The evening was restless. The air seemed to churn with murmurs, though no one around me spoke loud enough to fill it. I was walking among the people—faces I had come to know only as shadows waiting to reveal themselves. Every day I felt the rhythm of hearts beating around me, some fractured, some burning faint with a light that threatened to fade. Most I could read as easily as one reads ink upon a page.
But then I saw him.
An older man, sitting near the corner of a tavern where the lamps guttered low. His hands rested on the table, knotted with age but steady as stone. His eyes followed no one in particular, yet I felt them searching the room, searching me, before they had even turned in my direction.
I slowed, watching him.
Normally, when I looked upon someone, their aura revealed itself—threads of shadow, sparks of hidden fire, or the dull gray of indifference. But with this man, there was only murk. A veil. Like looking into water that has been stirred, the silt rising to hide what lies beneath. Not unreadable, not invisible—just obscured.
It unsettled me.
I lingered at a distance, testing the weight of him. His presence did not press outward like the wicked, nor flicker fragile like the broken. It sat heavy, like stone in the chest of the room. The others passed him by without pause, unknowing, unseeing. Only I felt the disturbance, as if something beneath the earth had shifted.
My first thought was human, of course. They all are, at least until they prove otherwise. Yet even in my long walk between worlds, I had not known one like this. His shadow did not cling, his spark did not shine, but still… there was something.
I sat nearby, silent, watching him the way one watches a door that should not be open.
He did not move for some time, only sipped the last of his cup as if patience was a game he had long mastered. Then, without turning, his voice broke the silence—rough, low, and calm.
"You've been watching me."
The words froze me for the smallest moment. Not unusual for the guilty to sense me. Not unusual for the desperate to feel my gaze. But his tone carried no defense, no fear. Only certainty.
My hazel eyes shifted, piercing, then soft again. I said nothing. Not yet.
And so began the watching—me of him, and, it seemed, him of me.
His gaze finally turned toward me. Not with the trembling guilt I usually saw in others, nor the wary defensiveness of those who feared what I might uncover. His eyes were calm, weathered like stone, and yet burning with a question I could not hear but felt in my chest.
"You walk like one who belongs everywhere," he said, voice carrying through the low-lit tavern. "And yet you sit as if you belong nowhere."
I felt the words settle heavy. Many had tried to name me before, to corner me with labels—sorcerer, outcast, demon, saint—but this was different. He was not reaching for a name. He was describing.
"And you," I answered softly, "speak like a man who has seen too much of both."
A faint smile touched his mouth. "Perhaps. Or perhaps I am only seeing you."
There was no malice in him, no obvious darkness. Yet his presence was a riddle I could not untangle. My sight, which should have pierced him easily, slid away like light on oiled glass. He was opaque in a way that unsettled me.
"Most men," I said, "do not enjoy being watched. They flinch, they avert their eyes, or they spit curses under their breath. You invite it."
"Because you are not watching me," he said. His fingers tapped once on the wood of the table, deliberate, patient. "You are watching what lies behind me. What shadows me."
The words made me still. Few ever came close to naming what I truly saw when I looked at a person. And fewer still spoke of it without fear.
"What do you believe shadows you?" I asked.
He leaned forward, and for a moment his weathered face was only a breath away from mine. "What shadows every man. His past. His blood. His father's voice."
I did not flinch outwardly, but within, something shifted. His choice of words was no accident.
My silence amused him. "Ah," he said, leaning back. "So the wound is still fresh, though it was cut long before you were born."
I searched him, my voice low, almost warning: "Who are you?"
But he only raised his cup and sipped the dregs, eyes never leaving mine. "One who remembers. One who listens. And one who brings messages."
"Messages?" I echoed. My voice was steady, but the weight in my chest grew heavier.
He chuckled, the sound low and dry. "Do not look so wary. Not all messengers carry curses. Some only bring mirrors."
That word — mirror — struck me. It was the word I used for myself, though I had never spoken it aloud to another.
"You seem too practiced with your tongue," I said. "Most men trip when they speak to me. You… balance. Why?"
"Because I do not speak to you as most men do," he replied. His tone was calm, unhurried, as if the entire tavern and its noise could not touch him. "I speak to you as one standing on the same edge."
I studied him, searching for the cracks that usually betrayed men: the twitch of fear, the fever of lust, the coldness of cruelty. Nothing. His aura remained veiled, a curtain I could not part.
"Then tell me," I said, narrowing my eyes, "what edge is that?"
"The one where blood divides," he whispered. "Where a man is not whole, but two currents tug at him. Flesh and flame. Soil and smoke. And every step he takes, he wonders which half will claim him."
My throat tightened. He was describing me without naming me, laying bare the fissure I carried inside my veins.
"Careful," I said, voice almost a growl. "You risk saying more than you know."
