The bleeding map was now a sacred, morbid relic. Ira had wrapped it in a spare piece of cloth and carried it in his arms, refusing to put it back in the satchel with the others. He treated it with the gentle, useless care one might afford a dying bird. The act was so steeped in madness and grief that no one tried to stop him. They simply walked on, a funeral procession for a piece of paper, their collective trauma now having a physical, bleeding body.
Lio felt a desperate need for a moment of solitude, a brief escape from the oppressive gravity of his family's sorrow. While they made a brief stop in a narrow, windy canyon, he volunteered to find a source of water, a plausible excuse to put fifty feet between himself and them. He followed a dark seam of moisture down the canyon wall until it led him to a wide, shallow basin in the rock.
It was filled with water, but the water was dark and strangely still, and the basin itself was made of a smooth, black, glassy obsidian. The surface was a perfect, dark mirror, reflecting the sliver of grey sky above with absolute fidelity.
He knelt at the edge, the silence of the canyon a welcome respite. He cupped his hands to drink, the water shockingly cold. As he did, he glanced at his own reflection. He saw what he expected: the face of a fifteen year old boy, smudged with dirt, his hair matted, his eyes wide with a fear that had become his baseline state of existence.
He stared, and the face in the water stared back. And then, it began to change.
It wasn't a sudden shift, but a slow, horrifying crawl, like time lapse photography of a rotting fruit. The exhaustion in the reflection's eyes deepened into a hollow, permanent despair. The soft lines of youth around his jaw and cheeks hardened into the sharp, unforgiving angles of a man who had not known kindness in a long time. Lines of grief and hardship etched themselves around his mouth. The reflection aged five years, then ten, right before his eyes.
Then, a scar bloomed on the reflected face. A jagged, ugly white line that ran from his right temple down across his cheekbone, a wound Lio had never received. The man in the reflection—the man who was him—raised a hand to touch the scar, and Lio saw that the hand was calloused and cruelly scarred.
But the true horror was in the eyes. Lio had felt fear, confusion, and a loneliness born of his terrible secret. The man in the water felt none of that. His eyes held only a vast, silent, and complete emptiness. It was the look of a man who had lost everything and everyone, and had continued walking long after his soul had died. It was the look of a survivor who had nothing left to survive for. This version of him was utterly, irrevocably alone.
Lio's breath hitched. He couldn't move, couldn't look away. The reflection's lips moved, forming a single, silent word that Lio could read with perfect clarity.
Run.
Lio flinched back as if struck, his sudden movement sending ripples across the pool's surface, shattering the image into a thousand wobbling pieces. He scrambled away from the water's edge, his heart hammering a frantic, terrified rhythm against his ribs. He waited, breathing heavily, before creeping back. He peered over the edge.
The water was still again. Staring back at him was his own face: fifteen years old, un aged, un scarred. Just a boy.
He fled back to his family, the silent command from the water echoing in his mind. He saw his broken father cradling the dying map. He saw his haunted mother staring into the distance. He saw his sister, a quiet enigma at the heart of their tragedy. And he knew he could not tell them. He could not explain that he had just seen the ghost of his own future—or one of many possible futures.
The woman with two shadows had been right. He had seen another version of himself. He now knew what failure looked like. It wasn't death. It was survival. It was living long enough to become that scarred, hopeless man, the sole mourner at the funeral of his own family.
He rejoined the small, sad group, taking his place in their formation. But he felt a new, cold distance from them. He was no longer just trying to get them all to safety. He was now running from the man in the water, a race against his own potential damnation.