Anomaly

My words echoed like thunder through that space. The fury inside me burned so fiercely that I didn’t even bother to control the direction of my telepathy. In an instant, everyone within several feet heard every syllable, raw and unfiltered.
More than that—because it was telepathy, they didn’t just understand my words. They felt the weight of my emotion. My anger—raw, searing, unrestrained—spilled out like a wildfire, forcing every nearby mind to taste a fragment of what I was feeling.
Probably because of that, Laura, Emily, Victor, and Rupert—who had been silently watching until then—now wore startled, anxious... no, terrified expressions. It didn’t take much thought to realize that fear came directly from me.
Their eyes trembled, their bodies tense, as if they expected something terrible to happen at any moment. And honestly, what could I do about it? I was consumed by a rage I could barely control—this time, it burned inside me like a living flame, impossible to hide.
The strangest part of all this was that I couldn’t logically understand why I was so furious. It wasn’t as if I was mad at myself. The anger had just erupted out of nowhere—sudden, unannounced, and overwhelming.
Normally, my face hardly shows the slightest change in expression, but at that moment, it was impossible to ignore the weight of that fire burning within. To be honest, you could say a natural disaster was more likely than a change in my expression.
I wish I were exaggerating—but unfortunately, I’m not. Unless something truly extraordinary happens, my face hardly ever changes. Even so... I never would have imagined that my expression would shift so suddenly just because Eryanis was being confronted—no, intimidated—by a damn mirror.
And yet, while those thoughts raced through my head, something unexpected cut through my anger. The mirror in front of me, which until then had only reflected the raw overflow of my fury, began to tremble ever so slightly—as if it had come alive.
Its once smooth, polished surface rippled in unstable waves, like the turbulence of a lake stirred by invisible hands. Slowly, my reflection stopped following my movements, until it was swallowed entirely by the distortion, torn away from me and expelled somewhere else.
The Eryanis in the mirror vanished, erased in a silent instant. Bit by bit, the surface reformed—but what emerged wasn’t just a reflection. It was me.
“Oh!” gasped Althea, her eyes widening in genuine surprise. Her expression mixed astonishment with a hint of disapproval: “He... he wasn’t supposed to do that”
I had no idea what Althea meant. But honestly, I didn’t have room to think about it at that moment. Every shred of my attention was locked on the figure before me—my other “self”.
Not a frozen version. Not a distorted shadow. But me, in flesh and blood, breathing, every movement in perfect sync with my own. There was life in that copy, and the same blazing fire burned in its golden eyes—intense, defiant, as if it were about to act on its own.
It stepped forward, emerging from the polished surface as if walking through a liquid curtain that dissolved behind it in silent ripples. For a moment, my body refused to react—I stood frozen, heart pounding, eyes locked on the impossible sight.
Before me stood myself—but there was something profoundly wrong about that presence. The “other me” slowly lifted his head, and a cynical smile spread across his lips—a smile cold and twisted, one I knew I could never reproduce, not even if I tried for a lifetime.
“Hehehehe...” My reflection’s laugh echoed off the walls, as if the very air itself mocked me. The sound was thin and cutting, dripping with malice, a mocking laugh that refused to end. Then, his lips curled into a warped grin, and the words slid out like poison: “So much anger... so much fury... and still, you don’t understand”
The voice was mine, but heavier, deeper, carrying a shadow I would never accept as part of me. Each syllable dripped venom, laced with everything I denied being: “Poor Zentharys... so melancholic, so miserably sad. It isn’t anger over what I did to Eryanis that eats away at you. No. It’s something worse. You’re furious because she doesn’t need you. Because deep down, you’re afraid you’re nothing more than dead weight—an idle spectator standing beside her... beside all of them”
Those words cut deep—not because of their content, but because of the cold conviction behind them. It was as if the mirror had plunged into every hidden corner of my mind, dredging up thoughts I never dared to face, only to hurl them back at me as weapons. Insecurities I thought I didn’t have... or perhaps only convinced myself I didn’t.
I stepped forward, fists clenched—but before I could speak, the copy mirrored me exactly. Every movement, every breath, perfectly synchronized, as if every fiber of my being was nothing more than its delayed reflection. The sensation was suffocating. And the longer I stared into that grotesque imitation, the stronger the almost irrational urge grew—to tear it apart with my own hands.
“Look at me” it said, with the same sharp intensity my voice had carried moments ago. Its eyes burned like embers embedded in flesh: “I am you—stripped of filters, stripped of masks that hide what truly beats inside us. I am the desire you fear to admit: the hunger to crush anything that dares to threaten your family. Even if it means making the world bleed”
The smirk of my reflection spread through the room, as though the very walls had absorbed his irony and now echoed it back. His gaze, dark and malicious, locked onto mine with cruel patience, savoring every exposed weakness.
Then, with a voice that seemed to drown out my own consciousness, he continued: “You are not a good person, Zentharys... and you know that better than anyone. No matter how much you try to force yourself to believe otherwise, your nature will never change. Deep down, you’ll always be indifferent to every life that doesn’t belong to your sisters. They’re the only ones who matter. The rest...”