"Or exactly as much," he countered. "Tell me, do you never tire of pretending you are impartial? You call yourself a mirror, but mirrors tilt. They warp. They reflect only what light reaches them. You are not above the souls you test, Zahir. You are among them."
At the sound of my name, spoken so plainly, a chill swept through me. The tavern's lamps flickered as if a draft had passed, though no one else stirred.
"You presume too much."
"No," he said softly, "I remember too much."
He leaned closer again, and his eyes glinted with something old, something that made my own pulse stumble. "Do you know why you cannot read me, child of the In-Between?"
I said nothing.
"Because some truths are not for mirrors," he murmured. "Some truths stare back."
Silence pressed between us, heavier than the tavern's din. The stranger leaned back, fingers tapping the table as if he kept time to a rhythm only he could hear.
"You have walked long in the dark, Zahir," he said. "Long enough to believe the dark obeys you. But there are fires older than mirrors. Flames that burn from the bloodline you carry, not from the souls you test."
The words lodged deep in me. Bloodline. Fire. He was circling closer, too close.
"Say plainly what you mean," I demanded.
His lips curled faintly, but it was not a smile. "Plain words are dangerous. Still, I will risk them. Your father stirs."
The air shifted. For a moment, the tavern's noise seemed to dim, the chatter muffled, the clinking of mugs distant. My pulse thudded against my ribs.
"You lie," I whispered.
"Do I?" His gaze pinned me. "You have felt it, haven't you? That restlessness in your marrow, the hum beneath your skin. It is not only yours. It is his."
And then it happened. His eyes flared—not with the soft glow of a hearth fire, but with searing embers, molten and alive. Twin furnaces, unseen by anyone else in the room, yet burning straight into me.
I froze. My gift, my sight, faltered. For the first time in years, I could not look into another soul without flinching.
"Your father has been asking about you," he said, voice now low as a growl, every syllable edged with heat. "And the time is not far when the In-Between will no longer be a refuge, but a battlefield."
The fire in his eyes leapt once—like sparks breaking from an unseen forge—and then, as suddenly as it came, it was gone. He blinked, and they were mortal again.
Before I could speak, he rose, steady as a shadow. No one turned to notice. The tavern swallowed him as if he had never been there.
And I sat still, heart hammering, the taste of ash in my mouth.
The chair across from me was empty.
I stared at it as though the wood itself might still carry the weight of him, the echo of his voice. But it was just a chair again, simple and ordinary, and that ordinariness unsettled me more than his presence had.
My hand twitched once on the table. It was then I realized I had curled my fingers into a fist, my knuckles tense and tight. I unclenched them slowly. They trembled.
The taste of ash lingered on my tongue. Not metaphor, not imagination—real, as though I had breathed smoke, though the tavern's hearth was cold. The man was gone, and yet my body felt marked, as if his fire had branded me from within.
For the first time in years, my sight had faltered. I could not pierce him. Could not read him. Could not bend him toward his truth. He had looked into me instead, and the mirror had cracked.
I rose too quickly. The floor seemed to tilt. A few patrons glanced my way, then looked past me without care. None of them had seen what I saw. To them, he was another face swallowed by the crowd, nothing more. That blindness gnawed at me. What else did I not see?
I stepped out into the night air. The cold struck me clean across the face, yet it carried no relief. The street was empty, save for a stray cat darting into shadow. Lamps burned faintly against the dark, their oil running low.
I pressed a palm against my chest. My heart beat hard, faster than it should. Not from fear—no, I told myself, not fear. But something close enough to shame me.
He had spoken of blood. Of fire. Of a father I had spent years refusing to imagine. And he had said the word stirs. That was worse than remembering. Remembering is a corpse dug up. Stirring is a corpse rising.
I wanted to dismiss it as a ruse, a cruel trick meant to rattle me. Yet the ember in his eyes was not trickery. I felt it sear into me. That fire belonged to the same current in my veins, the blue fire that no prayer or curse has ever cooled.
I walked, though I do not recall choosing a direction. The city's alleys carried me, stones echoing under my steps. My mind replayed his words, turning them like shards: You are not above the souls you test. You are among them.
It struck me because it was true. I pretend neutrality. I speak of choice, of reflection, of light and shadow belonging to others. Yet the In-Between lives inside me as well. Flesh and flame. Soil and smoke. Each half tugging. Which one will claim me if I falter?
The thought unsettled me more deeply than I wished to admit.
I stopped beneath a guttering lamp. My breath fogged in the air. I realized, suddenly, that I felt watched. Not just by memory, but by presence. The hairs on my neck bristled. I turned—only the empty street behind me. Yet the feeling clung like a cloak.
Perhaps it was only paranoia, the residue of his gaze. Or perhaps others truly had begun to look for me. If he spoke truth, my father was stirring. And if he stirs, then the In-Between is no longer only a passage for other souls. It becomes a bridge to me.
I drew my cloak tighter. The night was colder now.
For the first time in years, I felt less like a mirror and more like prey.