Mary holds the book in both hands and watches its cover fall open without her touching it. The pages are blank. All of them. She knows what they need from her — the same thing everything needs from a mirror. Not words or wishes, but proof that she exists. She presses her thumb against the book's edge until skin splits. One drop falls. Then another. The pages drink them in, and where her blood touches, lines begin to form. The lines stretch and curve, becoming a figure. A woman in white, face pale, red hair vivid against the drawn veil. Blood marks stain the drawn fabric. The image is crude but precise, like something carved rather than painted. Mary recognizes what she's looking at. A portrait of herself. Not as she sees herself, but as the book sees her. As something already claimed. She turns the page. The next one shows a pentagram drawn in black against white. Five points, perfect and stark. She's seen this before. Outside, in the snow behind the castle, where she stood three days ago and felt the cold through her boots. The book is showing her where she's been. What she's marked without meaning to. The charcoal lines in the snow weren't random. They were hers. Mary closes the book and feels its weight settle differently in her hands. Heavier now. The blank pages are gone. The book has her blood, her face, her footsteps. It knows what she is and what she wants. To show people what they hide from themselves, she needs to see what they truly are. The book will help her do that. It already has her reflection. Now it needs theirs.

Mary carries the book back through the mansion's corridors, feeling its weight shift with each step. It knows her now. Her blood, her face, her marks in the snow. But knowing her isn't enough. The book showed her what it could do with one reflection. Now she needs to see what happens when it gets another. Void is in the east wing, standing where the floorboards creak. Mary doesn't call out to him. She simply opens the book and holds it steady. The pages bleed again, but this time the blood isn't hers. Black ink spreads across the white like shadows pooling under moonlight. The portrait that forms is nothing like the one the book made of her. This one shows horns curving from a hooded figure, wings spread wide, eyes pale and hollow. The drawing is beautiful in the way sharp things are beautiful — precise enough to cut. Beneath the figure, tendrils twist and spiral across the page, spreading like roots seeking water. They move even after the ink settles, curling outward in patterns that make Mary's eyes ache if she looks too long. She tilts the book toward Void. He doesn't flinch. He looks at the portrait the way someone might look at their own name carved into stone. Recognition without surprise. The tendrils stop moving. The page goes still. Mary closes the book and feels the difference immediately. It's heavier now. Not from weight, but from what it holds. Two reflections instead of one. She wanted to see if the book could show what someone hides from themselves. It did more than that. It showed her what Void already knows he is — the truth he doesn't bother hiding because he's never tried to look away from it. That wasn't the test she meant to run, but it taught her something sharper. The book doesn't wound people by revealing secrets. It wounds them by drawing what they refuse to see. Void has nothing to refuse. Which means the next reflection she feeds it needs to come from someone who does.

The book grows heavier in Mary's arms as she walks. By the time she reaches the east wing's far door, it shudders against her ribs. Void follows a step behind. Neither of them speaks. The pages are pulling at something, and Mary can feel the pull in her own chest, like a hook set behind the bone. They end up in a stone chamber she has not seen before. An archway stands at its center, swirling with dark light, fragments of mirror set into its frame. Each shard shows a different sliver of them — her hand, his wing, her eye, his mouth. The book wants to be opened here. Mary knows it the way she knows her own reflection. She sets the book on a flat dark tablet near the arch. The tablet's surface catches starlight that isn't there. The pages flip themselves. Her portrait surfaces on the left. Void's surfaces on the right. Between them, lines begin to draw — thin black threads reaching from her image to his, from his to hers, knotting in the middle of the spine. Mary feels it then. Something she has not named, even to herself, lifts in her throat and tries to climb onto the page. She sees Void's jaw tighten. Whatever he refuses to want is being dragged up beside her secret. Across the chamber, a pale statue of two shadowed figures locked in an embrace begins to crack along its seams. The strain is not in the stone. The strain is in them. "Close it," Void says. His voice is quieter than usual. "Mary. Close it now." She slams the book shut. The threads snap. The statue settles with a long, low sound, fracture lines stopped halfway through. Mary lifts the book from the tablet and feels how it has changed — lighter by exactly what it almost took. She did not master it. She stopped it. That is not the same thing. Void does not look at her, and she does not look at him, and the space between them now has a shape it did not have before.