The staircase opened into reflection.
Not light.
Not illusion.
Truth.
A SFX: fwoom—
A cold ripple swept out as Sunny stepped onto the fifth floor.
The hall stretched forever—
an ocean of mirrors devouring every horizon.
Obsidian floors reflected a ceiling of bleeding red sky;
pillars of black glass rose like frozen screams;
and between each pillar:
Mirrors.
Thousands.
Millions.
Infinite.
Each framed in bone and gold.
Each showing a different Sunny.
Not echoes.
Not hypotheticals.
Consequences.
Every mirror held a version of him who had taken the throne
and become worse than the Forgotten God.
In one, he sat on a throne of screaming souls,
a crown of broken halos dripping blood,
eyes like black gravity swallowing galaxies.
SFX: whum-whum—gravity pulse
In another, he wore Nephis's skin like a cloak,
her burned, perfect face stretched over his,
smiling a terrible Nephis-that-was-not smile
while the world burned beneath him.
In a third, he had devoured the cohort—
Effie's laughter echoing in his hollow chest,
Kai's wings sprouting from his back,
Cassie's prophecies dripping from his lips like venom.
They were all him.
Every monstrous path he had refused.
Every cruelty he had denied.
Every time he had chosen mercy when ruin would've been easier.
They had lived.
They had ruled.
They had won.
And now—
They were waiting.
Nephis stepped onto the obsidian beside him.
Her reflection did not appear in a single mirror.
She was real.
They were not.
She looked around, amused.
"My favorite floor," she said lightly.
"Mordret designed it himself. Before I fed him to the tree."
Sunny took one step forward.
SFX: krRRRRRIP—mirror ripple
Millions of reflections turned at once, every face his own.
A single voice of infinite layers whispered:
You're late.
We've been waiting.
Look at us.
Look at what you could have been.
He walked.
Mirror One
Sunny—the god of lies.
A face shifting every second.
A thousand stolen identities.
Eyes hollowed of anything human.
It stepped out of the glass.
Not reflection—
real enough to bleed.
It smiled with his mouth.
"You fought so hard to stay weak," it said.
"Why?"
It attacked.
SFX: SHHFF—shadow clash
Two liars, identical in deceit, fought in absolute silence.
Sunny won—barely.
He drove his fist through its chest.
SFX: KRSHHH—
The mirror exploded.
Shards sliced his arm to the bone.
He kept walking.
Mirror Two
This one wore the cohort like masks—
Nephis's skin stretched over his own,
Effie's iron plates bolted into his shoulders,
Kai's wings dragging behind him like a blood-soaked veil.
"You devoured them," it whispered.
"Why pretend you didn't want to?"
It lunged.
SFX: SKRAK—wing cleave
It fought like all of them combined—
Effie's brutality, Kai's elegance, Cassie's inevitability.
Sunny bled.
He bled a lot.
But the mirror shattered.
And the next.
And the next.
They came faster.
Some begged.
Some laughed.
Some wept.
Some offered power.
Some offered forgiveness.
All of them were him.
All of them were true.
Sunny destroyed them with his bare hands.
The shards cut deeper each time—
his face, his chest, his throat,
the mangled stump of his missing arm.
His backward fingers bled black ink.
His shadow frayed into threads.
Nephis walked beside him the entire time—
untouched, unhurried.
She spoke like a connoisseur at an art exhibit.
"This one ruled for eight thousand years," she said, admiring a mirror where Sunny throned upon stars.
"He was magnificent."
She paused at another where he turned the world into a single endless Nightmare.
"That one was honest," she said.
"No more lies. Only truth in suffering."
Sunny shattered them all.
By the time the final corridors approached,
his hands were ruined stumps of blood and glass.
His coat was gone.
His skin hung in torn strips.
He kept walking.
The Last Mirror
Only one remained.
A plain frame of stone.
No gold.
No bone.
Just truth.
Sunny stopped before it.
Inside—
the throne above.
The real throne.
The garden of quiet stars.
The child—
no longer a child,
now a young man with silver in his hair
and laughter in his eyes—
sat on the arm of the throne.
He smiled.
Proud.
Real.
He looked straight at Sunny and mouthed:
You did good.
Sunny froze.
His ruined hands trembled.
Nephis stood silent behind him.
He raised his fist.
The reflection didn't flinch.
He stopped.
Lowered his hand.
He could not break this mirror.
It was the only one that had never lied.
Nephis watched him for a long moment.
Then she smiled—small, almost gentle.
"Ready?"
Sunny looked at the intact mirror one last time.
The young man nodded.
Sunny turned away.
A new staircase opened in the obsidian floor.
He stepped onto it.
Behind him, the infinite hall began to bleed light—
slow, golden, forgiving.
SFX: tinnnng—glass rising
The shattered mirrors floated up,
their broken pieces reforming—
not into monsters.
Into stars.
A constellation of every lie he refused to become.
They followed him up the stairs.
Nephis walked beside him,
amused no longer.
The fifth floor was silent.
But for the first time in four hundred years—
it was clean.