The Mirror Shows Eight Maines

The invention room made Eveline talk.

Away from the public parts of the manor, she admitted how much Point Pringle was pressing on her. Faephine was back in the story. Family expectations had not disappeared. Faith, love, duty, school, and home all seemed to be pulling on the same thread.

Maine listened.

The conversation drifted toward gods, belief, and whether divine beings were truly something beyond people with extraordinary power. Eveline did not have an easy answer. Maine did not either. They had both seen enough to know the question mattered.

Then Eveline looked at the cracked mirror.

She explained that PP3 had made it differently for people altered by Warforged or Void technology. To her, the mirror showed something gentle: herself happy, able to smile even through the cracks. To others, it seemed to show stranger truths.

Maine sat before it.

The mirror split him into eight visible versions across its broken sections. In one, he saw himself in a lab cradling the arm of a fallen drow, steel fingertips glinting as that version said he had tried to be better but was alone. In another, he saw a quiet train scene: a version of himself with a human in a red suit, rain on the window, a hand on a shoulder, a feeling of love, then fire and muffled screams. In another, he saw a version of himself snarling in a shattered lab, void-black power pulsing from his throat.

Then the mirror broke.

Maine picked up a shard and kept it.

The room had stopped being a museum of obsolete inventions. It had become evidence. Maine was not only a person with replacements, memories, and missing answers. There were other versions of him, and at least some of them had already suffered endings he did not understand.