Trial of Perception

You fall through soil that turns to air, through a scream that never finds your mouth. The plunge ends not with an impact, but a slow, impossible stop - your feet landing on something smooth, hard, and cold. When you lift your head, there are no walls around you, no sky above you.

Only mirrors.

No seams, no frames. A perfect globe that holds a hundred versions of you. The reflections bend in strange ways; your body repeated a hundredfold - each time slightly wrong. Each image lags, leads, smiles, or stares differently. Some reflections breathe a beat behind you, others blink a hair too soon. One bears a scar you do not have, another’s hair clings wet to a dry shoulder. The room multiplies you until you cannot tell whether the originals are the copies or the copies are the truth.

Light has no source here. It glows faintly from the glass, shifting in pale ripples, like moonlight seen through water. When you move, the sound changes pitch, as if the room is listening. You take a step. A thousand feet move with you.

The air tastes of metal and earth. When you exhale, the glass near your mouth fogs and then clears in a drifting curve. Some reflections collect your breath into a mist that lingers on their side; others remain perfectly clear, as if the air you made never reached them. When you step, certain mirrors shift their angle the instant your foot leaves the floor; others delay, as if remembering movement after the fact.

A reflection caughts your eye; one whose breathing and motion fall into quiet concord with your own: when your heart thuds, its chest thuds, when you blink, its eyes close in the same instant. It is not brilliant, not pretty, but it is steady, like a compass that trembles but keeps true.

Next to it another copy of your face looks at you with interest. It looks sharper and cleaner and it smiles at you. It is beautiful in a way that makes your skin prickle; it promises perfection, answering your deepest desires at a glance. Then it steps aside, beckoning you to follow.