And I wished I hadn't.
The obsidian wasn't just reflective; it was interpretive. As we moved across the jagged plains, the surface below us didn't show our faces. It showed our ghosts.
I watched Flynn trot across a slab of smooth, black glass. In the reflection, he wasn't a wolf. He was a man standing in the center of a burning village. I saw the thatched roofs collapsing. I saw the bodies in the mud. I saw the blood on his hands, so much blood it looked like he was wearing red gloves. The reflection-Flynn was throwing his head back, laughing, but the eyes were screaming.
Flynn whined, a high-pitched sound of distress, and danced sideways, trying to step off his own reflection. But the next pane of glass just showed him the same scene from a different angle.
Don't look down,Flynn whimpered.Don't look. The floor is mean.
I drifted over Aria.
Her boots crunched on a long, flat stretch of the void-glass.
Below her, the reflection didn't show the Underworld. It showed the Citadel. It showed a small, stone room that smelled of cruelty. It showed the High Keeper’s rod striking a small child's back. But then the image shifted. It showed the Forge of Hephaestus.
I saw Aria lying on the Anvil, her body arching in agony. I saw the hammer coming down. But in the reflection, the hammer didn't reshape her. It shattered her. I watched her fly apart into a million bloody pieces of meat and broken metal. I watched the light leave her eyes.
It was the outcome I had calculated a thousand times. The statistical probability of her survival had been less than four percent. The glass was showing the ninety-six percent. It was showing the failure of my design.
Aria stumbled. She had seen it too.
Her metal foot skidded on the glass. For a second, she looked like she was going to fall right into the image of her own death.
Thane’s massive hand shot out, catching her by the elbow.
Steady,the Bear projected.
I looked at Thane’s feet.
The glass beneath him didn't show the Ridge, or the men he had lost, or the war. It showed... nothing. It showed an empty chair. A cold hearth. It showed a world where he stood completely alone, the last living thing in a universe of dust.
Loneliness. That was his failure. Not the death he caused, but the connection he failed to keep.
And Kaelen?
I dared to look at the reflection beneath the Dragon’s boots.
I expected to see burning cities. I expected to see the fall of Olympus.
Instead, I saw fire. I saw Kaelen standing in the center of a charred plain, and the bodies at his feet were not enemies. They were the shapes of the people he had chosen to protect. His hands were open at his sides, and he was weeping, because he had not meant to burn them. The fire had simply been too much, and he had been too much, and love had not been enough to hold it back.
Consumption. The dragon's secret fear wasn't chains. It was becoming the very thing that destroyed what he loved most.
I felt a surge of nausea that nearly knocked me out of the air.
It knows us,I realized, the thought turning my blood to ice.
The Devourer wasn't just a hungry mouth at the center of the world. It was a mirror. It catalogued every crack in our psyches, every moment of self-loathing, and it paved the road to our destruction with them.
We weren't walking across glass. We were walking across our own insecurities.
Aria,I projected, urgency lending strength to my mental voice.The terrain is psycho-reactive. It is weaponizing our guilt. Do not internalize the data. The data is biased.
"I see it, Elias," she said through gritted teeth. She didn't look down. She kept her chin up, staring resolutely at the grey horizon. "Just keep moving. If we stop to analyze it, we accept the premise."
The premise that we are broken,I noted.
"The premise that we're defined by our worst days," she corrected.
