III
I didn't feel myself fall.
One moment I was standing at the edge of the prayer circle, watching the priests chant over the nearly dead woman, watching the mirror‑shadow lean forward like a starving thing… and the next, something inside me loosened. I made a quick leap towards the mirror to try and shield great aunt's soul from being taken, and the thing passed through the center of my torso. I felt a soft tug. A gentle unthreading. My knees buckled, but it didn't hurt. It didn't feel like fainting. It felt like stepping out of a coat I'd worn my whole life.
My body hit the floor a few feet behind the prayer circle. They were all facing my great aunt. I heard the thud, distant and dull, like it belonged to someone else. The priests didn't notice. They were too focused on the corpse, too desperate to keep her soul from slipping into the mirror's hungry glow. But I saw everything.
I saw my own body lying there, eyes half‑open, breath shallow, skin already paling. A coma. That's what it looked like. A clean, clinical shutdown. But I wasn't unconscious. It seemed like I was floating just above it, weightless, untethered, watching the room from a vantage point I shouldn't have.
And the shadow in the mirror saw me and grimaced. He pushed a second shadowy limb into the room, digging into my great aunt as he breathed her last, claiming her soul.
It straightened, its form sharpening into something unmistakably alien — tall, elongated, its surface shimmering like liquid chrome. Not a ghost. Not a demon. A collector. A scientist. A being that had learned how to slip through reflective surfaces and pluck consciousness from flesh like data from a drive.
It tilted its head, studying me with cold fascination. It had accidentally pulled the soul still tethered to a living body.
Behind it, the mirror pulsed. It formed a portal, a lab doorway, a threshold to whatever facility waited on the other side. I felt the pull again, stronger this time, like a magnet locking onto metal.
The dead woman's soul, or whatever was left of her, drifted toward the mirror, drawn like I was by shadowy limbs. She didn't struggle. She didn't scream. She simply slid forward, her body on the bed unmoving, her essence dissolving into the glass.
And then the alien reached for me, pulling me into the mirror. Not with hands — with gravity. With intention. With a force that wrapped around my disembodied self and began pulling me toward the mirror's surface.
My body lay limp on the floor, left behind but still visually breathing.
My soul was being harvested. The priest and the people in his circle had no idea, their eyes shut during prayer. As the chanting stopped all they would find was my body on the floor.