Chapter 11: The Other Side of the Glass

The moment the mirror shattered reality, Liam felt the world tilt sideways. The bedroom floor beneath his feet became liquid, the walls stretched like taffy, and gravity seemed to reverse itself. He was falling upward, or perhaps the ceiling was falling toward him—in the chaos of collapsing dimensions, direction lost all meaning.

The mirror shard in his hand blazed with heat that transcended temperature, becoming a point of absolute sensation that anchored him to something resembling self-awareness. Through the swirling maelstrom of gray mist and impossible geometries, he could see the Ashtons approaching—no longer desperate specters but solid, determined figures with fifty years of accumulated will focused on a single goal.

Stop him before he completes the ritual.

"You don't understand what you're doing!" Eleonora's voice cut through the chaos, no longer the whispered plea from beyond glass but the full-throated cry of a woman who had fought death itself for her child. "The Severance will destroy us all!"

She's wrong. She has to be wrong.

But doubt crept into his mind as the ritual space continued to collapse around him. Eleanor's research could have been incomplete. The grimoire could have been corrupted over the centuries. He could be about to commit an act of mass spiritual murder based on academic guesswork and desperate hope.

Tommy appeared at his mother's side, no longer grinning but wearing an expression of such profound sadness that it made Liam's chest ache. "We just want to play," the boy said, his voice carrying harmonics that spoke of decades of loneliness. "We just want to be alive again."

Don't listen. Complete the incantation.

But the words of the Severance felt thick on his tongue, like trying to speak while drowning. The Latin phrases that had come so easily during practice now fought against being spoken in this place where reality bent like warm glass.

"Vincula disrumpere—" he began, but Eleonora was there suddenly, her hand closing around his wrist with strength that felt like iron bands tightening.

"Look," she commanded, and the world exploded into vision.

The mirror world stretched before him in all its terrible glory.

This wasn't the peaceful gray landscape he'd glimpsed in reflections. This was a realm of perpetual twilight where the sky pressed down like a lead blanket and the air tasted of copper and despair. Hills rolled away to horizons that curved wrong, following geometries that human minds weren't designed to process. And everywhere, scattered across this impossible topography, were the structures the trapped souls had built from their memories of life.

Half-remembered houses that shifted when viewed directly. Phantom cars that drove roads leading nowhere. Children's playgrounds where the swings moved without wind, pushed by hands that cast no shadows.

"Fifty years we've been building this," Eleonora said, her grip on his wrist burning with desperate intensity. "Fifty years of creating a world where Tommy can play, where he can run without pain, where death can't touch him."

And fifty years of recruiting others to join them in their gray paradise.

Through the mist, Liam could see the other figures Eleanor had mentioned—the seven missing persons who had accepted the Ashtons' offer over the decades. They moved through the mirror landscape with the purposeless wandering of those who had traded all possibility of change for the safety of stagnation.

This isn't salvation. It's a prison decorated with the illusion of peace.

"You're not saving him," Liam said, though speaking the words felt like trying to exhale while underwater. "You're condemning him to an eternity of being eight years old and dying."

Eleonora's face contorted with rage that had been building for half a century. "What do you know about love? What do you know about sacrifice? You can't even save your own pathetic life!"

She's right. What am I compared to a mother's love that transcended death itself?

But even as the doubt weakened his resolve, Liam felt the mirror shard pulse in his hand, its fractured surface reflecting not the gray landscape around him but glimpses of the living world—his apartment with its comfortable clutter, Eleanor's library with its sanctuary of knowledge, even the city streets he'd fled from in desperation.

Life. Messy, difficult, painful, glorious life.

Tommy stepped closer, his child's face wearing an expression of ancient weariness. "Please don't make us go away," he said. "We've been alone for so long. We just want someone to stay with us."

The heartbreak in his voice was genuine, the loneliness real. But so was the trap.

"I know," Liam said, and meant it. "But this isn't living, Tommy. This is hiding."

The boy's face crumpled, and for a moment he looked exactly like what he was—a child who had died frightened and in pain, whose mother's love had become his prison.

