Jason hits the ground with a soundless impact, like gravity remembering him too late. The surface beneath him flexes, neither solid nor liquid, every molecule rippling in slow-motion light.For a long second, he just breathes, tasting static in the air, the metallic tang of reflection. His body feels heavier than flesh, but lighter than thought, a ghost held together by the memory of pain.Then the world exhales. Everything around him brightens at once. A horizon of glass dunes unfurls into the distance, each one glinting with faint silhouettes, reflections walking where no one stands.Above, the sky is divided cleanly in two: one half bleeding color, the other a perfect silver void. Every sound here carries twice, an echo half a beat behind, as if reality itself were lagging.He pulls himself up, heartbeat thudding with that strange double rhythm. And then he hears it: footsteps. Slow. Familiar. Jason turns.Someone is walking toward him across the mirrored plain, barefoot, calm, lea

There’s no wind when she falls this time. Only sound, the thin, ringing hum of glass breaking forever.Aria tumbles through it, her body weightless, her reflection scattering into countless versions. Every angle of her face flashes by, crying, screaming, silent, until she can’t tell which one is real anymore.Her skin gleams with the residue of the silver field, her hair snapping in slow motion like she’s falling through liquid light instead of air.Below her, or maybe above, lies a shifting lattice, an infinite architecture of mirrors folding over themselves, swallowing entire worlds as they go dark.She doesn’t scream. She’s too far past fear for that. Instead, she whispers his name, the one sound that still feels like hers. “Jason…”The mirrors answer, whispering it back in a thousand voices. Each one a different tone, a different emotion. Some tender. Some cold. Some not human at all.She flails once, trying to orient herself, but the fall keeps rewriting direction. Up becomes dow

Silence.At first, that’s all she knows, an unending pause between heartbeats. The rhythm that used to keep her tethered to the world is gone, yet something else persists: a whisper of perception.A flicker without a source. She wonders if she’s fallen through herself, if this place is the thin membrane between thought and unbeing.She tries to move, but there’s no “she” to move. Only drifting awareness.It stretches out like vapor, feeling its way through the unseen, touching what feels like the echo of her own name. Aria. The sound ripples once, twice, then dissolves. “Still here?”The voice doesn’t come from outside. It’s folded inside the pause, threaded through her fading thoughts. She doesn’t recognize it, and yet, it feels familiar, like a melody hummed by the part of her that never stopped listening.She focuses, trying to recall what came before this moment. There was light, breaking glass, Jason’s hand, then the split, that impossible storm of reflections devouring everythin

There is no up or down, no breath, no body, only the steady thrum of something new being born out of the ruin. Thud. Pause. Thud. It isn’t her heart. It isn’t his. It’s both.The sound fills the void like a question that hasn’t decided what language to use. Every pulse sends ripples through the blank space, shaping the nothing into flickering contours, half-Aria, half-Jason, both incomplete. Aria drifts first.She can’t tell where her body ends anymore. Her skin dissolves into photons, her thoughts scattering like pollen through the white sea.The last thing she remembers is reaching for him, defying the voice, and feeling everything collapse inward. “Jason…”Her voice trembles, too soft for the enormity of the silence around her. Still, it echoes, returning to her from every direction, stretched and distorted, her name spoken by someone else. “Aria?”The reply tears through the quiet like a spark.She turns or thinks she does and there he is, suspended in the distance. Jason’s form f

Silence.No breath. No motion. Only the echo of a heartbeat that isn’t mine, steady, soft, pulsing through the dark like a signal from somewhere deep inside the earth.For a while I think I’m dead again. Then the silence shifts. It breathes. Light spills through the dark, but not as sight, more as memory.Shapes resolve around me, translucent, shimmering: the fractured remnants of the chamber, the rippling sea of mirrors, and Aria’s outline suspended within it, still falling. “Aria”The word breaks before it forms. My voice doesn’t sound right. It vibrates twice, once in my chest and once outside of it, like there are two of me trying to speak in sync.I reach forward, and the world moves with me, like glass bending around a hand pressed too close. Something’s wrong. Everything feels… reversed.The air flows inward instead of out, gravity pulls toward the sky, and every sound I make arrives before I think it. I realize then that I’m not standing in the reflection. I am the reflection.