Chapter 3: Mirror Maze of Shattered Selves
The connection was less a touch and more a completion.
Rut’Aba’s palm met the haft of the pike. There was no shock, no blast of power. It was a silent, deep-click joining, like a bone settling back into its socket. The roaring drone in the hold ceased instantly, replaced by a humming, crystalline quiet.
For a second, nothing happened. Goran stared, blade ready, at the frozen corpses. They were statues now, suspended in mid-lunge, the oily black fluid halted in glistening strands around them.
Then Rut’Aba gasped, doubling over. A light was kindling under their skin, deep within their chest. It wasn’t the hostile purple of the pike’s corruption. This was a cooler, more familiar violet, the color of a twilight sky from a world they could barely remember. It bloomed behind their sternum, two soft, glowing points—one slightly higher than the other. The light shone through their threadbare tunic, illuminating the fabric from within.
“What in the seven hells is that?” Goran breathed, his eyes wide. “Are you… bleeding light?”
Rut’Aba couldn’t answer. The glow wasn’t painful. It was… grounding. It made the pike in their hand feel less like a foreign object and more like an anchor, a tether thrown into a stormy sea. They looked up.
The air in the cargo hold had changed. The strobing red emergency lights were still there, but superimposed over everything was a faint, shimmering web of golden geometric lines—hexagons, triangles, interlocking circuits of light. It coated the walls, the ceiling, the frozen dead, like a ghostly shell.
“The Gellar field,” Rut’Aba said, their voice filled with awed horror. “It’s… stabilized. But it’s visible. It’s using the pike’s energy as a framework. Using me as a battery.”
As they spoke, the golden lattice pulsed softly in time with the violet glow in their chest. The frozen corpses shuddered, a collective ripple passing through them. They weren’t moving. They were trapped in the solidified reality of the field, like insects in amber.
The collapsed doorway was still sealed, but the new, visible field had a different texture there. It thinned, warped, creating a narrow, passable gap between the twisted metal and the shimmering wall of reality.
“Go,” Rut’Aba said, straightening up. The pike felt light as a reed in their hand, yet impossibly heavy with consequence. The manacles were still on their wrists, inert and dead. The pike’s energy flowed around them, not through them. A workaround.
Goran didn’t need telling twice. He scrambled over the sparking wreckage, pushing through the gauzy golden light. It parted for him like a thick mist, clinging to his armor with tiny, static kisses before releasing him into the corridor beyond.
Rut’Aba followed. Passing through the lattice was a bizarre sensation. A thousand whispering non-sounds brushed against their mind—fragments of forgotten prayers, echoes of warp-drive calculations, the ghost of a child’s laughter from a crewman long dead. Then they were through.
The corridor outside was a tomb of a different kind. The red emergency glow was stronger here, reflecting off pools of congealing black fluid that seeped from the seams in the walls. But the new, visible Gellar field was here too, a shimmering, honeycomb overlay on everything. It gave the world a distorted, dreamlike clarity.
And in its golden surfaces, Rut’Aba saw themselves.
Not as they were now—filthy, chained, holding a nightmarish weapon. But as they had been. Elsewhere.
To their left, the lattice on a busted control panel showed a reflection of them in a sleek, grey uniform, hair cropped short and severe, standing on a bridge of brushed metal under a calm, yellow sun. They were pointing, giving an order to a subordinate whose face was a blur.
Goran saw it too. He flinched. “What is that? Some kind of echo?”
“A memory,” Rut’Aba whispered, touching their own cheek. The reflection showed a confidence they didn’t feel. “Not mine. The ship’s. The field is… mixing things up.”
They moved on, stepping over a body in a technician’s coveralls. The lattice on a dripping pipe showed another reflection: Rut’Aba in a flowing gown of iridescent scales, laughing at a private joke in a crowded, aromatic bazaar, their eyes lined with kohl. The image held a softness, a chosen fluidity.
Goran grunted. “Okay, that one’s weirder.”
“It’s just clothes,” Rut’Aba said, a defensive edge in their voice they hadn’t intended.
“Didn’t say it wasn’t.” Goran kicked a fallen toolkit out of the way. “Just saying it’s weirder than the space-captain you. More… colorful.”
Another few steps. The lattice on a cracked viewport reflected a third memory: Rut’Aba bound in leather straps, grimacing in pain on a medical slab, while a figure in a clean white coat adjusted a dial. A test subject. A number.
Rut’Aba stopped, their breath catching. That one hurt. The clinical detachment in their own reflected eyes was a colder prison than any manacle.
“You get around,” Goran muttered, his attention mostly on the corridor ahead, his knife held low and ready.
“It wasn’t travel,” Rut’Aba said, the words coming slowly as they walked, each step revealing another fragmented mirror in the golden light. “It was… displacement. Something pushed me through. Tore pieces off, left others behind.” They gestured with the pike at the swirling reflections around them—soldier, socialite, specimen, stranger. “These aren’t costumes. They’re… consequences.”
Ahead, the corridor T-boned. From the right corridor, they heard the distinct, rhythmic clank of armored footsteps. Scions.
