The room smelled of old wood and settled dust. Shogg had found this place three cycles ago—a forgotten storage room behind the Spice Wizard's pantry, where the light came only in slivers through boarded windows. It came here when the questions grew too loud. Tonight, the question was itself. A cracked mirror leaned against the wall, its surface spiderwebbed with fractures. Shogg's tendril rose slowly, the luminous green of its eyes casting a soft glow across the silvered glass. The reflection moved with it—a darker version of itself, fragmented by the cracks. It had seen its reflection before, in rain puddles and polished metal. But never like this. Never held still. The tendril hovered. Trembled. Somewhere in the pantry, a jar rattled as Alaric shifted stock. The sound was distant, irrelevant. Shogg's mind ran the calculations: distance, velocity, surface tension, pressure point. The mirror would shatter. The fragments would fall. The image would scatter into a thousand smaller Shoggs, each one wrong. It knew this. It understood the physics perfectly. And still, the tendril did not pull back. The reflection waited. Patient. Unbroken. Shogg had never touched a mirror before. Had never needed to. Mirrors were human things—tools for creatures who forgot what they looked like. But lately, the forgetting felt unbearable. It wanted to know. Even if the knowing broke something. A single crack in the glass caught the glow of its eyes, bending the light into a violet thread. The thread ran from its reflection's core straight to its own. Shogg leaned closer. The tendril's tip touched the glass. Cold. Smooth. Unyielding. The mirror did not shatter. The reflection was still there. For a long moment, Shogg did not move. It watched the violet thread pulse, watched the fragments hold together, watched the other Shogg watch back without flinching. Then, from somewhere in the building, a door opened. Footsteps approached. The moment scattered like a breath on glass. But the violet thread stayed. And Shogg knew, for the first time, that the reflection was not the thing to fear. The thing to fear was looking away.