"Vincula disrumpere, spiritus liberare," Liam continued, each word feeling like lifting stones with his tongue.

The mirror world convulsed around them. Cracks appeared in the pearl-colored sky, and through them leaked something Liam had almost forgotten existed—natural sunlight, warm and golden and alive.

Eleonora screamed, a sound that held fifty years of accumulated grief, and lunged for him with fingers extended like claws. But as she reached for the mirror shard, her hand passed through it as if she were made of mist.

The Severance is working. The connection is weakening.

"No!" she cried, her form beginning to flicker between solid and translucent. "I won't lose him again! I won't let death take my baby!"

But death had taken Tommy fifty years ago. The only thing keeping him from his rest was his mother's refusal to let go.

Around them, the mirror world's carefully constructed reality began to collapse. The phantom houses dissolved into memory, the impossible roads crumbled into gray dust, and the figures of the other trapped souls turned toward the cracks of light appearing in the sky with expressions of wonder and relief.

They want to be free. They're just too afraid to choose it.

"Quod mortuum est ad pacem tendat," Liam continued, adding words that weren't in Eleanor's notes but felt necessary, felt right. "Quod vivum est ad vitam redeat."

Let the dead go to peace. Let the living return to life.

Tommy looked up at the cracking sky with eyes that suddenly held their proper age—not the ancient weariness of decades of unnatural existence, but the simple wonder of a child seeing sunlight after a long illness.

"Mama," he said softly, "I think... I think I'm tired now."

Eleonora's rage crumbled, replaced by the crushing weight of a truth she'd fought for five decades. Her son wasn't trapped in the mirror world because of magical bindings or spiritual prisons. He was trapped because she wouldn't let him go.

A mother's love, transformed by grief into the cruelest kind of chains.

"But if you go," she whispered, "I'll be alone again."

Tommy took her hand with fingers that were already becoming translucent. "You won't be alone, Mama. You'll be with me. Just... not here."

The light from the cracks in the sky grew brighter, warmer, carrying with it the promise of whatever came after the gray spaces between worlds.

Liam felt the mirror shard growing hot in his hand, then suddenly cool, then simply absent—not vanishing, but transforming into something that existed in a different category than physical objects. The Severance was nearly complete.

Around them, the other trapped souls were walking toward the light, their faces showing the first genuine peace Liam had seen in this place. They moved not with the aimless wandering he'd observed before, but with purpose, toward a destination that finally offered something better than eternal stagnation.

Eleonora stood motionless for a long moment, watching her son's form become more and more translucent as the natural order reasserted itself. Then, with a sound that might have been a sob or a sigh of relief, she knelt beside him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry I kept you here. I just... I couldn't let you go."

Tommy smiled—not the unnerving grin Liam had seen in mirrors, but the peaceful expression of a child ready for sleep after a long, difficult day.

"It's okay, Mama. I understand. But I'm ready now. Are you?"

The final words of the Severance felt different on Liam's tongue—not forced or foreign, but like a prayer he'd always known:

"Spiritus ad lucem. Anima ad pacem. Vivus ad vitam."

Spirit to light. Soul to peace. Living to life.

The mirror world shattered like glass struck by a hammer, but instead of sharp fragments, it dissolved into motes of light that drifted upward toward the expanding cracks in the gray sky. Liam felt himself falling again, but this time the sensation was movement toward something rather than away from it.

Toward home. Toward the world of the living.

The last thing he saw before the light claimed everything was Eleonora and Tommy walking hand in hand toward whatever waited beyond the gray spaces, finally free to discover what death had always offered—not an ending, but a transformation.

Then the light swallowed everything, and Liam found himself back in the cabin bedroom, surrounded by the glittering fragments of a mirror that had finally released its prisoners.

But the ritual wasn't finished yet. And something had followed him back from the other side.

In his palm, where the mirror shard should have been, a tiny fragment of silvered glass caught the candlelight and winked like a star.

Or like an eye, watching from within.