He had always been slightly wary of mirrors. As he pondered memories of before and after, of his undying existence and his human life, of Patience and of Paama, he remembered the mirror. It had been a terrible way to remind him of himself. When a beautiful, ageless, and strangely familiar woman appears in an adolescent boy’s mirror, he should be allowed some time to enjoy the experience before he starts screaming, but his childhood had been too mundane to prepare him for such unusual events. The screaming had begun almost instantly.

“Yao? Are you all right?”

At the sound of his mother’s voice, he choked on his breath. He meant to reply in the negative, but before he did, he beat the flat of his hand against the mirror in the hope that it would banish the ghost that had replaced his reflection. He stared at his hand, and the words choked deep down in his chest along with the rest of his breath. Like white blotting paper under a tipped-over ink bottle, his skin was turning blue.

“Yao?”

“I’m all right, Maa!” he answered loudly. Constancy, his occasional cat, jumped down from his bed, sat on the floor, and eyed him with amusement.

“Yao?” The actual sound of his name never changed, but something in the resonance of the tone spoke of power and danger. He responded to the challenge instinctively.

“Paama, I said I’m all right!”

In the shocked silence that followed, the face in the mirror gave him a very slight smile and disappeared. The cat rolled over, still keeping her eyes fixed on him, and gave the impression that she might be stretching or silently laughing very, very hard. The blue tint faded swiftly, or perhaps it simply went under, seeping into flesh and bone and marrow.

As the mind of the boy called Yao struggled with the awareness of the being known as Chance, one thought was clear: the hope that he would be allowed to forget what had just happened.

To give Patience credit, most days he did forget, a small but necessary precaution to preserve his human sanity. Other times, like this night, he found himself wandering, mind expanding and growing clearer, vision enriched to a broader spectrum, his very skin becoming an organ of all senses that sifted reality for information with each habitual and unnecessary inhalation. The world was no longer a smooth track but a gathering of perilous cracks in which a mind could lose itself playing hopscotch.

Not perilous to him.