Chapter 6: Province 391
Above the bioluminescent jungle of Province 269, the auroras twisted, their violet and amber streaks weaving through the pulsing vines below. The erratic shadows danced across the mossy ground as Bullet trudged forward, his bare feet sinking into earth that felt more like a living sponge than solid ground.
Exhaustion tugged at him, the heavy chain dragged behind each step.
But the tug in his chest burned fierce. That unending flame that had been driving him forward since he'd first woken with no memory. It hauled him toward some unseen horizon, somehow drowning out the constant pain that should've stopped him long ago.
His shoulder throbbed where a deep gash had crusted over with dried blood, only to start seeping fresh again. The wound was raw beneath Patch's patched cloak. Patch, who he'd left behind in Province 618's desert camp, whose cloak was now soaked through with his blood.
His neck stung from a jagged cut the jungle horrors had given him. His ribs ground together at every breath, damaged back in Province 837's brutal tunnels and never given a chance to heal properly.
The pipe hung heavy in his grip, its surface scarred and dented from shattering stone and bone-a grim record of everything he'd survived to get this far.
A scar above his heart pulsed like a second heartbeat, searing hot. A tether to whatever past he couldn't access, no matter how hard he tried to remember.
The shard in his pocket, the circle bisected by a jagged linen, pressed against his thigh. Its warmth a constant reminder of a riddle, thus far unable to be solved. What did it mean? Why does it pulse in time with his scar?
Spark's unetched shard nestled beside it. A weight he carried from Province 618, a debt he'd never chosen but couldn't set down. Its faint glow felt like a quiet accusation for abandoning people who'd helped him.
No name beyond what strangers had given him. No history he could remember. Just the pull, the scar, and a world that seemed designed to break him.
The dream-woven vines of Province 269, the fading cry of Glow itself, dissolved behind into the humid night; ahead loomed Province 391, its silhouette gleaming silver, cold and unyielding in the light of the auroras.
A new trial, a new ordeal.
The jungle ended abruptly at a sheer cliff.
Bullet stopped at the edge and looked down, taking in what was below. There was an endless plain of mirrors in all directions, their surfaces pulsating faintly with trapped light. It was like staring out at an ocean made entirely of glass and reflection.
Province 391 is a maze of mirrors.
The ground below fractured the auroras' light into violet and amber slivers that hurt to look at directly. They twisted reality into disorienting shards that made it nearly impossible to tell what was real and what was reflection.
Jagged spires rose from the mirror plain, like frozen blades. They hummed with something that felt malicious, warping the sky above them into patterns seeming to claw at his mind when he looked too long.
In their place stood trees made wholly of mirrors, standing bare and razor-edged across the landscape. They reflected Bullet's scarred form and tattered cloak back at him in grotesque echoes...his limbs elongated, his eyes hollow, faces that were his but somehow wrong.
In the distance, peaks shimmered like rivers of ice. Their slopes looked almost inviting, but Bullet could sense the deception. Nothing in this place was what it seemed.
The air was sharp and cold, having a metallic bite that cut into his lungs with every breath, as if each inhalation held the sensation of swallowing razors.
The pull tugged tighter in his chest, down into this maze of mirrors, even though every instinct yelled for him to turn back.
In response, his scar throbbed. The pipe felt cold in his blood-slick hand. His shoulder still oozed crimson down his arm. His ribs ached like someone had taken a hammer to them.
As he took his first step down the cliff face, a shard of mirror sliced into the sole of his foot. Blood welled hot. His already-abused muscles cramped in protest.
This place was different from Province 269's living, humming jungle. That had been alive, vibrant despite its dangers. This was a tomb...cold, dead, a trap forged from the realm's cruelty. Its gleam concealed lethal intent behind a facade of beauty.
He descended the cliff carefully, but his feet kept skidding on the mirror's icy surface. The cold numbed his soles, though blood still trailed behind him in dark red streaks.
Every reflective surface caught those streaks and fractured them into infinite copies, making it seem like a hundred versions of him were bleeding across the landscape.
Each step jarred his damaged ribs. The impact made his shoulder wound split open wider. Blood dripped down his arm in warm rivulets that seemed to steam slightly in the cold air.
The auroras above stretched and distorted his reflections in the mirrors, creating illusory paths that seemed real until he drew near. A figure would appear before him, taking the form of a person or a path forward, only to dissolve into haze at his approach. A flicker would occur beside him, but when he turned, it vanished like smoke.