His lips twisted into a near-poisonous whisper: “Are nothing but inferior beings—fragile, disposable creations beneath you”
For an instant, silence reigned. Eryanis, Laura, and even the others stood frozen, as though the very air had crystallized around us. The room no longer felt like a room, but an invisible tribunal, austere and merciless, where no sound dared rise.
There, in that space, only I and that copy had the right to exist. In that moment, wrapped in suffocating tension, something began to reveal itself before my eyes — and I finally realized what was truly happening. The surface of the “living mirror” quivered — not with power, but with raw instability.
Every word that slipped from its mouth reverberated through the air like a dissonant echo, and with each syllable, delicate cracks spread across its reflective skin, like glass on the verge of shattering under an invisible weight. It was as if the copy couldn’t sustain the very lie of its existence — a fragile farce crumbling before the truth it was trying to imitate.
A low laugh slipped from my throat, rough and edged with a coldness that even startled me. Each note carried a deep, almost cruel disdain: No... you’re not me. You could never be. If you were real, you wouldn’t have to prove it.
The moment my words dissolved into the air, the copy froze. The smile it had been wearing slid from its face as though ripped away, leaving behind only a disturbing emptiness.
Then the first cracks spread, fine as spiderwebs on shattered glass, multiplying into a network that covered its entire body. The golden eyes, once brimming with arrogance, now gleamed with feverish despair — but it wasn’t mine. It belonged to him, and only him.
The reflection tried to form words, but before its lips could shape even a single syllable, a brutal wave of energy erupted from within. Shards of glass and beams of light scattered in every direction, as though the air itself had been torn into incandescent fragments. The sound was deafening — like hundreds of mirrors breaking at once, a metallic, piercing chorus that rattled the bones.
At the heart of the chaos, the original mirror convulsed, its edges twisting as if refusing to remain whole. Then it screamed — not with one voice, but with hundreds of mine, interwoven in a suffocating lament, a cry of agony that echoed more inside the mind than in the space around it.
And then, in a final act, the mirror’s surface folded in on itself and imploded, as if swallowed into a single invisible point. Every fragment of reflection was devoured by the darkness until nothing remained but a heavy, suffocating silence.
When the last shimmer faded, the room seemed to breathe again, resuming its ordinary shape. No mirror. No copy. Just me — gasping, lungs burning, heart racing like I’d just fought a war against myself on a battlefield no one else could see.
Eryanis watched me in silence, that same impassive mask etched across her face. And yet, in her eyes, there was something different — a flicker, barely there, but enough to make me believe that, for the first time, she had seen beyond the surface. As though she’d glimpsed fragments of me I had never intended to reveal — parts I preferred to keep buried, invisible even to myself.
Laura, on the other hand, was pale, as though the blood had drained from her face. Her eyes faltered, unable to hold mine for more than a few seconds, and yet in them lingered a shadow of understanding.
I wasn’t sure how much she had truly grasped, but considering it was her, she probably caught the essence of it: the mirror hadn’t been destroyed by brute force, but by contradiction itself. It tried to reflect me, tried to be me... but failed to sustain what actually defined me.
A whisper escaped my lips — low, almost inaudible, as if it slipped out without my permission. I didn’t even have time to understand what I meant; the words simply spilled on their own, laced with restrained venom: Stupid mirror... you think imitating my existence is that simple?
The instant those words left me, I blinked in confusion. Honestly... what the hell did I mean by that? The sensation was strange, as if my own mind had betrayed me. It wasn’t something I had planned, nor something I wanted to say — the words simply surfaced, raw and involuntary, like a whisper from a place I didn’t control.
To be honest, the mirror had seemed strange from the very moment it took Eryanis’s form. That was when the first ripple had run across its surface, as if reality itself had quivered inside it. And for some reason I couldn’t explain, I had the sharp impression I understood why: the mirror had tried to copy us.
Not selectively, not carefully, but exactly as it claimed — without any filter. Even so, the thought sounded absurd. It was simply impossible for anything to reflect not just the image, but the essence of a virtue.
That much I knew instinctively: Creation itself would never allow a virtue to be copied. Virtues weren’t mere concepts or abilities, but absolute essences — fragments of a single primordial Authority that admits no replica.
Their existence is singular across every dimension, as if the fabric of the universe itself conspired to preserve their uniqueness. And so, when the mirror dared to attempt copying us, it sealed its own fate — that very transgression was what led to its inevitable ruin.
Anyway, the moment I turned around, I realized every pair of eyes was fixed on me. There was an almost suffocating intensity in that collective attention. My sisters, however, showed no surprise—in fact, they behaved as if this outcome had been written from the very beginning, as if they had simply been waiting for the inevitable.
Laura, Emily, Victor, and Rupert, on the other hand, carried in their eyes a mix of shock and disorientation, as if searching me for an explanation I simply couldn’t give. For a brief moment, I considered opening my mouth and trying to justify what had just happened. After all, I had just destroyed an anomaly... but how could I explain something I didn’t fully understand myself?