A truth you'd kill to protect.
This time, Zahir didn't brace himself. He just listened, letting the formula resonate through him.
The world around him didn't fracture or collapse the way it had before. It simply held — silent, heavy, waiting.
Slowly, the hallway faded away, replaced once again by the quiet, impossible chamber. Curved lines of geometry drifted around him like ink spreading gently through water, half-formed shapes always rearranging themselves before fully settling.
The hallway blurred and peeled away like mist, and the impossible chamber unfolded again around him. Curved lines of living geometry drifted through the space like slow-moving ink in water, shapes forever forming and unforming before they could be named.
At the far edge of the circle, the silhouette waited — not aggressive, not accusing. Just… there. A mirror to a part of himself he hadn't faced yet.
This truth wasn't buried like the others. It lived close to the surface, so close he barely needed to think to feel it.
Deadpan eyes glancing upward from a slate screen. Wild laughter masking fear. The warmth of a hand gripping his shoulder before a fight he had intended to lose.
His crew weren't just his friends. They were the ones he had chosen when the world had nothing else to offer. They were the reason he fought, the reason he survived.
And then —
A flash.
The guard he'd killed in the tunnels. It wasn't out of defense or necessity. Not just out of fear that hesitation would cost his people their lives. Something darker had moved through him too.
He had wanted it.
That part of him he never spoke about. The part that relished the power to hurt back.
He wasn't just carrying love and loyalty inside him. He was carrying rage.
And maybe the worst part—
He didn't want to let it go.
"I'd kill again," he said quietly, his voice steady but low. "If it meant keeping them safe."
The chamber answered him with a slow, deep pulse, as though a string had been softly plucked somewhere far below hearing.
"I'd do it without blinking," Zahir added, more softly now. "And I don't know what that makes me."
He stared down at his hands. They still felt stained, even now.
Once he'd believed that surviving his past was the hardest battle he'd ever face. But perhaps it was surviving what the present had shaped him into that was truly terrifying.
"I fight like there's no other way," he admitted aloud, each word an ache. "But part of me wonders if I've already crossed too many lines."
He lifted his gaze. His silhouette had moved closer, only inches away from him now, standing directly opposite as if it had stepped forward silently during his confession.
Zahir felt the contradiction tightening in his chest—an overwhelming instinct to protect, at war with the dread that he'd become the very thing he once tried to escape.
"I don't know if I'm better than what made me," he whispered, his voice breaking slightly. "But I know this much—I won't let the people I love down."
The silhouette took another gentle step forward, close enough now for Zahir to truly see it. And when he did, he recognized it immediately—not as a shadow or an echo, but simply as himself.
The fighter.
The protector.
The liar.
The grieving son.
The boy who'd screamed and wasn't heard.
The one who still hoped, in spite of it all, for something better.
They stood in silence, breathing quietly together. The space pulsed around them once, then twice, before settling again. It wasn't finished, exactly—but something within it had readied itself, waiting calmly for whatever came next.
Balance the weight, the formula had instructed. But how?
There were no more instructions now. No guiding voice. Only him, his breath, and the presence standing quietly across from him.
He regarded the silhouette once more. It was balanced, open, simply breathing. It wasn't attempting to control or resist anything. It was only holding—holding everything he'd once believed was too much to bear.
And that was the shape.
Zahir breathed slowly. Once, then again, letting his jaw unclench and his shoulders drop. Into that unfamiliar shape, unguarded and vulnerable, he began to gather all of it—Dray's buried name, the wound of abandonment, and the difficult truth that he'd kill without hesitation to protect those he loved, even if it cost him something vital.
He held each one—and they didn't break him.
They fit.
The silhouette stepped forward. Zahir matched its movement, and as they met, something shifted between them.
Suddenly, there were more of him. Not copies—but truths. Layers of himself overlaid in a single moment:
His current self.
The boy in the alley, covered in blood and grief.
The child standing silently in the doorway.
The young man shaped by loss.
The one who was tired of pretending he didn't need to be held.
And in that moment, he embraced himself.
From every direction, he was holding and being held. He was the one offering love and the one too broken to ask for it. He was the person who had struggled to believe he was deserving of care.
A dam broke within him.
Zahir began to sob, quietly at first, then deeper, the sobs tearing through him until he dropped helplessly to his knees. Every ache he had armored, every pain he had swallowed, surged out freely and unapologetically.
Yet through it all, the embrace continued to hold. It was grief finally given a place to land.
Slowly, as the sobs quieted, the boy in the alley dissolved gently into him, not erased but made part of his marrow. The child in the doorway followed quietly, his pain now woven into a larger tapestry. Even his present-day double, the mirror image across from him, moved inward—being fully accepted.
When the last of these folded into him, and he had nothing left to release, the geometry of the chamber halted its gentle rotation.
What once pulsed with meaning now hovered silent, like the lingering quiet after a prayer. Zahir lay curled on the floor, his breathing slow and steady. He opened his eyes.
He stayed there for a long moment, letting the weight of everything settle fully into place. Gradually, he noticed something new—a quiet hum, not in his bones or his blood, but deeper, woven into the very outline of who he was.
Zahir knew he was damaged. Twisted by the life he'd lived, by the choices he'd made just to stay breathing. And for the first time, he didn't flinch from that truth.
He was fucked up. And that was fine.
Maybe the world didn't need clean hands. Maybe it needed someone who knew what it was to bleed, to hurt, to crawl through the wreckage and still keep moving.
He knew what people were capable of — the desperation, the betrayal, the hunger that lived under distracted and self-absorbed faces. He knew what he was capable of too.
And he was still here.
It felt like something had settled perfectly into the shape of his identity, in the slow settling of his chest, in the way the tension bled out of his muscles.
He scrubbed a hand across his face, blinking up at the heavy dark above him.
"...Was that it?" he muttered.
He'd expected — something.
A weapon. A breakthrough.
Maybe a signature move that shot lasers out of his damn eyes.
Instead, he got a trippy, soul-wrenching therapy session.
He slumped back against the floor, breathing out a low, broken laugh.
Figures.
And just as he pushed himself upright, just as he started to gather himself—there was a glint of light in his periphery.
So small he almost missed it.
A single brushstroke of ink suspended midair, as though an unseen hand had left it unfinished.
He froze, heart thudding once against his ribs.
He grinned faintly, breathing out through his nose.
Maybe it was too soon to jump to conclusions.