The physical universe ceased to have weight, heat, or dimension.
Ren Vale was not falling. He was diffusing. The blast wave from the Great Un-Burning Loom had stripped away the thin, fragile membrane that separated his nineteen-year-old mind from the sixteen alternate lives bound within the Speculum.
The Memory Multiplicity didn’t attack him as thoughts. It tore his identity open into a kaleidoscopic storm of fully realized, competing consciousnesses:
First Mirror: The Inquisitor of the High Bench.
He was fifty-four years old. He sat upon a towering seat of blackened iron in the Hall of Verdicts, wearing the scarlet-and-ermine mantle of the Lord High Judicator. In his right hand, he held an ivory execution metal pen. Before him knelt forty young scribes in chains, accused of copying forbidden texts.
He looked into the eyes of a trembling boy who reminded him of himself at fourteen. Then he felt absolutely nothing.
“The seal is broken,” he heard his own aged, rasping voice pronounce with cold, office perfection. “Under Article Nine, the penalty is severance of the tongue and three years in the lead mines. Court guards, clear the bench. Next case.”
The memory burned into his mind with the terrifying weight of thirty years of routine cruelty. He could remember the smell of the ink on the death warrants. He could remember the taste of the expensive port wine he drank each evening to drown the screams. And he could feel the cold, stony emptiness where his soul had once lived.
