal cords, their twisted branches forming knots of unspoken words. When the wind (was it wind?) passed between them, they whispered fragments of dead conversations:
"...you shouldn't have stolen it..."
"...she's waiting for you in the garden..."
"...how many times have we done this before?..."
The sky was a gigantic closed eye, its crystal lashes dripping with the dust of extinct stars. On the horizon, structures that could have been buildings or bones rose at impossible angles, shining with their own light.
And at the center of it all...
The Bleeding Mistake waited for him.
It wasn't the monster Kael had imagined. It was a boy—he couldn't have been more than seven—with dark hair and eyes... his eyes, but filled with a childlike light Kael could never remember having.
The boy played quietly with a mercury heart, molding it in his small hands like clay. When he looked up, he smiled, showing teeth like broken mirrors.
"Hello, Daddy," he said, his voice like the crackle of burning pages. "Did you come to kill me again?"
Behind him, in the mirror shards that formed his throne, hundreds of identical children appeared, each with mercury-stained hands. All smiling. All repeating in unison:
"This time it'll be different, won't it?"
At that moment, the Book of Bones violently opened at his waist, revealing a page written in dried blood: "They always lie about the first murder."
And in the distorted reflections of the throne, a female figure watched the scene... but her face was erased, as if someone had scraped it from reality.