---

Dispatches Of Splinters Of My Mind Entry 29:

Mirrors deceive only those who expect reflections.

The old ones are doors.

I did not remember entering the hall.

Perhaps I never had.

The corridor behind me had dissolved into a darkness so complete it seemed to drink memory itself. Before me rose a mirror taller than any cathedral door, framed in black wood carved with roots, ravens, sleeping kings, and forgotten constellations whose names had been erased from every surviving language. Hundreds of candles burned throughout the chamber, yet none surrendered warmth. Their pale flames trembled without smoke, releasing only the faint fragrance of melting beeswax, cold iron, ancient vellum, and dust so old it carried the dry sweetness of abandoned monasteries. The silence possessed weight. It settled upon my shoulders like a ceremonial cloak, making even breath feel intrusive.

The glass was cracked.

Not broken.

Remembered.

Thousands of silver fractures spread across its surface like rivers frozen beneath winter ice. They caught the candlelight and scattered it into drifting constellations that seemed suspended beneath the glass instead of upon it. The cracks shimmered with impossible depth. Looking into them felt less like studying broken glass than gazing through the veins of reality itself. Every fracture suggested another path. Every path promised another version of the same impossible destination.

He stood where my reflection should have been.

Older.

Not in years.

In burdens.

His robe absorbed the light around it until black itself seemed too pale to describe what I was seeing. Great wings unfolded behind him—not feathered, but woven from living shadow, each movement resembling a murder of ravens lifting from a battlefield after the last soldier had forgotten his own name. Upon his brow rested a crown grown from intertwined branches, thorns, and dead stars whose pale light had long since vanished from the heavens. It did not appear forged.

It appeared inevitable.

He raised one hand.

Slowly.

The motion possessed the unbearable patience of mountains shaping themselves through centuries of wind.

I hesitated.

Not because I feared him.

Because somewhere beneath memory…

I recognized him.

Recognition is rarely comforting.

The air between us became impossibly thin. Ancient glass separated us, yet it felt no thicker than skin. My breathing slowed until every inhale echoed inside my chest like wind passing through cathedral ruins. I heard the faint rasp of cloth shifting against my coat. The soft creak of leather beneath my boots. The steady pulse of blood inside my ears.

Then another sound emerged.

Not his breathing.

Mine.

Older.

Deeper.

Each breath carried the cadence of someone who had witnessed civilizations bloom into dust and still found reason to continue walking. It sounded like my lungs remembering a rhythm my life had somehow forgotten.

The mirror did not reflect who I was.

It reflected who had survived every version of me.

My hand rose almost without permission.

So did his.

Our fingertips stopped an inch apart.

The glass inhaled.

The fractures awakened one by one, veins of silver fire spreading through the mirror until the chamber filled with a faint crystalline hum that vibrated inside my ribs. The sound was neither music nor language. It resembled distant glaciers breaking beneath unseen moons. Beneath the glass unfolded impossible landscapes layered atop one another like memories refusing chronology: forests growing beneath oceans; cities built inside the ribs of sleeping giants; children carrying miniature suns whose warmth smelled faintly of cedar smoke and summer rain; rivers climbing into eclipsed skies where birds flew backward through constellations that no astronomer had ever mapped.

The mirror contained no future.

It contained every possibility abandoned in order to become the person standing before it.

An unexpected grief settled inside me.

Not regret.

Something older.

The sorrow reserved for lives never granted the dignity of existing.

The artist who abandoned the canvas too soon.

The father who spoke too little because silence felt safer than tenderness.

The friend who arrived one day too late.

The stranger whose single act of kindness might have redirected another soul’s entire history.

None accused me.

They simply existed.

Waiting patiently inside the fractures where every unlived decision continued forever, branching into worlds I would never inhabit yet somehow continued to mourn.

His eyes never left mine.

Within them I found neither judgment nor forgiveness.

Only understanding.

Absolute understanding.

The kind that strips every defense from the soul.

His lips never moved.

Yet words entered the chamber with the quiet certainty of snowfall covering forgotten graves.

“Every life believes it is becoming.”

Silence.

The candles bent inward as though listening.

“Few understand they are remembering.”

A cold draft drifted through the hall carrying scents that belonged to no single season—rain striking warm stone, extinguished fireplaces, pine resin, old parchment, cedar chests unopened for generations, and the faint metallic trace of approaching storms. Somewhere beyond the towering arches came the slow beating of unseen wings. Each pulse traveled through the marble floor until the vibration settled beneath my feet like another heartbeat hidden inside the earth.

I searched his face for answers.

Instead…

I found exhaustion.

Not the exhaustion of age.

The exhaustion of waiting.

Waiting so long that time itself had surrendered the habit of counting.

The realization struck with terrifying gentleness.

He had never been imprisoned inside the mirror.

I had.

Every certainty I defended.

Every identity I polished.

Every fear mistaken for truth.

Every role I accepted because it spared me the terrifying freedom of becoming something else.

Each had been another layer of glass placed between us.

The cracks were not evidence of decay.

They were evidence that something inside me had finally become willing to break.

His hand pressed softly against the mirror.

This time…

The glass yielded.

Cold flooded my fingertips—not winter’s cold, but the temperature of water hidden beneath glaciers, stone sleeping beneath mountains, and truths existing long before the first human mouth learned to shape sound into language. It climbed slowly through my hand, my arm, my chest. Every heartbeat echoed through the silver fractures until I could no longer distinguish whether the rhythm belonged to my own heart or to the mirror itself.

For one impossible moment…

I no longer knew which side contained the reflection.

Or whether either side had ever truly been real.

The candles extinguished themselves.

One by one.

Darkness reclaimed the hall with the patient confidence of night returning to a world that had only borrowed daylight.

Only the fractures continued glowing.

When the final flame surrendered, ordinary glass stared back at me.

My reflection had returned.

Smaller than I remembered.

Not diminished.

Merely unfinished.

Deep within the countless silver fractures, almost too distant to distinguish from memory itself, the crowned figure remained motionless.

Watching.

Waiting.

Some thresholds are crossed only once.

Others reveal that they were crossed years ago, and every step taken since has merely been the slow remembering of a meeting the soul has been walking toward since before it ever learned its own name.