NOVEL WEB Chapter 36: Chapter 32: Mirror Born of a Broken Truth
Chapter 32: Mirror Born of a Broken Truth
Perspective: Velkaris
She bowed.
No breath escaped her. No sound trailed behind her gliding steps.
Only the faint echo of reflected possibilities shimmered with her movement—
Like the memory of a whisper in a forgotten cathedral.
Mother of Mirrors.
The title carried weight. Too much weight for one being.
And yet—she bore it with ease.
Her body wasn't flesh, but living glass, ever-shifting, ever-echoing.
Each ripple across her mirrored skin didn't show the world, but me.
All of me.
Every face I had worn. Every identity I had buried. Every emotion I had faked.
She was me.
And yet… she wasn't.
"System," I said. My voice cracked slightly, uncertain. "Why does she embody two pathways?"
According to the logic of this world, angels do not—cannot—hold dual pathways.
That privilege belonged only to those who had ascended…
To those who held a Sefirah Fragment.
To gods.
[DING: Clarifying Origin of Entity — Mirror Matriarch.]
✦ Mother of Mirrors is not a traditional angel.
✦ She is a manifested anomaly, a conceptual echo born of two colliding forces:
‣ The Fake Pathway — deception, illusion, identity control.
‣ The Heartbound Pathway — emotion, longing, soul resonance.
✦ Her birth stems from an ancient cult experiment, one that attempted to fuse the powers of heart and illusion—
To make love a lie.
To weaponize devotion itself.
I stilled. I remembered now.
That cult… it was erased from history.
Even I, the god of falsehood, only knew of it through a shattered journal I once glimpsed in the dream of a mad historian.
Their ritual was never completed.
✦ The ritual failed. The believers vanished.
✦ Their souls dissolved. Their temple fell beneath the sands.
✦ But something remained. A resonant fragment clung to a mirror, half-formed…
✦ Waiting to be found.
✦ Waiting for you.
I stepped toward her. She mirrored me perfectly. No delay. No distortion.
"You are not of this age," I whispered. "You weren't born. You were… remembered."
She did not reply. But the System spoke again.
[WARNING: Entity is not independently stable.]
Mother of Mirrors is tethered to the evolving Sefirah: The Mask of Reflection.
If host perishes or rejects the Sefirah, she will shatter.
She is a fragment, like a reflection on broken glass—held together only by your belief.
A rush of cold understanding slid down my spine.
She was not an angel by Sequence.
She was an echo, a mirrored concept pulled into existence by the very Sefirah that my foolish wish had created.
And now that I had believed in her—truly believed—she was real.
More than real.
"Then… she is a prophecy," I said.
She tilted her head, ever silent.
A single mirrored tear fell from the veil of her face, fracturing into dozens of glittering, ghostly masks before fading into the air.
Velkaris looked into her eyes and saw his future.
Not as a tyrant.
Not as a savior.
But as a god who had no true face—only reflections, bound by emotions too strong to stay hidden, too false to ever become true.
And she, this Mother of Mirrors, was the first reflection of what he would become.
"You are not a servant," I whispered.
"I see myself in you," she finally spoke, her voice a shiver through crystal.
"And I will make sure everyone else does too."
End of Chapter 32: Mirror Born of a Broken Truth