Elias walked through the bone forest that ended almost without warning, and he was before the tunnel that he suspected the wolves had erged from.
He paused in front of it, waiting and listening, while his Vitality and Stamina slowly ticked upward. Elias knew that there were potions that could give a quick burst of Vitality and Stamina, and he had always thought he would not need them, but that was clearly not the case if he kept entering weird situations like this.
As he listened, he observed the tunnel; it was not natural, as he could see precise curves and edges, even though the walls were now filled with the light of dying bioluminescent fungi.
Elias stood at its entrance, and he could not hear anything breathing or sense any life with his Crimson Vein Art. He checked his vest and noted that with three of the objects close now found and close together, they were beginning to pulse against his chest in a rhythm that was almost, but not quite, synchronized.
The way Elias interpreted this pulse was that they wanted the fourth, and indeed, he could feel a pull inside the tunnel, and any hesitation he had was thrown away from the rumble as the entire cavern around him continuously shrank, and Elias stepped into the tunnel, feeling the darkness close around him like a mouth.
He saw no wolves even after walking for several minutes through the tunnel, and the only thing he had to worry about was the growing noise from the world collapsing around him.
The tunnel began to twist and turn, branching and rejoining, leading him through passages that seed to double back on themselves.
His Perception was useless here; the walls drank sound, absorbed light, swallowed the heat signatures of anything that might have lived in this place, and he soon realized that this tunnel might be filled with monsters, and he would not know until they were chomping on his head.
He was blind, deaf, and alone, and then he saw himself.
Elias blinked and then realized he was looking at a mirror.
It stood at the end of the passage, its surface black, and its edges were traced with silver.
Elias looked at his reflection, and he was amazed at how broken he appeared. It was as if he had been inside this cavern for months and not hours.
He cocked his head to the side. Sothing about this reflection seed off. He was not that visibly injured, was he?
Elias blinked again, and his reflection had changed. Now the man in the mirror was not bleeding or wounded. He stood straight, his armor intact, his face unmarked, and his eyes clear.
"You look tired," his reflection said.
Elias smiled, with all the strange things he had witnessed, a talking reflection seed almost ta, but he could now see that he had not reached the end of the tunnel, and the pull of the fourth item was still further ahead.
He walked past the mirror, and he heard the reflection laugh.
Elias hated that sound, or how arrogant it made him appear, even when he knew that his face and voice had just been stolen and were being used against him.
It did not take long before more mirrors appeared in front of him. They lined the walls, hung from the ceiling, rose from the floor.
In each, he saw himself differently. One showed him as a child, small and thin, his flesh rotting from his bones.
Another showed him as an old man, his face lined, his hair white, his eyes empty. Elias’s eyes widened a fraction; he had never believed that he would live long enough to ever grow old.
A third mirror showed him as the boy from the Fragnt, yellow-eyed, smiling, his teeth too sharp.
"You could have been ," the yellow-eyed boy said from the mirror. "You could have taken what was offered. You could have been whole."
Elias found this reflection to be strange as it almost seed as if it was reflecting soone else and not him, but he kept walking.
"Listen to him. You will never be whole," the rotting child he had been whispered. "You will always be broken. Always hungry. Always empty."
"You will die," the old man said. "Everyone you love will die! Everyone you save will die! Everything you build will crumble! This is your future! This is your fate!"
Elias stopped. It would have been better if he had sensed hatred in the voice of this old man, but there was no hatred, only a tiredness as if he had been to the future and saw what had happened.
This reflection knew without any doubt that Elias would die, and everything he had built and everyone he loved would die.
He looked at the old man in the mirror, at the wrinkles, the white hair, and the empty eyes, then he looked at the child he had been, the monster he could beco, then back at the man who would outlive everything he touched.
Elias walked up to the mirror of the old man, and he whispered, "Who told you I have the capability to love?" and he reached out and touched the glass. "You do not know my future... You know nothing."
He applied force to his hand, and the mirror shattered. The sound of the shattered mirror appeared like a trail of light that exploded through the tunnel, and the mirrors around him cracked, their surfaces spider-webbing, causing all of the reflections to fragnt.
The reflections scread, all of them, and then they were gone, and he was standing in a chamber with a single mirror at its center.
Elias closed his eyes for a mont before he opened them. The constant shifting of reality was affecting his mind.
It was almost becoming too hard to notice what was real and not real, and it felt worse when he considered that everything he had experienced could be seen as real, but also not.
Elias shook his head, dismissing all of these thoughts. If he wanted to go mad, he should do this when he was done with these trials.
He stared at the mirror, and in it, he did not see his reflection; he saw nothing, as if he was staring into the void.
"The Veil Fragnt," the voice whispered in his ears, and Elias turned a bit to the right. Did he hope he would see the owner of the voice that told him the na of each item he was sent to find?
Elias stepped toward the mirror, and even when he was so close, he could not see his reflection, and it was almost as if he was not looking at a mirror but a window into the void.
Squinting his eyes, Elias would have sworn that this void was the sa as the void that lived in his Lumina Space.
He understood now, or at least he thought he did. The Echo Stone had taught him to quiet the noise, the Passenger, and the voices of the dead. The Heartwood had taught him to grow from pain, his healing, his survival, his endless, stubborn refusal to die. The Tear had taught him to feel, to carry the sorrow of the world inside him, to fill up the emptiness inside him.
And this? If he was not wrong, then this would teach him what he was.
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