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I broke the silence. "I think you owe me a few explanations."

He blinked at me, hands emerging from his brilliant blue sleeves to rub over one another seemingly of their own will. "I didn't know, I promise. I didn't know you existed." His inflection was a perfect match to mine, and I hated the weak way his voice carried. "The ritual was for the Mane alone, and now this…"

"So you are behind this whole business with the two Manes?"

"Yes and no. Mostly yes, I suppose. You see it all started when I needed money and took a role as an aide to the imperial governor of Elsweyr—”

"Lucca. He said you promised to help him."

His face lit up. "You saw old Lucca? How is he? I suppose a bit angry—"

"More than a bit. Just keep going."

“Okay. Well it was all back office stuff for him, basic fortune telling, prognostications, and predictions for various local happenings, until at some point Lucca learned about the depths of my expertise. He was quite interested in my work, our work I suppose — you also study fate, correct? Good, then we have a smaller divergence than the Manes. Anyway, I earned Lucca’s trust and he tells me that the Mane is dreaming of greater things, maybe even independence. Obviously not something an imperial governor likes to let fester, but at the same time the Mane is too powerful to move against directly, especially with the empire in the state it’s in. So he tells me to humble him.”

“Humble him?”

He nodded. “The Mane’s dead set on 'restoring the glory of Elsweyr’ and all that. Long story short, he sends me into His Perfection' services as a gift supposedly, but secretly I’m just gaining his trust as a fortune teller so that I can tell him how crazy he would be to rebel. I went about perfecting his fortune and it was all well and good until I realized he really does have a powerful fate. And so I decided to confirm it by using the most powerful tool I have…”

“The Miser’s Mirror.”

"And like I said, I was under a lot of pressure. We went out into the wastes to perform the ceremony at a ritual site, out there for a whole week, and well..."

"Well?"

He walked to the kitchenette, putting the counter between us as he fumbled with the water pitcher. Glass chattering on glass as he poured. "I messed up. I messed up badly, Berry. May I call you Berry?"

"Well, it is my name”

"Of course it is. Well, I did everything like we did when we were kids, but it all went so, so, differently. I'm still researching the specifics. Regardless, as we returned home we realized we were changed by it and there was already another Mane in the capital, the Stranger. His scouts reported us as ‘pretenders for the throne’ and so he sent the royal guard out to murder us. Nearly killed us on the plains, but we beat a swift retreat back out to the wastes to rebuild our powerbase. Six months later and here we are"

"What do you mean by the other Mane being a ‘stranger’?"

He drained his glass in one go before clearing his throat. "Well you've heard how identical the two Manes are? I have a theory of what happened to them, and apparently us too. By Azura, but I need something stronger to explain this.” He forced a laugh and returned with a bottle and a pair of crystal glasses before kneeling at the table beside me. He slid the bottle to me so that I could pour while he took up a quill and drew a spoked wheel on the blank side of some oath of allegiance he'd received.

The brandy gurgled out brown and warm but I still had the presence of mind to run a finger over the rims, muttering a frost charm onto the glasses. As the other Berry finished his sketch he took up his glass and swallowed a mouthful before speaking.

"Imagine this wheel as the metaphysical foundation of our world. Each spoke one of the divines, establishing natural order and the space between them containing the material reality of our plane, in fact—” he put his drinking glass atop the paper and began slowly rotating the paper so it gently sloshed about. “This liquid is our reality, with Akatosh as the turning spoke which we mortals perceive as time."

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I nodded.

“Well everything is moving together in this little glass, isn’t it? One drop resting on another drop which is resting on another, all sliding around and having fun in there. If I suck up one little drop off the top, then a few of his buddies shift into place but not much of an effect is there? But suppose I somehow drained out a single drop from the bottom of this glass, it would cause a chain-reaction up the entire glass.”

“You’re referring to… someone being removed from time’s continuity?”

