Curses and Will Chapter 27: Chapter 6: The Waterfall of Mirrors

Read chapter 27 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

We left at first light, just the two of us. Kagenken had insisted on that part specifically, no Annya, no Suga, nothing waiting at the edges to soften whatever the water decided to show me. The walk took most of the morning, deeper into the forest than I'd been before, the trees growing taller and older the further we went, sunlight filtering down in thin, scattered threads through a canopy that had clearly stood undisturbed for centuries. Kagenken walked ahead of me in silence most of the way, his missing arm still wrapped in fresh bandages, his pace steady despite it. We heard the waterfall before we saw it, a low, constant roar that grew louder with every step until we broke through the last line of trees into a wide clearing. The waterfall itself wasn't especially tall, maybe twice my height, falling in a smooth, unbroken sheet into a pool below that sat unnaturally still despite the volume of water feeding it. No ripples disturbed the surface, even where the falling water struck it directly. The pool simply absorbed the impact and stayed flat, silver-dark, reflecting the canopy above it with a clarity that didn't match anything I'd seen a normal body of water do. "This is it," Kagenken said, stopping at the tree line. "I'll wait here." "You're not coming with me?" "This part you do alone." His expression carried none of his usual edge. "Whatever the water shows you, it shows you because it's already inside you. I can't change what's already there, and trying to stand beside you while you face it would only give you somewhere to hide instead of looking at it directly." I approached the edge of the pool slowly, my reflection growing clearer with every step until I stood directly over it, looking down at my own face staring back up at me, ordinary in every way the surface of any water might show it. Then it shifted. The reflection didn't move the way mine moved. It tilted its head a fraction too slow, like it was operating on a delay only it could feel. Its eyes, my eyes, went dark in a way that had nothing to do with the water's color, twin pools of something closer to void than reflection. "Finally," it said, the voice rising up out of the water itself, layered underneath the sound of the falls. "Took you long enough to actually look." I stepped back instinctively. The reflection didn't follow the movement. It stayed exactly where it was, still staring up at the space where I'd been standing. "You're not real," I said. "I'm the most real thing you've got," it answered, and the water's surface rippled once despite nothing physical disturbing it, the image of my face fracturing briefly into something both more violent and more human than I wanted to acknowledge. "You've been feeding me since you were four years old. Every scream you swallowed. Every funeral you weren't allowed to properly grieve at because everyone around you was too busy deciding you'd caused it. I've been growing this whole time, in whatever room you locked me in." "I don't owe you anything," I said, though my voice shook on the way out. "You don't," it agreed, almost gently. "But you owe yourself the truth, and I'm the only one willing to actually give it to you straight. You want to know why the power took over at the cliff? Why it took over again at the dojo, with the guard? It's not because you're weak. It's because you keep deciding I'm something to be ashamed of instead of something that's trying to protect you the only way it knows how." "Protect me," I repeated, disbelief sharpening the words. "You nearly killed an innocent man." "I nearly killed the people who would have killed Annya first," it shot back, the water churning harder now, the reflection's edges blurring and sharpening in turns. "I don't distinguish between threats and innocents the way you do, because you taught me not to. Every time the world hurt you and you swallowed it instead of fighting back, you taught me that restraint gets you killed. That mercy gets the people you love kill