Rise Of The Mirror King

Chapter 13: Snap Back

Astrid was in the middle of explaining why elixirs made from moonroot tasted like regret when the world tilted sideways.

"—and that's why nobody drinks it before combat drills, unless you enjoy—"

The hall dissolved around me.

Not the violent yank I remembered from the first crossing — no purple whirlpool, no thunder splitting the sky. This time it felt slower, almost gentle, like someone had reached into my chest and simply turned the page without warning.

Sound went first. Astrid's voice, the low hum of the guild hall, all of it thinning out into nothing, replaced by a different kind of quiet — the low mechanical hum of something I hadn't heard in what felt like a lifetime.

Then the smell hit me.

Antiseptic. Old coffee, gone bitter in a pot somewhere. Something floral and cheap, an air freshener plugged into a wall outlet, doing its best against a smell it could never fully cover.

I knew that smell. My body knew it before my mind caught up.

I opened my eyes to a ceiling of water-stained tile, the kind with those small square holes punched in neat, endless rows.

I remembered counting them once, weeks — or was it years now — ago. Or maybe that was a different version of me who'd done the counting. It was getting harder to keep track of which memories belonged to which life.

A heart monitor beeped somewhere to my left. Steady. Unhurried. Nothing like the frantic, tearing rhythm I half-remembered from the night everything changed.

"—still there. He's still there; I can see his eyes moving, look—"

My mother's voice. Cracked down the middle on the last word, like something had splintered inside her and she was speaking around the break.

She looked thinner than I remembered. Or maybe I simply hadn't let myself notice before, back when noticing things like that felt too dangerous to survive. Dark circles carved deep beneath her eyes.

Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, loose strands falling around her face, like she hadn't had the time, or the will, to do more than shove it out of the way.

She had both hands wrapped around mine, gripping it the way you'd grip the only solid thing left in a room that was otherwise falling apart.

"Mom."

My voice came out wrecked. Barely more than air pushed past a throat that hadn't been used in what felt like days.

She made a sound I had never heard her make before — something caught halfway between a sob and a laugh, both too big for her chest to hold at once, both trying to escape through the same narrow space.

"Simon. Oh my God. Simon, can you hear me? Say something else. Say anything."

"How long?" My throat clicked around the words. "How long have I been out?"

"Six days." Her hand tightened around mine, hard enough that it should have hurt, and somehow didn't. "The doctors said — they told us to prepare, Simon, they didn't think—"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. I watched her physically stop herself from saying the rest of it, watched the effort it took to swallow those words back down.

Six days.

I did the math without meaning to, some part of my brain running the numbers on its own, the way it had started running calculations on lifespan and mana cost without my permission.

Six days here. But weeks — real aching weeks in Odbeara.

The academy. The council trial. The cemetery, the second body, my own name written in blood on a wall. Blackwood, and Vax throwing her arms around me at the bottom of the stairs, and my father's cold approval, and Vax crying into my chest over what I was and wasn't.

An entire second life, folded and pressed flat into less than a week of hospital machines beeping quietly beside my bed.

I didn't know whether that meant I'd been given more time.

Or robbed of it.

"Where's Dad?" I asked, because it was easier than asking the question actually sitting in my chest.

"Getting coffee. He hasn't slept, Simon. None of us have." She pressed her lips together, visibly wrestling the panic back down into something she could hold steady. "You're awake. That's — God, that's what matters right now. You're awake."

I wanted to tell her everything.

I wanted to tell her I had another sister now, aside from Percy, somewhere, built out of memories that weren't mine and were mine anyway, memories of her falling asleep against my shoulder as a child I'd never actually met.

I wanted to tell her I'd killed a man a single day into an entirely different life, that my hand had known exactly how to do it before the rest of me caught up.

I wanted to tell her there was a version of me — a whole person, trained since childhood in things she couldn't begin to imagine — and that version was, more and more, becoming as real to this body as the boy currently lying in her hospital bed.

I didn't say any of it.

There wasn't a version of that conversation that ended anywhere good.

"I'm here," I said instead, because it was the only thing simple enough to be entirely true.

She brought my hand up and pressed it against her cheek, closing her eyes like she needed the physical proof of it more than the words.

For one long, suspended moment, none of it mattered — not Odbeara, not the guild, not the slow-motion collision of two worlds bleeding into each other somewhere behind my ribs. Just my mother, a hospital room, and six days that had somehow managed to feel like both nothing at all and everything at once.

"Don't you dare do that to me again," she whispered, her voice breaking clean in half on the last word.

"I won't."

It was, I realized even as I said it, a promise I had no real way of keeping. I didn't know what would happen the next time Grey told me I was running short on borrowed time. I didn't know if there'd even be a warning.

Her grip tightened around my fingers. She opened her mouth to say something else, something I never got to hear—

And the ceiling tilted.

"—before combat drills," Astrid finished, mid-sentence, like no time had passed at all, "unless you enjoy throwing up in front of your guildmates."

I was standing exactly where I'd been standing. Same hall. Same conversation, still rolling forward without a single missed beat, as though I'd never left it.

My hand was shaking.

Astrid noticed almost immediately, her expression shifting from amused to sharp in half a second. "Symon?"

I stared down at my own fingers, still warm from a hand that was, as far as this entire world was concerned, hundreds of leagues and one whole reality away.

"I'm fine," I said.

I wasn't sure that was true. I wasn't sure of much, standing there with the smell of antiseptic still clinging somewhere behind my eyes and my mother's voice still breaking apart in my ears, six days and one lifetime away.