The glass itself didn’t hold his reflection the way a normal mirror would.
It held the river instead, the same colorless churn he’d just been floating on, deep and patient and going nowhere in particular, and he understood, without being told, that this was not a mirror that showed you your face.
This was a mirror that returns things to their source, like how Death returns us to the Mother, like how the Eternal Darkness returns us to the Goddess of Origin.
‘No pressure then,’
He stepped in front of it, because if there was one lesson two lifetimes should have taught him, it was that the polite thing to do when an ominous mirror is in front of you, is to walk up and check your hair.
The reflection was not his hair.
The reflection was not, strictly speaking, him at all, not the him that ate meat pies and made poor life choices in London alleys, but something the mirror had apparently decided was closer to the truth of the matter.
“He” was tall, taller than he’d ever been, wrapped in robes that had once been white and were now torn into long ribbons at every edge, squirming without wind, like the cloth remembered being cut and hadn’t finished forgiving whoever did it.
Where a heart should have been, red flowers grew instead, small red blooms pushing up through torn white cloth the way weeds push up through a garden path nobody’s tended in years.
“His” chest didn’t look wounded so much as it looked planted.
‘Very dramatic.
This thing has good taste at least.’ he thought, feeling something between pride and mild horror.
One arm hung differently than the other.
It was covered to the shoulder in armor, heavy and shining silver, covered all over with intricate design, the metal itself flowed naturally like water filling a shape rather than a solid mass, built for a hand that was used to being obeyed.
‘The Twilight Giant Uniqueness’
He flexed the arm experimentally and watched his reflection do the same immediately.
Behind “His” head, rising where no wings had any business being, three pairs of wings swept up and out like a crown covering “His” face as if shielding the world from the horror hiding within, every wing covered in deep crimson eyes, surrounded by darkness.
‘The Darkness Uniqueness’
He thought of opening the wings, and they did.
His face wasn’t a face at all.
“His” face only had a single vertical eye large enough to cover the whole, no longer shut the way he half remembered it being once in some flicker of memory he couldn’t place.
Now open, he could see through “Him” watching himself.
Black furred wolf-like ears hiding behind the feathers.
In “His” remaining hand, the one not buried under the armor, a scythe made of pale white bone rested easy, long handled, the pale blade curved in a slow, patient arc, the kind of tool built less for a single killing stroke and more for the steady, unhurried work of a harvest that was never in any particular rush.
‘And that’s the last one,’ he thought.
‘The Death Uniqueness’
“He” turned the scythe slightly, watching the orange light from his side of the mirror catch the curve of it, watching the flowers on “His” own chest sway with the movement like they’d been growing there for years rather than minutes.
He heard a voice, countless voices of praise and worship that could not get through the mirror now finding a destination.
Smiter
Flashing One
Monstrous Wolf
Beast of Slaughter
Precious Serpent
Wisest of Men
Honorific names that belonged to divine idols.
‘Misplaced worship, this is exactly why Klein was so careful in constructing his honorific name’
He stood there for a long moment, taking the whole thing in, robes and armor and wings and scythe and flowers and the eye that wouldn’t blink, and felt the specific, undignified joy of a man who has just discovered he looks, against all reasonable odds, extremely cool.
“Now that’s aura,” he said, to the empty garden, to the mirror, to whatever cosmic committee had signed off on this design.
He turned slightly, admiring the wings from the angle a man admires a new coat in a shop window.
“The Eternal Darkness’ Mythical Creature Form has never looked any better”
He talked to the air like a madman.
Partly as an old habit.
Mostly to calm himself down.
Somewhere underneath the satisfaction, a thought surfaced, an action that he thought he could never do again.
‘Whatever burgeoning consciousness was developing in that river has fully fused with me, but instead of consumption, it was a true fusion, as if I have always been “Him” and “He” has always been me, as if this is how it should’ve been in the first place’
“He” let the scythe rest against his shoulder, testing the weight of it, testing the weight of all of it, the armor and the wings and the flowers growing in places the torn cloth couldn’t cover, there was no longer a distinction between the two.
He is “Him”
‘Free things are often the most expensive,’ he thought, and almost laughed, because whatever this was, it would cost him plenty, and he still wasn’t entirely sure who exactly was going to come to collect the payment.
The mirror held steady, showing him exactly what he was, he did not look away from it.
“Alright,” he said, to his reflection, to the garden, to the river that had never once stopped being patient with him.
“This is a reasonable development.”
He could leave now and he had a theory, an experiment to do.
His self inside the mirror is the Eternal Darkness, an alien destructive force, while his self outside is Cormac Anwar Halvorsen, a not so ordinary human but still of this world.
The River of Eternal Darkness, now essentially his body, physically split him due to his desire to gain access to the outside world, subconsciously like how the desire to live makes someone’s body breathe on their own.
The Eternal Darkness can pass through this mirror, he can feel the fragility of this glass barrier, but breaking it will just get rid of his only way out.
He has to take it slow, act to deceive the world into thinking that this power belongs solely to Cormac Anwar Halvorsen.
He reached into the mirror and so did his reflection but when their hands were about to touch, they moved in opposite directions.
The Eternal Darkness gave eyes stained with starlight, a pale leather covered in rotting black spots, and a tangled mass of flesh that slowly writhed.
Cormac received them and held them carefully.
Then they separated and mirrored their movements again as he ingested the Beyonder Characteristics directly.
He could feel the connection he has with his other self has gotten stronger.
I noticed people’s comments disappear because I keep editing chapters, I’ll try not to do that anymore unless really necessary