THE FRACTURE MIRROR
The marks burned deeper, burrowing under Raahi's skin as if they were not ink but wire — molten, molten, threading themselves through the veins with a deliberate cruelty.
He staggered back, breath catching on the hook of pain, but the scream that tore free was not wholly his.
It split.
Not in volume, not in strength — but in voice.
Midway through, the timbre climbed higher, catching on an edge of grief far older than his own. And before Raahi understood what was happening, he was hearing her.
Alira.
The sound was raw — the kind of cry that didn't belong in this century, that had been banished to dusty corners of history books and stillborn memories. It clawed its way into the sterile air of the chamber, scraping against the glass walls until the echoes became unbearable.
Only one surface seemed immune to the cacophony: the mirror.
It didn't simply reflect.
It multiplied.
One side showed him: Raahi — trembling, jaw tight, circuits sparking beneath the trembling layer of synthetic skin, pupils dilated to eclipse the whites. His scars glowed like smoldering circuitry, each line a map leading deeper into a body that was no longer wholly his.
The other side held her: Alira — a woman carved from centuries of resilience and ruin, wrapped in a sari that shivered in an unseen wind. The air around her was sepia-stained and dust-heavy, like an old film reel flickering. Yet even in agony, her back was straight, her eyes wet but unbroken.
They were not blending.
They were being pulled apart.
Like two halves of a photograph ripped down the middle, their edges fraying, the colors bleeding as if reality itself couldn't decide which belonged to which.
Raahi's hands flew forward, palms slamming against the glass — and on the other side, hers met his, so perfectly aligned it was impossible to believe the centuries between them.
The heat in his chest coiled tighter, until it was no longer heat but a weight — and then no longer a weight but a certainty.
I am her.
The thought was not spoken aloud at first. It was not even shaped in words. It was just true in the way that fire is true when it burns you.
When his voice finally broke the silence, it wasn't one voice at all — it was two, layered and imperfect, one male register and one female, threads of sound pulling against each other until they were indistinguishable.
"I am her," he whispered. His eyes lifted, fierce and wet.
"And I'm still in love with him."
The admission did not echo.
It detonated.
The chamber shuddered, the glass walls bowing inward as if the very air wanted to collapse into that truth. The mirror cracked — not shattered, but split clean down the middle, a seam of blinding light opening like a surgical cut.
From the fracture, two realities bled out.
On the left, the world tilted backward — into Alira's last day. Her fingers wrapped in ceremonial red thread, the scent of jasmine thick in the air. A ritual interrupted by steel and fire. Her scream. His name.
On the right, the present flared — Rasmika staggering forward, the scar along her collarbone igniting with the same molten light now crawling across Raahi's skin. Her eyes wide, her mouth forming a name she had not spoken in years.
The mirror did not decide between them. It refused.
And in that refusal, time itself seemed to buckle.
The air grew heavier — not metaphorically, but physically, as if the molecules themselves had been ordered to remember every moment they had ever been part of. The scent of burnt metal slid against the smell of sandalwood oil. The weight of silk tangled with the sterile hum of machinery.
Somewhere, in the seam between seconds, someone screamed.
It was neither Raahi nor Alira.
It was Aryan.
Or Ryan.
The name shifted depending on where you stood, the syllables bending under the gravity of the split. Raahi didn't know which was true — only that he was the axis everything was tearing itself apart around.
Pain lanced through him, but it wasn't pain in the way human bodies knew it. It was memory as sensation. The sound of wedding bells turned to warning sirens. The moment a hand slipped from another's grip — the sweat on the skin, the way the fingers tried, failed, to cling. The heartbeat that followed, louder than anything.
His body shook under the weight of it, his knees folding until he was kneeling before the mirror. Alira mirrored him perfectly, and for a moment they were so close he could see the flecks of gold in her irises, the tiny scar just beneath her lower lip.
She mouthed something.
He did too.
They were the same words.
They were his words.
They were hers.
And he knew with an ache that belonged to both lifetimes: love wasn't something that faded just because the body housing it had burned or been rebuilt.
It was the ghost.
It was what lingered.
The crack in the mirror pulsed, the light spilling from it now almost unbearable, and Raahi understood — with the kind of clarity that only comes once — that this was a choice. Not of whether he was Alira, but of which world he would let collapse.
The chamber's hum deepened, systems overloading, the glass beginning to warp as though the pressure might turn it liquid.
On the left: the past — where Alira stood in the shadow of the ritual pyre, waiting for a man who had already been taken from her.
On the right: the present — where Rasmika reached toward him, flame reflected in her tear-bright eyes.
The pain in his chest was no longer molten.
It was an emptiness so deep it threatened to eat the light itself.
Raahi raised his head. The air between the two halves of the mirror shimmered, and for a heartbeat, all three timelines touched: the moment of the ritual, the sterile now of the chamber, the dark unknown beyond.
His voice broke the space in two.
"I will not lose him twice."
The choice was made before the words finished leaving his mouth.
The seam in the mirror burst wide, light flooding the chamber, wrapping itself around Raahi's body like a second skin. He reached forward — not to the left, not to the right, but through, where the two halves blurred into a singular, impossible point.
His hand met hers.
And the glass was gone.
The scream that followed was not pain, but the sound of two lifetimes colliding. It reverberated in the bones of the chamber, in the memory of the air, in the shadowed corridors of history where love stories go to wait for their endings.
When the light faded, the mirror was whole again.
But the reflection was not Raahi.
It was not Alira.
It was both.
And in the ghost of their shared eyes, the reader — if they had been there — would have felt the thing that haunts forever:
That love is not bound to flesh or time.
It burns, even in the dark.
It remembers, even when you forget.
And it will wait — centuries if it must — to be claimed.