"Every mirror is a door, but no one asks who built the frame." — The Fool
The lights went out, and the silence that followed was wrong.
Not the ordinary hush of a blackout, but a silence with weight—thick, listening, alive. Jake stood frozen in the living room, the broken mirror glinting faintly in the dim spill of streetlight. The air smelled like rain and copper.
"Grandma?" he called.
No answer.
He moved toward her room, each step slow, the floor creaking louder than it should. His heartbeat felt too big for his body. The door was ajar, light flickering behind it as if from a candle, though he hadn't lit one.
He pushed it open.
His grandmother sat on the edge of her bed, facing the window. At least, it looked like her. The figure's back was too straight, her hands folded too perfectly on her lap. Her reflection in the window was *smiling*, though her real face was not.
"Jake," she said—or the thing wearing her voice did. It sounded like it was being spoken through glass.
"You shouldn't have said the name."
He took a step back. "What—what are you?
The reflection turned its head toward him before the body did. Its movements lagged, just a fraction too slow.
"We are what hangs between," it said in a dozen tones at once. "You called, and so the Balance answered."
The window cracked without touching. Hairline fractures spread outward like veins of frost. The reflection inside the glass twisted, stretching until the face was upside down, suspended by invisible threads.
Jake felt the pull again, the weightless vertigo that meant the world was about to tip.
"Stop!" he shouted.
The figure rose from the bed, feet not touching the floor. Its shadow stayed seated. The air bent around it. His grandmother's voice bled away into a chorus of echoes.
"Suspensus," whispered the reflection. "Equilibrium demands—"
A gunshot tore through the sentence.
The body fell backwards, shattering the window. Shards rained across the room, glinting in frozen motion before gravity remembered them.
Liora Kaine stood in the doorway, pistol steady, her expression unreadable in the half-light. She wore no Ordo insignia now, only the black of exile.
"Move away from it!" she ordered.
Jake stumbled back, dizzy. "What did you—she—"
"It wasn't her," Liora said. "It's what comes *with* you."
The reflection on the shattered glass re-formed itself, crawling along the pieces like oil across water. A pale hand reached out of the mirror's edge, grasping the air.
Liora drew a circle with her free hand, whispering under her breath. The sigil flared, white fire shaped like a pendulum.
"Per vinculum aequilibrii," she intoned.
("By the bond of balance, return.")
The air imploded. The hand screamed without sound, withdrawing as the cracks sealed. The room went still.
Liora lowered her weapon. Jake was shaking so hard he could barely stand.
"What was that?" he asked.
She holstered the pistol, eyes still on the glass. "A Visitant. A reflection that tried to become real. They follow the Suspensum—they always have."
Jake swallowed. "And my grandmother?"
Liora's jaw tightened. "Alive. Asleep. It used her image to reach you."
He sank to the floor, covering his face with his hands. "Why me?"
"The same reason the pendulum swings," she said softly. "Because something pushed it first."
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance—Ordo containment teams already on their way.
Liora looked toward the window, then at Jake. "They'll come for you now. You can run, or you can learn. But if you stay, you do it under my mark."
He looked up at her. "Why help me?"
Her eyes flickered, pale and haunted. "Because once, someone didn't help me."
She drew a coin from her coat, the same silver sigil as before, and pressed it into his hand. "Keep it close. It will keep you anchored."
As she turned to leave, Jake heard the Fool's laughter again, faint and fading into the rain.
---
The rain had become a rhythm — steady, penitential. Every drop struck the cabin roof like a ticking clock counting down to absolution. Liora stood at the window, pistol drawn, her breath fogging the glass. Out in the woods, pale lanterns flickered — one, two, ten. They were moving in formation. The *In Umbra.*
"They've found us," she whispered.
Jake sat cross-legged within the chalk circle, eyes closed. His pulse was wrong — slower than it should have been, slower than life permits. The silver coin glowed faintly against his palm. "Jake," Liora said, turning. "You have to stay behind me, no matter what happens."
But he didn't answer. Because he wasn't Jake anymore.
---
I wake in him.
The body is small, mortal, trembling — yet through its veins runs the same thread that once held the stars in place. I feel the world's weight pressing from every direction, and I remember why I hung myself upon the axis: to stop it from falling apart. But equilibrium is mercy's cruel disguise. I open his eyes for him. The world breathes in reverse. Dust floats upward. Raindrops rise like silver needles. The door bursts open.
Figures in black surge through the rain — masked, sigils burning across their armour. Their eyes glow with the pale gold of sanctified death.
"By decree of the Ordo Arcanae," their leader shouts, "the anomaly known as Suspensum is to be unmade."
Liora fires first. The shot is a single thunderclap, cutting through the chanting. A figure falls, glass shattering where his body should have hit the floor — a reflection breaking loose.
Jake rises slowly, head bowed.
The leader steps forward, sword gleaming with mirrored light. "Restrain him."
They never reach him.
---
The world inverts.
Floor becomes ceiling, air becomes weight. Every living thing in the cabin dangles upside down, as if the room itself were the Hanged One's altar. Time stutters, then stops entirely. Only I — we — remain upright.
The boy's voice fractures into mine, our words twinned:
"Suspensus ascendit."
The Suspended rises.
The circle of salt ignites. The symbols carved into the floor lift into the air, spinning slowly around us like orbiting moons. The agents struggle soundlessly, their movements slowed by gravity turned sideways.
Liora stares, caught between awe and horror. "Jake… stop. You'll tear yourself apart."
But he doesn't hear her. He's listening to me. He sees what I see: the golden threads connecting all things — from raindrop to breath to heartbeat.
And he understands that to pull one is to change the world's pattern.
He reaches out, fingers trembling, and touches a thread that leads to one of the fallen soldiers.
The man vanishes — not violently, but gently, as though erased from memory.
"Balance restored," I whisper.
Liora grabs his arm. "That was a life, not a number!"
He turns to her, eyes glowing faintly upside-down within his reflection. "They came to kill me. To kill *us.*"
"Yes," she says, voice breaking. "But you're supposed to be better than the Order, Jake. You're supposed to be *different.*"
Her words pierce something deeper than the flesh. For a moment, I almost remember mercy. Then the pain comes — raw, human, impossible to bear. Jake collapses to his knees. The light fades. Gravity remembers itself. The bodies fall. The silence returns.
Liora rushes to his side, pulling him upright. His nose bleeds, his breath ragged.
"You said you'd teach me," he murmurs.
"I didn't know how fast you'd learn," she whispers.
She looks around — at the ruin, the stillness, the absence where men once were. "They'll send more. We have to move."
But Jake isn't looking at her. He's staring at the floor — at the faint outline of an **inverted cross** burned into the wood where he'd knelt.
The symbol glows once, then fades.
"He's awake now," Jake says softly.
"Who?"
"The one who hangs."
And somewhere deep within him, I smile.
For pity has always been the gentlest form of possession.