Falling wasn't like last time.
Elias didn't tumble through air. He didn't crash into a new body or awaken in the dark. He drifted, slowly, steadily, through layers of memory, of noise, of time folding over itself like pages turned too quickly.
And then came silence.
When he opened his eyes, he was floating in water. Warm. Still. The sky above was a churning dusk, neither here nor there. He gasped and stood, except there was no ground beneath him. Just the surface, like glass.
The mirror.
He was inside the mirror.
It stretched infinitely, reflecting not his face but dozens, hundreds of faces. All his. Or rather, all versions of him. Each dressed differently, marked by different times, different lives. Some bore scars. Some wore uniforms. One wept silently in a tattered lab coat.
Then one stepped forward. The boy from the first loop. The one Elias used to be before Rae. Before Roe. Before relics and rituals and fire.
"You shouldn't be here again," the boy said. "Not yet."
"I had no choice," Elias whispered. "It was either that or die."
"You did die." The boy's face twisted. "You always die. That's the point."
The mirror around them rippled. Symbols bloomed across the surface: the cipher characters Rae had embedded. The sequence was almost complete. A new one glowed now,V,pulsing with his heartbeat.
Elias stumbled backward. "I don't understand what this wants from me."
"Not what," said another voice, The Watcher. He emerged from the shadows, wearing no form, no face. Just presence. "Who."
Elias clenched his fists. "Then tell me who I am."
"You are a wound," The Watcher said calmly. "One that refuses to close. You leap, and each leap tears the world more. And yet… you heal others. You bring change where you land. Like fire. Like plague. Like hope."
The boy-version of Elias stood beside him now. "You weren't the first, you know. And you won't be the last."
The Watcher extended a hand. Not flesh, just a motion. "One last leap for this cycle. And then you'll begin to see the pattern."
Elias swallowed. "Where?"
"To the beginning."
He looked down. Beneath his feet, the mirror cracked.
Below the cracks, he saw a new world. Pre-colonial. Dense forests. Something ancient buried deep beneath temple stone. A storm forming above.
His body began to dissolve, atoms bending inward, blood already humming.
One last question escaped his lips:
"Will I ever come home?"
The Watcher offered something like a smile in the reflection.
"You were never from where you thought."
The light took him.
And Elias Vale was gone.
Again.