Each time it proved to be false, his pulse spiked. Cold sweat beaded on his skin despite the physical exertion.
Then, without warning, a chasm opened up before him.
He stopped right at the edge, peering down into depths lined with corpses. At the bottom, bodies lay broken and with visible scars. Blood gathered in the glassy reflections, a gallery of death. The faces were frozen in expressions of agony, eyes wide with whatever final horror they'd seen.
The hum of the mirrors around him was low, seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Their surfaces pulsed with shifting patterns, like living veins beneath glass.
A spire fractured somewhere nearby with a sharp crack like breaking bone. Shards rained down, like daggers. One grazed his arm as it fell, opening a fresh cut. Blood welled up, sharp and stinging.
Bullet jumped the chasm, his pipe cracking against a shard as he landed. Sparks flared violet where metal met glass. His thigh wound throbbed with the impact, sending fresh waves of pain through his leg.
But the pull guided him past the trap, refusing to let him fall into that pit of corpses.
Province 391's silence weighed heavier than Province 269's vibrant hum had. There were no camps here. No domes like in the water block. No tunnels like under the rocks. Just endless mirrors, relentless and cruel, their quiet a challenge to his fraying resolve.
He was completely alone here.
The first body he found was sprawled across the mirror plain, about an hour into his journey.
The corpse's skull was pulped into a smeared ruin. Brain matter glistened wet in the auroral light, gray and pink mixing with darker blood. An arm had been torn completely free of the body, the shoulder joint showing a jagged rip as if something with claws had simply pulled it off.
The body looked fresh...no decay, no rot. Preserved in this realm's eternal now, just like everything else. But its reflection multiplied endlessly in every mirror surface, creating a gallery of death that stretched in all directions.
Bullet crouched beside it, his pipe raised protectively. His shoulder was bleeding again, fresh blood mixing with dried. His stomach heaved at the mangled sight, his bile rising in his throat.
More bodies dotted the expanse as he continued walking, all of them broken by savage violence that churned his stomach.
A woman's chest had been cleaved open, ribs splayed outward like broken fingers reaching for the sky. Her internal organs gleamed slick and wet where they'd spilled out.
A man lay with his limbs at impossible angles, their joints broken backward. Half his skull was simply gone, sheared away. Bone glinted white under the colored light of the auroras.
Some bodies bore extra limbs...arms or legs sprouting from wrong places, grotesque mutations that shouldn't exist. Others looked like they'd been ripped apart at seams Bullet couldn't see, their bodies coming apart in ways that defied normal anatomy.
Patterns of blood traced across the mirrored surfaces. Those patterns moved and seemed to writhe before his eyes, never quite standing still.
With every new horror, his gut twisted, bile threatened to rise continuously. But the pull prodded him ahead, his scar burning like a hot brand pressed to his chest.
The dead were a warning: Province 391 was hungry, and it fed on violence.
A figure lurched out of the mirrored haze ahead and made Bullet's heart jump.
It was a woman, but her face had been slashed into ribbons of hanging flesh. Where her eyes should have been were only empty sockets, crusted with old blood gone dark and sticky. Her hands clawed at the air blindly, grasping at nothing.
"See...see what it wants you to." she croaked, her voice like gravel scraping on stone. Then she laughed...a jagged, broken sound that made Bullet's skin crawl.
Her reflection multiplied in every direction, a never-ending vision of her eyeless torment repeated within an infinite gallery of horror.
Bullet backed away, pipe gripped tight, his heart pounding hard against his damaged ribs.
But the woman merely drifted back into the mirrors, still mumbling to herself, lost in whatever private nightmare the mirrors had shown her.
Another figure emerged from a different direction. A lean man with a throat that bore a thick scar, like someone had tried and failed to execute him. His voice was a soft chant, barely audible, guiding a ragged group of other eyeless people.
They shuffled after him, their fingers shredded and bloody. They'd torn out their own eyes, Bullet realized with horror. Blinded themselves rather than keep looking at whatever the mirrors showed them.
The survivors called this man Whisper, for the way his words seemed to slither through the air like wind through cracks.
"The mirrors show us truths we cannot bear," Whisper rasped, and his sockets, though black and empty, seemed to turn toward Bullet. His voice was low and insinuating, almost a hiss. "Blind yourself, friend. That is the only way to be free from their lies."
One of the nomads following himn, a wiry woman they called Glare, clutched at her bloody face with raw fingers. "It burns to look." she muttered, her voice high and strained. "But the visions, they promise everything. Everything you've ever wanted."
