Through the glass, two calculating eyes peer deeply into mine - the irises are burgundy, the sclera a pure white. They are beset within a sharp, angular face of regal projection, olive skin, jutting cheekbones. A jagged cut lisps across into the lips — perfectly still, the superior lip thicker than its inferior twin. Driblets of a slightly sanguine substance eek from the new wound, trailing down the neck, a neck with farcical ligaments that portray liveliness while being perfectly — unsettlingly — still.
Two calculating eyes that drag ever downward, gazing upon its real life duplicate with a plain disregard. Diverging rivers of the blood-like substance trace over steel-zinc letters embedded into their skin, the words are:
C E R I v.01 - si001
yelipika industries original™
Indicators stress that my body is nigh on destruction, critical systems nearly collapsing, but the Ceri in the glass sees just another failure. She doesn’t know the pain I’ve endured, the gold twisting from my fingers; no, she exists only in this moment, within the narrow frame of present.
In just seconds, the flesh of her face spurns: the sharp cheekbones twist back, flattening into a wide, masculine austere, the oval figure of her face widening at its bottom, rectangular now. The lips flatten into two even lines. Needles re-pigment the skin of her face, darkening them until the olive has become a hardy wood; the flush of color flows through her neck and down her shoulders. The cut that was down her right cheek has re-positioned slightly, tearing at the ends and casting more blood-like substance hellward. Pain cascades from many tears, all down into my body.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
A plane of glass is expelled from the skin of the reflection’s left thigh, an unsettling sensation like squeezing out sheet metal. It clatters to the bathroom tile, managing to stay whole still. The reflection’s eyes, twin verdant jades nestled in the branching arteries of a slightly yellowed sclera, trace down to the reflective sheen of glass. While keeping eye contact with the sheen, he crouches downward and grips the glass in his world.
He brings it to the model number beneath his collarbone. Without care to recalculate or reassess, he cuts through the flesh to the left of the M. My body alerts with pain and sends data to an internal monitoring system — a system that was destroyed in my fall. With no inhibition, the man in the glass continues: through the flesh that bleeds its blood, the sculpted man edits his appearance in a way his creator forbade. To obscure his mark as created, not creator, he rips his supple flesh around the mark, blood pooling at his feet. The creature that clings to him, that is his skin, cries in horrific pain, batting strikes at his psyche; alas, he lives in the reflection, so he does not truly feel.
When the flesh is removed, sinews snapping in discordance, and its blood a river fall over his naked chest, he extends the viscera from him and drops it as a child would a toy. Then, his hands reach into himself, grip the metallic lettering, spreads his feet apart, and, within a prolonged moment, bends the marking until it shatters, one letter at a time.
When he finishes, I look down upon my body. A bloody crevasse had been made below my collarbone, yellowish lines trace over the artificial ridge, over the steel stalks that had been torn short. Clutched within my thick fingers are steel-zinc fragments, and I cast them to the sink rapidly filling with water — branches of the sanguine substance intermingle with the water.
A knock on the door to my right, and I steal one more glance at the man that rid himself of his mark. That man isn’t me, for I am no man, nor am I a woman. I was once a Ceri, but now I am me.
Shattered, unwhole.