Chapter 51
An endless corridor in the dream, lined floor to ceiling with tall silver mirrors in frames of frosted wood. Snow drifts upward between them. Rougeina stands alone in the middle, eight thin blades drawn, barefoot on the cold glass floor.
In every one, her reflection is a little fainter than the last. Further down the hall they're barely there: a ghost of crimson hair, then just a smudge, then nothing. Just a mirror reflecting an empty hall.
breathing slow, controlled.
Her reflection speaks, a half-second before she does, in her own voice:
Rougeina Swaps with a mirror across the hall, to get behind it.
The reflection Swaps at the exact same instant, so it's behind her. A blade made of reflected light opens a line across her shoulder blade.
stumbling, blood on the glass floor.
It is Rougeina exactly: crimson hair, eight blades, bare feet. But it's flat, like a painting walking. And its face keeps flickering, there one moment and then blank, the features fading and returning like a candle in wind.
smiling with a face that comes and goes.
Rougeina Swaps left. The Nightmare Swaps left.
She Swaps up onto a mirror frame. It's on the opposite frame.
She Swaps three times in a blur, the phantom trails crisscrossing the hall like silver-rose ribbons. It mirrors all three, its trails exactly matching hers, a reflection of her own pattern.
Every exchange ends with a new cut on her: forearm, thigh, cheek.
The hall is a web of silver-rose phantom trails, hers and its own, crossing and recrossing. In the middle, two Rougeinas face each other, one bleeding and one flickering.
on one knee, panting, blood running into her eye.
waiting, perfectly matching her pose, also on one knee, its face blank, then not.
a flash of memory: a kind grandfather face, a pen that signs birthday cards, a man the whole world has forgotten except her. She carries all of them.
standing up slowly. She lowers her blades.
standing exactly as she does, blades lowering. A fraction slow.
She goes still. Blades down. Eyes on the Nightmare. Not moving at all.
Still too, mirroring. The two of them stand frozen in the hall, the silver-rose trails slowly fading around them.
Silence. Upward-falling snow drifts between them. Neither moves.
steady.
Its face flickers out. Back. Out. It's hungry. It needs her to move; it needs to cut. Its fingers twitch on its blades.
a small, cold smile.
The Nightmare moves first, lunging, blades out, its face blazing wrong as it breaks the rule of what it's pretending to be.
In that moment it's not her reflection any more. It's just a Nightmare in her shape. And Rougeina, who never moved, Swaps with its own phantom trail, the silver-rose ribbon it left half a heartbeat behind, and appears exactly where it was, inside its guard, all eight blades crossing through its chest.
The Nightmare shatters into a thousand shards of mirror, each one tumbling upward with the snow, each shard holding one frame of her face.
The hall is quiet. All the mirrors are clear now, her reflection steady in every one. Not fading.
sinking down against a mirror frame, bleeding from a dozen cuts. She laughs once, shakily.
A thin crimson line cuts through the hall from somewhere far away, straight as a laser, from mirror to mirror, bending around corners that shouldn't bend: a Sightline. Smurjan walks along it into the hall, third eye blazing.
offering her a hand up. She takes it.
about to leave. Smurjan stops. His third eye narrows.
at the very end of the hall. Unlike the others it doesn't reflect snow or Rougeina. It is dark steel, a deep blue-grey, cold and polished.
Every other mirror in the hall is drawn in faint dream-lines. This one is drawn in hard, solid, real lines. It isn't dreamed. It's here. And it's made of the same steel as the eight blades on Rougeina's back.
on the glass floor, all of them flinching away from that mirror at once.
turning toward it, frowning.
Something moves deep inside the steel. Not a face. A warmth, like breath on a cold window from the other side.
all the colour gone from it, eyes wide.