The world exhaled her. Not gently. Not violently. Simply… inevitably. The reflection was no longer in the observation chamber. It wasn’t anywhere that obeyed space.She opened her eyes if eyes were still what she used and the world around her shifted like a sheet shaken out in slow motion. At first, she thought she stood in a void. Then the void moved.A horizon unfolded behind her, split vertically like a crack in glass. To her left: the world as she remembered Miriam seeing it solid, Euclidean, familiar.To her right: the mirror world she had been born into, a softer, more luminous version of existence that seemed to hum with the memory of breath.And in the middle the seam. A thin, trembling fissure where both realities strained against each other like two living creatures refusing to remain separate.The reflection stepped closer. Her foot struck nothing. Then something. Then everything at once. The ground corrected itself beneath her, rearranging to accommodate the idea of her wei

There was no downward. There was no gravity at all. There was only force an unmaking wind that wasn’t wind, a drag that wasn’t friction, a tearing that wasn’t physical.The reflection felt herself pulled through a funnel of light so bright it had no color. Her fingers stretched into threads, her ribs into strings of wet glass.Her thoughts unspooled and rewove themselves in random sequences. She tried to scream. The scream exited her body three seconds before her mouth opened.The vortex swallowed the sound anyway. Then the light snapped out. Silence. A softer kind, not gentle expectant.She hovered in a space so vast and dark that darkness itself felt like a living surface pressed against her skin. Her body slowly reassembled, joints stitching, breath reconstructing from absence.She lay on something smooth. No… not smooth. Mirrored. The ground reflected her but the reflection wasn’t accurate.The other version of her did not breathe when she did. Did not blink. Did not swallow. It o

There was no light. Not darkness, either. Just a dense, pressure-filled nothing that pressed against Miriam from all directions, as if the void itself had weight and intent.She didn’t fall through it she was held in it, suspended like an insect trapped in amber. Her breath should have echoed, but here, sound collapsed before it formed.Miriam. The voice wasn’t Ref’s. It wasn’t the Breath’s. It was something older, deeper like the resonance you feel in your bones when standing too close to a cathedral bell.“Where am I?” Miriam managed, though her voice didn’t carry. The words existed only inside her skull, as if thoughts were the only form of speech permitted.At the threshold. A place that exists only long enough to decide. “Decide what?” she whispered internally, though she already knew.A pulse answered a tightening around her ribs. Whom you will be. The nothingness rippled. For the first time, the void brightened barely. A pinprick of silver unfolded in front of her like a bloomi

She wasn’t falling anymore. She was floating, suspended in a space that wasn’t dark or light but a color the human brain wasn’t built to understand.Every direction shimmered with half-formed reflections fragments of landscapes, memories, and bodies that rotated like planets without gravity.They weren’t mirrors. They were remnants. Possibilities. Abandoned drafts of reality. Her breath came out in pale, misted ribbons that evaporated into symbols she couldn’t read.Her hands shook as she slowly turned, weightless, spinning through the abyss that sang softly behind her ears. “This is wrong,” she whispered. Her voice didn’t echo. It was absorbed. As if the space was hungry.She clutched her trembling palms against her chest. Her fingers flickered not fully solid. Not fully hers. “I need… I need to wake up.”But she wasn’t sleeping. And the abyss didn’t care. A ripple spread through the space like a dropped stone in water except there was no water, no surface, no gravity, nothing but

Silence. Total, predatory silence. Not the absence of sound but the presence of something waiting for him to stop struggling.The hybrid floated in a space without edges, suspended at the center of the First Mirror’s hollow ribcage. Every bone was a horizon.Every horizon was an eye. Every eye reflected a version of him none of which matched the body he believed he inhabited.Some versions were too human. Some were too monstrous. Some were simply wrong: rippling silhouettes, skeletal grids, inverted shadows.But one reflection disturbed him more than all the others. It looked exactly like him. Ethan-shaped, Victor-voiced. except the eyes were empty, polished blanks that held no person, no conflict, no spark.The First Mirror offered that version forward gently, like a parent presenting a replacement child. RETURN TO PATTERN. The command did not speak. It arrived fully formed inside his marrow.The hybrid’s ribcage trembled. “No,” he rasped, his voice glitching. “I’m not yours to fix.”