Chapter 6: Echoes in the Underside

Chapter 6: Echoes in the Underside

Lux pointed a single, elegant finger at the polished black marble floor of Glitterati’s penthouse. "In there," she had said, as if suggesting a trip to the corner store. Our reflections stared back from the glossy surface, warped and elongated. Mine looked more tired than usual, Lux’s was an impossible smear of light and color, and Glitterati’s was barely there at all.

"The floor?" I asked, my voice flat. My experience with reality breaches told me that gateways were rarely so convenient.

"Everything that reflects holds a piece of the Underside," Lux explained, her tone that of a teacher indulging a slow student. "A puddle, a polished spoon, a lover's eyes. But a true Weeping Mirror, one that has seen a paradox and shed a tear of pure concept? Its reflection runs deep. And this whole building," she gestured around at the sterile, luxurious prison, "is built on a paradox. The paradox of being famous for being famous. This whole floor is a Weeping Mirror."

My desire was to find the ghost of Dapper Dan's story, to get the final piece of the puzzle. The obstacle was a journey into a dimension I only knew through whispers and warnings—a place of raw concepts and psychic undertows. An unfiltered reality. Glitterati looked at the floor with abject terror, her part in this seemingly over. She was the cage, not the key.

"How?" I asked Lux, holding up the Pez dispenser. The plastic duck seemed to stare back at me with a vapid, cheerful ignorance of the situation.

"That is the anchor," Lux said, her gaze fixed on the small toy. "It's the last piece of his true story. It wants to find the rest of itself. You just need to hold it, and step into the reflection. But be warned, Jack," her playful expression sharpened with a rare sliver of seriousness. "The Underside isn't a place. It's a state of being. It reflects what is already inside the traveler. For most people, it's a confusing mess of half-formed ideas. For you…" She let the sentence hang, her shifting eyes telling me everything I needed to know. For me, it would be hell. My personal, tailor-made hell.

There was no other choice. My action was to trust the chaos fae and a piece of plastic that dispensed chalky candy. I took a deep breath, the air tasting of ozone and Glitterati's quiet despair. I clenched the Pez dispenser in my fist, its cheap plastic edges digging into my palm.

"Let's go," I said, and stepped onto the black marble.

It wasn't like falling. It was like being inverted. The world didn't drop away; it turned inside-out. The feeling of solid floor vanished, replaced by the disorienting sensation of passing through cold, silent liquid. The city lights seen through the penthouse window smeared into streaks of neon pain, then folded in on themselves until there was only darkness. For a moment, I was nowhere, a consciousness adrift in a silent void.

Then, the ground slammed into my feet.

I stumbled, catching my balance on instinct. The air I gasped in was thick with the scent of wet asphalt, industrial smoke, and the faint, coppery tang of old blood. My blood. The sky above was a shattered mosaic of mirrored shards, each one reflecting a different, distorted piece of a bruised purple twilight. The ground beneath my feet wasn't solid ground; it was a loosely packed terrain of broken glass and tarnished silver that crunched with every step.

This was the Underside. And it was already wearing my soul like a suit.

Lux materialized beside me, her form coalescing from a shimmer of light. She looked around with the keen interest of a tourist in an exotic, lethal jungle. "Oh, my," she murmured, a genuine note of fascination in her layered voice. "It's even louder than I imagined. Your trauma has… dreadful acoustics, Jack."

She was right. I could feel it. The entire landscape was humming with the low-frequency thrum of my own Lítost. This place was feeding on my grief, using it as a blueprint to build its geography. Ahead of us, the Pez dispenser in my hand began to glow, emitting a faint, warm, golden light—a single point of cheerful color in a landscape of desaturated misery. It pulsed gently, a tiny, insistent heartbeat pulling me forward.

We walked, following the light of the candy dispenser through the wasteland of my own making. The path led us toward a shape on the horizon that grew steadily larger, a monument to my past failures. It was a factory, a hulking behemoth of rust and brick that clawed at the shattered sky with a dozen smokestacks. It was a perfect, monstrous replica of the old textile mill that had dominated my grim, working-class neighborhood back in Chicago.

From its chimneys, it didn't spew smoke. It spewed memories. Thick, black plumes of regret that drifted down and solidified into tangible shapes as they hit the ground. They were figures made of ash and glowing embers, vaguely human-shaped, with hollow eyes that burned with a cold, accusatory light.

The Ash Figures turned toward us. They didn't have mouths, but whispers slithered from them, a chorus of my own deepest insecurities.

"...not fast enough..."

"...should have seen it coming..."

"...you let them burn..."

My hand instinctively went to the phantom weight of the service pistol I no longer carried. The urge to fight, to lash out, to destroy these things was overwhelming. This was the core obstacle, the literal manifestation of the grief the outline had promised.

"Don't," Lux warned, her voice sharp. She hadn't moved, her expression one of detached analysis. "They are made of your memory. To fight them is to fight yourself. You'll only make them stronger and tear yourself apart in the process."

"So what do I do?" I snarled, the whispers growing louder, clawing at the edges of my sanity. An image flashed behind my eyes: orange flames, the scream of twisting metal, the smell of burning hope. The family tragedy the Reality Editor had orchestrated.

"You walk," she said simply. "You endure. This is the price of admission, Jack. You have to walk through your own haunting."

It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. To take a step forward when every nerve screamed to run or fight. The Ash Figures swarmed around us, their touch not hot, but cold, a soul-deep chill that sapped my strength. Their whispers became a cacophony, burrowing into my ears, replaying the worst moments of my life on a relentless loop.

I clenched my jaw, my knuckles white around the glowing Pez dispenser. I focused on its light, on the single, tiny spark of simple joy it represented. It was my only anchor. I locked my eyes on it and put one foot in front of the other. I walked through the heart of my own failure, letting the cold whispers of the ash-ghosts wash over me without drowning in them. It felt like walking barefoot on razors, but I kept going. My control over my Lítost wasn't about suppressing it; it was about accepting its weight and refusing to be crushed.

Slowly, miraculously, as we passed through the phalanx of my demons and walked beyond the shadow of the phantom factory, the Ash Figures dissolved back into inert dust. The whispers faded. The air cleared slightly.

I was shaking, sweat and something that felt suspiciously like tears cold on my face. Lux looked at me, her shifting face for once unreadable.

Then she looked past me. "Well done, detective," she said, her voice soft. "You've paid the toll."

I followed her gaze. In a small, quiet clearing in the glass-shard desert, free from the oppressive influence of my past, something was floating in the air. It was a fragile, shimmering ribbon of light, coiling and uncoiling like a serpent made of smoke. It was utterly black and white, a stark contrast to the bruised colors of the Underside. Within the ribbon, tiny figures flickered and moved—a man in a fedora tipping his hat, dancing with a cane, his movements jerky and silent like an old, forgotten film.

The Pez dispenser in my hand pulsed brightly, its light bathing the ghostly celluloid strip in a warm glow. We had found it. The ghost of Dapper Dan's narrative.

There it was, the memory of a God of Small Joys, adrift and alone in the wasteland of my grief. And as we drew closer, I could see that the edges of the filmstrip were frayed and glitching, as if something was actively trying to erase it, even here. The silent, flickering images on the strip seemed to contort in a silent scream. It was weeping.