"Well through the fate binding technique — theoretically — we are moving a person independently of their personal volition, and not in a cheap way by mental or physical enslavement either, but by reforming them through a sort of mass-group identity formation — my term for it — I’ll share my papers with you of course. All from the mass awareness you gain from the mirror. Regardless, while in contact with the mirror the person is fundamentally absent from our plane as a singular person, since by their own conception they are being identified by the persona within the mirror. So as far as fate is concerned there is a void, an unassigned fate. The gods, or some similar natural phenomenon, then create an individual to accept that fate. To our eyes a duplicate, but not truly so in the eyes of higher beings. I categorize the being which experiences the transformation and creates an ‘excess’ fate to be the 'Deviator' and the duplicate who is brought into existence to receive the original fate to be the 'Stranger'."

I tried to slow my breathing through my nose, my head was beginning to spin. "And you're implying that I’m a ‘Stranger’, along with the southern Mane? But I have memories, an entire life. People know me."

"You know as well as I do that fate is not that simple, Berry. You aren’t a mere imposter. Your memories are real, all of them. Yet some may not be remembered by anyone else living. I suspect half of those we know recall the world as you lived it, the other half as I did, that’s the effect of a shifting mass-group identification cascade. The material truth of our world has shifted, and now lies somewhere in the middle.

It was my turn to drink. Judging sips as insufficient, I cast the glass back and dumped its contents burning down my throat — gritting my teeth.

My entire life was merely a shallow reflection of the little man before me. Would my mother even know me for myself if I returned home? My Deviator sat across from me, avoiding my eyes in a respectful silence while I processed it all. Eventually I cleared my throat. "So this split into two people is the cause of all this chaos. But you said something about a small divergence between us?"

"A theory of mine. Just going off what I've learned from the Manes, it appears that the duplicates are never the same, some event in the Stranger's life turns out differently so that they would not also seek to bend fate and create yet another replica of themselves — for example the southern Mane lacks the will to catch a pigeon, much less rebel against the empire, or so my spies tell me."

I rolled my head back to eyed the tessellated mirrors on the ceiling, watching Berry’s reflection extend an arm to refill my drink. I squeezed my eyes shut. "I already know our divergence, I cast the Miser's Mirror back into the sea. I know you still have it — your version of it at least. And it's the crux of your fate binding technique."

He froze as if I'd just accused him of murder (and I suppose I had in a way) before slowly thawing out enough to nod. He spoke without looking at me. "Did he ever recover for you?"

"No, that's why I threw the damn thing into the ocean."

He swallowed, eye rims reddening further. "I felt I had to carry it on, for him. I had to make it all worth it. It's a one of a kind artifact and I — we — are the only ones with the painfully earned knowledge to use it."

"But look what you've done! The country is on the verge of damn civil war."

"You think I don't know that? But I can't walk away now. I have to fix this."

I was silent a moment. "How much of this do the Manes know?"

"None of it of course! And they can't find out. It would be the death of me for one, and now you too. Besides, it would only serve to terribly confuse the issue. No, the only solution is a swift resolution to the excess Mane sitting in the east, then we can have a single wise and powerful leader this country needs. We can do it all nearly bloodlessly if we're smart."

"It's not just us, you know. Ro'kash also has a Stranger."

"By Molag Bal’s sore nuts, another Ro'kash is the last thing I need. And there were a dozen other people at the ceremony who may have doubles I haven't accounted for either." He deflated back under his own weight upon the cushion beside me. He seemed both older and younger than me, softer skinned but crooked under an invisible weight. The lump of his throat slid up his pale neck with a swallow as his eyes stared vacantly. "So what will you do now that you know me? What I've done."

He puzzled me. I was sure he could have snapped his fingers and had a dozen guards take me out back to be beheaded, but this court advisor — nearly a prince in his own right — sitting before me was begging for some absolution I had no business giving. Me, who even before my ignoble conscription into the service of the Blades had been a penniless failure, now ridden rough by the road to be more miserable than most beggars, one with a bounty on his head no less.

"Berry…" I said.

"Yes?"

"You're a selfish bastard. But under our unique circumstances I find this traits a commendable feature of your character." He gave only a weary smile but wouldn't meet my eyes until I put my hand on his shoulder. He was smaller under my palm than I expected.

I rocked him gently, like a brother would. "Brighten up, Berry. This is a second chance for both of us. We can fix it together."