The void spat Kael out into a world of paper and mercury. He fell onto a floor formed by torn pages, each written with alien memories that faded at the touch. Some seemed illusory and fragile. Shards of mirrors floated in the air like dead leaves, caught in an eternal dance, reflecting glimpses of shattered realities. In one of them, Kael could see himself in the city of broken mirrors, being killed by the judge of a thousand tongues, pierced by his sword. Each mirror was different, even giving a glimpse of creatures that could not be named.
The air smelled of rotten ink and charred flesh, with that sweet metallic poison he now recognized all too well: the scent of Lirya's tears.
Around him, towers of books rose like tombs, their spines throbbing with skin. Between them, shadows crawled.
No... they weren't shadows.
They were him.
Or what remained of other Kaels.
Some young, some old, some with three arms or mouths in strange places, most inert, lost like their memories...
One with his face melted like wax in the sun approached, whispering in a ragged voice:
"We are divided like the mirrors of the world... and the Judge comes for the weakest pieces."
A metallic creak cut the air.
Kael didn't need to turn around. He knew.
The Judge of a Thousand Tongues had arrived.
Amid the floating mirror shards, he saw his reflection: a cloak woven with severed tongues, each murmuring judgments in forgotten languages. His sword, forged from shards of shattered realities, reflected all of Kael's possible deaths on its blade, hundreds, thousands of them in different ways, in different realities... An endless cycle.
"Don't run," the Judge croaked, the tongues of his cloak chanting "guilty" in distorted echoes. "Just accept that you're not real."
Kael backed away, stepping on something soft. Another him, this time with empty eyes and a mouth filled with mirror shards instead of teeth.
The Judge raised his sword. In his reflection, Kael saw an ancient, chained version of himself.
"This will be your..."
A liquid sound interrupted him.
At his feet, a pool of mercury formed Lirya's lips. Among the mirror shards floating around, her voice whispered:
"The mirror behind her left shoulder! It's your way out!"
Kael acted on pure instinct, as if his instinct for self-preservation had been activated. He lunged forward, dodging the sword that carried a death sentence, and threw himself against the piece of mirror the Judge was shielding with his body.
The cold glass swallowed him, spitting him out into a garden of mercury statues.
Lirya waited for him, her eclipsed eyes glowing with the light of distant galaxies. Behind them, in the garden's only intact mirror, the Judge's silhouette began to emerge, his hands breaking the surface like thin ice as the previously silent garden filled with murmurs of judgments from those languages that formed the Judge's shelter.
"Fool," Lirya whispered, as a nearby statue (a Kael with its arms open in supplication) melted in a wordless scream. "You showed him the way. And now he's coming for both of us."
The mirror cracked with a soul-splitting sound.