Chapter Five
Aldric sat in front of the mirror.
The room was still. The kind of still that doesn't belong to silence — it belongs to waiting. The lamp on the side table threw a thin cone of amber light across the floor, and the rest of the apartment crouched in the dark beyond it, patient and attentive.
In the mirror, his face looked back at him.
Except it didn't.
A child sat where his reflection should have been. Small. Barefoot. Silent. Dark hair dripping faintly, as if it had not yet decided whether it belonged to water or blood. The boy was dressed in clothes Aldric recognized — a shirt he had owned at seven years old, grey-striped, the collar fraying at one edge. He sat perfectly still, as children only sit when they are waiting for something they already know is coming.
He smiled at Aldric.
Not a child's smile. The smile of someone who had been keeping a very old secret, and had decided, at last, that the time for keeping it had passed.
Aldric did not recoil. He did not blink. He simply watched, with the same flat attention he brought to everything — the same attention he had brought to the doctor's office, to the corpse in the mirror, to Elissa fading into mist. The same wall. Always the same wall.
"You came early," the boy said. His voice was a child's voice, but the cadence was wrong — too slow, too deliberate, stripped of the breathless quality that belongs to the young.
Aldric leaned back slightly. "I was tired."
The boy tilted his head. "Tired... or avoiding?"
Aldric said nothing.
The mirror flickered. Just for a moment. Like a candle in a draft. The boy's image wavered, and in that wavering Aldric caught a glimpse of something beneath the child's face — something older, darker, worn smooth by long use. Then it was gone.
The boy pressed one hand against the glass. Aldric, without quite deciding to, pressed his own hand against it from his side. Their hands did not align. The boy's palm was an inch too far to the left, as if they inhabited slightly different versions of the same room.
"Let me," the boy said softly. His eyes had not moved from Aldric's face. "Let me handle it."
A long pause.
"...And repeat it?" Aldric asked, quietly.
The smile on the child's face shifted. It did not disappear. It simply shed something — peeled back one layer, revealing whatever lived beneath the innocence. What lived beneath was not monstrous. That was the most unsettling part. What lived beneath was patient.
"They deserved it."
The voice was still soft. That made it worse.
The mirror rippled again. The room felt slightly smaller than it had a moment ago, as though the walls had taken one quiet step inward. The boy seemed closer, though he had not moved.
"You keep pretending," the voice continued. "Law. Order. Rules." A faint sound that was almost a laugh, and almost nothing. "As if those ever saved anyone."
Aldric's fingers tightened against the glass. For the first time since the boy had appeared, something shifted in his eyes — not fear, not recognition exactly, but something adjacent to both. Something he hadn't looked at directly in a very long time.
He said nothing. He breathed. The reflection leaned closer, and for a brief moment the glass looked wet.
A phone rang.
The sound cut through the room like a stone thrown through still water. Aldric blinked once. The mirror was ordinary again — his own face, pale and unreadable, staring back at him from the glass.
He stood. Answered.
"What."
Cassian's voice. Not calm.
"Eril. Hospital. Accident."
A pause. "...Location."
The call ended.
Aldric stood still for a moment that lasted slightly longer than it should have. Then he moved to the coat rack, took his coat, and left.
The hospital smelled of chemicals and sleepless nights.
Cassian was standing near the entrance when Aldric arrived, his posture rigid, watching doors that wouldn't open fast enough. He had the look of a man who had been standing in one place long enough that the standing had become its own kind of action.
Aldric was carrying white flowers.
Cassian looked at them. He didn't ask.
Aldric placed them in his hands without breaking stride. "I have somewhere to be," he said.
Cassian frowned. "You just got here."
Aldric adjusted his coat. "I know."
He left.
Cassian stood holding the flowers, watching him go. Something about it refused to settle. The flowers — white, impersonal, chosen without hesitation — and the way Aldric had handed them over like a man disposing of something he no longer needed. As if visiting the hospital had never really been the point.
He held the flowers and didn't move for a while.
Aldric sat in the parked car.
The engine was off. His hand rested on the wheel, unmoving. The street outside was grey and wet, the streetlamps painting long orange reflections across the slick asphalt.
He was thinking about Eril.
Not with grief. Not with guilt. With the careful attention of a man taking stock of a changed situation. The brake line. The Boss watching from the sidewalk. The tilt of her head as she observed what she had set in motion.
He had been on that sidewalk once or twice himself, in a different capacity.
The thought arrived quietly, the way dangerous thoughts always did: If he disappears... things become simpler.
Aldric noted the thought. Did not chase it. Did not bury it.
He started the car.
The city blurred past the windows. The rain had returned, and the wipers moved in their slow, tired arc across the windshield. Aldric drove without particular urgency, his hands loose on the wheel, his eyes on the road.
The numbness arrived gradually, the way it always did now — fingers first, then wrists, then something deeper and harder to locate. Not pain. Something more fundamental. As if the medication and the illness and the sleepless nights were conducting a slow negotiation about how much of him was still required to function.
He had read about this. The body beginning its long divestment.
The streetlights stretched. Sound dulled. He was aware of his own breathing in a way he was not usually aware of it — each breath a small decision, a small effort.
"It's getting worse," he said, to no one.
In the windshield, his reflection kept pace with him — his face superimposed over the wet street ahead, transparent, inhabiting both spaces at once. He watched it. It watched him. The reflection's eyes were steady in a way that his did not entirely feel.
And then — not dramatically, not with the force of revelation — his grip on the wheel simply loosened.
His fingers opened.
The car continued forward.
Aldric exhaled. The city lights bled together into soft, formless color. The pain was gone. The numbness was gone. Everything had gone quiet in a way that was not unpleasant, that was in fact the most rest he had felt in months, and he thought — or something thought, in what remained of the part of him that was still thinking —
We'll see.
His eyes closed.
The car kept moving through the rain-soaked streets of a city that did not notice, and the night received him with the indifference it extends to all things, the dying and the living alike.