There was no transition, no gradual awakening. One instant, James was dying on the floor of a dusty antique shop, and the next, he existed somewhere else entirely.
He floated in absolute nothingness. Not darkness, darkness implied the absence of light, and this place seemed to exist outside such concepts. It wasn't black or white or any color. It simply wasn't.
And neither was he, exactly.
James tried to look down at himself and realized he had no body to examine or even a head to look down with.
He possessed some waning awareness and consciousness but no form or substance. Just a fragment of awareness floating in a vast, endless void.
Panic should have seized him immediately. He should have been screaming, thrashing, desperate to escape. Instead, he felt oddly detached, as if watching events unfold to someone else.
It was difficult to describe the sensation for a mind that had always been embodied, but James gradually became aware that pieces of himself were loose. Drifting. Like a dropped jigsaw puzzle, pieces slowly floating apart.
He tried to pull himself together but had no idea how to accomplish it. How do you grab parts of your soul when you have no hands? How do you call back scattered thoughts, memories, and feelings when you have no voice?
He should have been terrified, but he felt nothing, no worry or fear.
Time passed. Or perhaps it didn't.
In a place without light to mark day from night, without a heartbeat to count seconds, time became meaningless. James might have been there for minutes or a millennium. He had no way to determine which.
What he did know was that he was disintegrating.
The pieces of himself drifted further apart, each taking some essential component of his identity. A memory of his seventh birthday party floated past, complete and intact but no longer his. The sound of his father's laugh, the taste of his mother's chocolate chip cookies, the feeling of grass between his toes on summer afternoons, all of it becoming untethered, dissolving into the endless nothing.
He should have been terrified. Should have fought against it, struggled harder to maintain himself. But the dispersal brought with it a strange sort of peace.
He wasn't just losing the good memories; the bad ones were fading away, too. His father's death, dropping out of college, and the last several miserable years. Years since he'd had a single positive memory. The sharp edges of his identity were smoothing away, leaving something softer, more diffuse.
Perhaps this was what death was supposed to feel like. Perhaps the mirror hadn't killed him so much as freed him from the burden of being James Kard, college dropout, pizza delivery driver, profound disappointment to his parents and himself.
Perhaps this nothingness was preferable to the life he had been enduring for the past decade.
He was almost gone. Just a few scattered fragments of consciousness drifting in the vast emptiness. That's when something touched him.
The sensation was such a shock after the endless numbness that it took several moments to process. Something small and warm had attached itself to the largest remaining piece of his soul, wrapping around him like...
A warm embrace.
That was the only way he could conceptualize it, though it had no arms. It was a bead of light, approximately the size of a needle's tip, but its light was steadily dimming. And it was definitely alive. He could feel it pulsing with its own rhythm, different from a heartbeat yet somehow familiar.
As he observed, thin, wispy filaments like spider silk began extending from the bead. They were composed of light and moved with clear purpose. One by one, they reached toward his scattered pieces, following trails he couldn't see or understand.
The first filament found the closest fragment, his father's laugh. The taste of his favorite dish. It gently drew them back. The memory settled into place with an almost audible click, and suddenly James could recall not just the flavor but the day he'd first tried it, despite never having that memory before.
More filaments followed, each retrieving another piece of him. Some found emotions, the contentment of lazy Sunday afternoons, the sharp sting of his first heartbreak. Others collected sensory memories, abstract thoughts, and half-formed dreams. All of it slowly, carefully gathered back together.
But the bead wasn't merely retrieving what had been lost. As the filaments drew his scattered essence back, James became aware they were also filling gaps where pieces had already dissolved beyond recovery with something else. Not replacement memories or emotions, but a kind of spiritual mortar holding everything together.
He could feel himself becoming something again. The bead's influence was subtle but unmistakable, weaving itself through his restored consciousness like veins of gold through marble.
As more of himself returned, James found he could think more clearly, and observe more precisely. The bead continued its work with infinite patience, sending out new filaments to capture the last fragments of his dispersed soul. And as it worked, he began to sense something like warmth radiating from their connection.
Not physical warmth, he still had no body to experience such things. But something deeper, more fundamental. The warmth of relief after a long day of hard work.
By the time the bead finished its work, James somehow felt more real than he'd ever been while alive.
He floated there in the timeless void, wrapped in that gentle warmth, connected to the mysterious bead that had saved him from dissolution. Questions crowded his restored mind. What was this place? What was the bead? Why had it helped him? But for now, he was content to simply exist.
For the first time since the mirror shattered, James Kard felt whole.
And he was no longer alone