“Oh. I’m here again.” William looked around the bright white room, a broken mirror standing in the center with a chair to assist with gazing while sitting. The Reflecting Room, a place to build confidence in oneself and introspect.

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Mother would always tell him that, “You cannot understand yourself if you don’t have that image of yourself in mind.” She would lock him up in that room full of light and have him reflect about his imperfections, about his lack of confidence. Have him reveal every little detail to her so that he would be bare to the world.

“Every sibling has a role to play. You are our front, our face, the happy child in a happy family.” She would repeat this over and over again while scrubbing his skin raw removing each blemish and imperfection from his body. They were trinkets, tools for his mother to ascend in social status and assure her status as nobility. But even our existence wasn’t enough. “They expect me to be without equal, expect me to crumble, expect me to fall to the pressure. Not me. I will be a pillar of stone. Not me.” For Jacob, it was a devotion to his athletics, to his physique. He was meant to be the strength of the family, resilient where she wasn’t. For Mirrah, it was her intellect. She was gifted with natural beauty and mother would weaponize that, teach her to be cunning where she could not be. William was afforded no comforts. His body was weak. His mind, although curious, was gentle and unfit to survive in the courts of charisma. He was the broken shard of weakness most like her, what she once was, and she would polish him how she had polished herself to rise to this point.

“Look at them crawling down there. They’ve rejected purity for filth. After all we’ve given them to be clean.” She would mock, Williams eyes open and vacant, simply staring at the world below and the misery above. The vitriol came from experience, from being in the rotten muck. Like a statue, he would watch the world pass him by, eyes unflinching, face with a vacant smile and a lack of a voice to bother the adults. A suit of flesh that allowed his mind to wander beyond it all. She was a noble, her children were successful, and the facade would remain.

Until it didn’t. And he passively watched it all. He watched as her skin peeled and crumbled, porcelain skin revealing a hollow and empty inner self. He watched as she succumbed to her madness, a face drawn for beauty, an abstract body of wood and blood, a smile radiant like the glimmers of sunlight, all set to crumble under the weight and pressure of ascension. At least Mother wasn’t alone in the end. He could watch her and keep her company wherever she went and she would always see herself in his eyes, the pride and joy of the family, her weakest son.

The court discarded him after she disappeared. Jacob remained a slave to his heroics, devout to his craft of violence. Mirrah blossomed into something beyond their mother, an unrecognizable wolf in a herd of sheep. They were tools even now and with no need for a face, the weakest son fell from grace.

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It was a story that would loop in the room over and over again, the broken shards in the mirror stolen glimpses of the one he had loved, of all that he had known. It was always a struggle to sink this deep and wallow, a risk taken to indulge in the power he did have. It would gnaw at him know if he did not complete the loop. He was designed to watch and wait until the end.

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There were the Backstreets and the Outskirts and he was unfamiliar with both. He had read of the suffering experienced beyond the walls, the cannibals that roamed the area feasting on the bones of little children while greater demons slept in the roiling smoke of the Ruins. He was familiar with the abject misery and impoverishment of the Backstreets.

It was something to be experienced, not to be learned. It was an unpleasant sensation to be so unclean, to have devoted oneself to purity only to have no way to remove the defilement in the wastes. He attuned to his ability and watched others from afar, traveling from world to world and indulging in the lives of others to avoid thoughts of hunger and pain from existence. On the third night, he had found his new home. The warehouse and the tree, its landscape vivid and secluded from everything else, a paradise to decompose without worry. His body shaking, he hobbled to his salvation and watched the lives of others, hoping to be un-tethered from his mortal chain.

He met Foxtail and Roxy at that time. A lumbering woman of stone and moss flailing her limbs to crush the Sweepers harassing them. A hoodie wearing youth kept jumping in and out of view avoiding danger while making a path to him. It was his first choice. Seeing their desperate fight for life passed an ember to will merely smouldering; life would be a struggle but he would not be an observer today. From the trash and detritus in the area, he reached into the fragments and showed them the many worlds he was familiar with, a world fit for them. The golem girl barrelled through the plaza carrying the hooded girl and barged into the warehouse.

“Why did they stop following us?” The hooded girl looked at the giant.

“I don’t know.” Each syllable boomed with a guttural power. She sat down on the floor and the warehouse shook. William dragged his body to peer over the second floor and whispered “It was me…” before the loop ended. The broken mirror was realigned and would remain so as long as he focused on the present. He was inside a room and bound to a chair, an absence of sound so present he could tune into the sound of his heartbeat. He was captured after succumbing to the smoke and flames, his mind unable to return to his body fast enough to react. But he had the time now. Peepers was stuck in a room with no reflective entry point. It would cause him turmoil again and again but the fragment left with Foreigner was his only hope. It was his struggle to warn them against saving him. Against confronting someone like her.

He opened his eyes and watched the remnants of a man in a brown coat being coldly shredded through a cloud of blades. There were others on the line up before him and he would do everything in his power from having them succumb to that same fate.