Goran pressed back against the wall, gesturing for silence. Rut’Aba looked at the lattice on the wall opposite the junction. It showed a reflection of the two of them huddled right here, right now, but from a different angle. A possible future, playing out silently in the field. In the reflection, a Scion stepped into view and Goran lunged, his blade bouncing harmlessly off the powered armor before a hellgun barrel pressed to his temple.
Rut’Aba acted on instinct. They reversed their grip on the pike and slammed the butt against the glowing lattice on their own wall, right where the reflection’s Scion would appear.
In the real junction, as the first black carapace armor plate came into view, the corresponding section of the golden field in that corridor suddenly crystallized. The air itself hardened with a sound like shattering glass. The leading Scion walked face-first into an invisible, solid wall of solidified reality. There was a sickening crack of ceramite and bone. He staggered back, stunned.
“Left!” Rut’Aba hissed, shoving Goran down the other corridor.
They ran, the sound of confused shouts and servo-assisted recovery fading behind them. This new passage was narrower, darker, the ceiling lower. The Gellar lattice here was denser, the reflections sharper, more intrusive.
They weren’t just seeing Rut’Aba’s past lives now. They were seeing choices. A reflection showed them letting go of the pike in the cargo hold, Goran being torn apart by corpses while they watched, blank-eyed. Another showed them turning the weapon on Vale during the interrogation, the Commissar’s head vanishing in a puff of purple light before a hundred hellgun bolts cut them down.
“Stop looking at them,” Goran panted, dragging his eyes away from a reflection that showed his own body frozen in the amber-lattice, a look of perpetual terror on his face. “It’s messing with your head.”
“It’s showing us the lattice’s function,” Rut’Aba countered, though their voice was shaky. “It’s not just a barrier. It’s a… recording. A stabilizer of what is. It freezes moments. Possible moments. Real moments.” They glanced at a new image: themselves, alone on a placid grassland, the pike discarded, a look of pure peace on their face. A lie. A beautiful, impossible lie.
The corridor ended at a heavy blast door, sealed shut. A keypad next to it was dark, dead. The lattice here was a frantic, tangled knot of light, throbbing like a migraine.
Goran slammed a fist against the door in frustration. “Dead end. We’re boxed in.”
Rut’Aba studied the knot. The reflections here were a chaotic overlay of countless moments—technicians running through this door, it being sealed, welding teams reinforcing it, then… nothing. A blank spot. A decision point.
They raised the pike, its crystals pulsing in sympathy with the tangled field. “It’s not a wall,” they said. “It’s a moment they chose to lock.” They pressed the tip of the pike gently into the center of the luminous knot.
The lattice responded like a nervous system. Golden lines of light flared, running up the pike and into Rut’Aba’s arm. The violet glow in their chest blazed, illuminating their ribs. In the reflections around the door, a dozen different versions of the past few minutes played out—them being captured here, them dying here, them turning back.
And one, tiny and almost hidden, of the door sliding open as a harried crewman fled inward from the other side, leaving it unsealed for a critical second.
Rut’Aba focused on that reflection. They didn’t try to force the door. They asked the lattice to remember that moment, to make it the true one.
The pike grew warm. The oily black fluid on the door hissed and evaporated. With a grinding shriek of metal protesting the shift in reality, the blast door shuddered. Its locking mechanisms, rusted shut for who-knows-how-long, suddenly spun freely.
With a final, exhausted groan, the door slid open six inches and stuck.
The gap was just wide enough.
Goran didn’t hesitate. He squeezed through, grunting as his armor scraped against the metal. Rut’Aba followed, the pike scraping loudly as they angled it through the opening.
They emerged into a cavernous space—a secondary cargo bay, lined with silent cargo haulers and stacks of empty crates. The air was cooler here, the hum of the dying warp engine more distant. The Gellar lattice was fainter, too, just a faint golden shimmer in the air, showing fewer, fainter reflections.
They were away from the heart of the distortion. For now.
Goran leaned against a crate, breathing hard. He looked at Rut’Aba, at the softly glowing points of light in their chest, at the now-dormant pike in their hand. The anger and fear had burned down to a grim, weary confusion.
“So,” he said, wiping sweat and black fluid from his face. “You’re a battery for a reality-key. The ship’s haunted by your old wardrobe. And we’re leaving footprints in solidified time.” He let out a short, humorless laugh. “What’s the plan, boss? Because my plan of ‘shoot the bad things’ is running out of ammo.”
Rut’Aba stared at the faint reflections in the air around them. One showed a schematic of the ship, a blinking path to an escape pod bay. Another showed Vale, his face a mask of cold fury, directing Scions toward their last known location. A third showed the weeping, oily darkness at the ship’s core, coalescing around the shattered warp engine, beginning to take a shape that had too many limbs.
The pike was quiet. Their chest-light was a steady, low burn. The choices were all still there, shimmering in the golden air.
“We follow the path,” Rut’Aba said softly, nodding toward the reflection of the schematic. “We get off this ship.”
“And go where?” Goran asked, pushing off the crate. “The whole reason we’re in this metal coffin is ‘cause the planet below is a fortress. Calth’s a death sentence if you’re not on the guest list.”
Rut’Aba looked at the final, terrible reflection—the thing forming in the engine dark. They looked at the pike, then at their own faint, multiple reflections overlapping on the bay’s far wall.
“Anywhere,” they said, turning toward the path the lattice showed. “Anywhere else.”