Journey Through the Mirror World

The world that greeted us was the architectural ghost of the one we’d left, stripped of substance and rebuilt from incandescent fantasies. Everything hummed with an inner light—a venomous violet bleeding into the blue of a gas flame, a feverish magenta pooling in the hollows of crystalline shapes that surely tortured the perilous photons that endured. The air itself was a tangible pressure, a curious, clinging presence against the skin.

I looked up through the shattered lake's mouth, seeing our familiar orange sky framed by crystalline teeth. The sense of gravity seemed to invert at some invisible midpoint, making my inner ear protest the impossible physics.

"We're not just in another dimension," Yoko explained, noticing my confusion. "This is another quantum reality that springs forth when entropy permits the right conditions."

"So it's more like a sixth-dimensional construct of time? Where the master wave function collapses naught?"

"Precisely. Like the inflationary period before a Big Bang."

I filed away a dozen questions about the physics of folded space for later. The landscape around us held only surface similarities to our world—like looking at a photograph of a photograph, each iteration losing definition. Depths yawned where none had existed above, suggesting we would need to shatter more mirrors to descend further into this reality of echoes.

The shrine rose before us like a black tumor growing from the chromatic ground, spiraling both upward toward our world and downward into abyssal depths I couldn't fathom. Dark lightning crackled around its surface with the rhythm of a diseased heartbeat.

"What if we just—" Xiao Ru began, but Yoko's headshake cut her short.

"It would be the same as destroying the one above. We need to go deeper."

Xiao Ru nodded and summoned her arrows, which now blazed with a power that made my eyes water. "Just tell me where."

Yoko consulted her holographic display, frowning at the static that corrupted the deeper readings. "The map's degrading, but I can see enough. There—" She pointed toward an area where the geometry folded in on itself like a blouse made of razors.

Xiao Ru drew and released.

The explosion that followed belonged in artillery manuals, not archery demonstrations. Fragments of chromatic mirror erupted in all directions, one shard nicking Xiao Ru's cheek as she stared in amazement at her own destructive capability. We all stood slack-jawed at the crater she'd carved from solid reflection, a cavern mouth now gaping where a smooth surface had been moments before.

After collecting ourselves and Serena carefully extracting a sliver of glass from Ashley's arm—to a chorus of mortified apologies from Xiao Ru—we approached the opening she'd created. Whatever waited in the depths below, at least now we had a way to reach it.

The descent into this hell of echoes was about to begin.

---

We descended through air scrubbed clean of all scent, so sterile it felt sharp in the lungs. It felt, at times, a vault of perfect preservation. The walls were seamless chrome, polished to a mirror shine, and the floor was a sheet of flawless pearlesacent glass. Yoko’s holographic display, once a riot of color, was now just a smear of grey static against the overwhelming reflections, leaving us to navigate by her instinct alone. She could only remind us to keep spiraling downward—stray from the path and we would be endlessly reflected, never to be found.

The turns came frequently, a disorienting, repeating edifice. Serena kept by Ashley, her focus absolute as she tended to the wound with her lips. Ashley, for her part, simply stared into the middle distance, offering her arm as if it were a parcel to be delivered. Behind them, Xiao Ru moved with her head cocked, listening to echoes that were either phantom footsteps or the vault’s own resonant hum.

A strange languor stole over me as I considered the task ahead. What did it mean to destroy the "roots" of this place? Was it a simple, brutal act of severance, like a gardener uprooting a weed, or some manner of metaphysical surgery for which my mind possessed no proper scalpel?

My reverie was broken by a change in the reflections before me. From the chrome’s cold heart, two forms precipitated like ghosts in a dark mirror. Remi appeared first, a shivering mirage, and beside her, Ami, her spectral violin held with a sorrowful grace.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, my voice a dead sound in the sterile air.

Remi spoke, but her backwards tongue may well have been cut out.

Ami’s voice was a whisper from a sepulcher. "Lady Kageyama has sent a guide. Remi was once lost in the intersection between these realities. She remembers… the weak points of the pillar root."

In a flicker of displaced air—an abuse of her magicks for certain—Xiao Ru was at my side, her arms enlacing my neck with a sudden, possessive ardor. Her closeness was a magnetic thing, an innocent yet primal claim that sent a strange warmth through me.

"You'd think she wished to become one of you," Ami observed, her words a note of gentle amusement.

Xiao Ru's pout was immediate and heartfelt. I ruffled her hair in consolation, drawing one of her satisfied hums, before deciding to feed from her arm rather than her throat—such intimacy felt inappropriate with this much an audience.

A silent ecstasy bloomed through my veins, a warmth like liquid moonlight that banished the chill of of the mirrors and filled me with a terrible, vibrant life. But before the languid pleasure could fully take root, the very empyrean—a mirrorquake—if such a term existed—sent vibrations through the crystalline walls as something vast stirred in the depths ahead. A low, resonant groan shivered through the chrome, the protest of some vast, dreaming thing disturbed in its slumber.

Our eyes met, and in that shared glance was a worried and silent concord. The depths had awoken to our intrusion. The time for subtlety had passed. With a shared, unspoken resolve, we moved as one toward the source of the tremor, descending into the heart of that cold, beautiful dread.