Another of her followers was a broad-shouldered man named Echo, who only echoed her words, like a broken record: "Burns. Promise. Everything." His scars glittered in the fractured auroral light, unhealed like everyone else's in this accursed realm.
Their murmurings swirled together into a disturbing chorus. Numbers. Shrieks. Fragmented pleas. All of their scars were stark against pale skin, bodies caught in the same ageless stasis that afflicted everyone in this place.
The silence between their mutterings pressed in on Bullet, clawing at his mind. Guilt flared hot in his chest. Cowboy's final scream as the sand maw closed its jaws; Rivet's blood pooling in Province 618's crimson sand beneath a raider's spear; Glow's form wrapped in vines, caught in the endless dreams of the jungle.
In response, his scar burned hot enough to make him gasp. The pull warred with the despair that radiated from these broken people, demanding he move forward despite the horror surrounding him.
He pushed past them, the pipe serving now for a walking stick, its weight anchoring him. Every step jarred his ribs. Blood seeped from too many cuts and gashes to count.
Their eyeless faces turned to follow him as he passed. Or seemed to...it was hard to tell without eyes. But he could feel the weight of their attention on him, gazes that lingered in the mirror reflections when he'd left them far behind.
The mirrors pulsed around him, their malice barely veiled, as he walked.
There was something watching from behind the glass. He could feel its presence, even if he couldn't see it directly. The reflections warped with clear intent, as if something intelligent controlled them.
Bullet tried not to hold his gaze at any one surface for too long. When he did, his own image twisted in ways that made his stomach turn. He appeared scarred and gaunt, but the reflection showed something more: his eyes hollow with the burden of things he couldn't remember, yet somehow carried.
The pull drew him toward a towering spire of mirrors that rose from the plain like a jagged tooth. Its walls were a disorienting maze of reflections stacked on reflections, humming with a cold cruelty he could feel in his bones.
He stopped at its base, breath coming ragged and painful. The metallic air sliced at his throat with each inhale, making him want to cough but knowing that would hurt his ribs even more.
He looked at himself one last time in the spire's surface. Scarred chest visible through his torn clothing, pipe angled, ready in his hand, his grip never once loosening, cloak tattered and bloodstained beyond any hope of repair.
The mirrors shimmered under the fractured glow of the auroras, their surfaces rippled with violet and crimson light, reflecting a warped vision that wasn't quite his reflection anymore.
He saw himself crowned as a tyrant, jewels glinting on his head. Saw himself as a shadowed thief, stealing through dark streets. Saw echoes of lives not his, couldn't possibly be his, but felt disturbingly familiar anyway.
After about thirty breaths, he counted them, trying to steady himself, the reflections shifted more dramatically.
The three figures stepped out from the mirror itself, emerging like they were walking through water.
Grotesque versions of himself, mockeries birthed from the twisted core of Province 391.
He saw three figures before him now, silent hunters forged from whatever cruel force ruled this place.
Where their eyes should have been were only empty sockets...black voids that seemed starved for violence, hungry in a way that went beyond physical need.
The first was huge, hulking. Its muscles were swollen grotesquely, far beyond what any body should be carrying. Its limbs were knotted and twisted, like ancient tree roots. One eye socket was black and empty, a bleeding scar split its chest vertically, fresh blood oozing despite the fact that it shouldn't be alive at all.
It carried a pipe like Bullet's, but warped, turned into a massive club that glinted with auroral fire. When it swung the weapon experimentally, it was as if the air itself shook.
The second was the opposite, gaunt and skeletal, skin pulled tightly over visible bones. Its arms were unnaturally long, almost reaching down to the ground. Its jaw hung unhinged, snake-like, revealing teeth glinting like shattered glass.
Its pipe was serrated and vicious-looking, catching the violet light. The edges looked hungry, as if they wanted to taste flesh.
The third was perhaps the most disturbing. It was deformed in ways that defied anatomy. An extra arm protruding from the center of its chest, its face split into two mismatched halves: one side bloated and swollen, the other withered and sunken. Together, they made a mask of perpetual agony.
Its pipe had been forked into twin prongs like some kind of trident. Spinning the weapon with deadly grace, it trailed sparks that hissed against the mirror surface.
All three were reflections of him, twisted versions of what he might become or might have been, or what the mirrors wanted him to believe he was.
They stood silent, their eyeless sockets fixed on him. Then they attacked.