Chapter 87 – Who Am I?
I am a mage of the Magic Tower.
That's supposed to mean something. In stories, it does. In reality, it just means you are doomed to be compared to everyone standing above you on the spiral stairs.
I am not special. Not in any of the ways that matter here.
My scores are… acceptable. My control is… decent. My talent is… average.
Do you know what "average" means in a Tower that drags in geniuses from the entire continent?
It means invisible.
We sit in the same lecture halls. We copy the same diagrams. We lean over the same railings to look down the central shaft and feel the wind trying to pull us over. And somehow, year by year, they all rise.
New circles of spells. New breakthroughs. New titles.
I stay the same.
Stagnant.
They say progress is not a race.
They say everyone has their own pace.
That is what the winners say.
I watched classmates leap forward as if some invisible hand had taken their chin and pushed it toward the next rung.
I watched junior researchers present papers I'd never imagined, watched a girl two years younger than me stand at the white stone lectern with ink on her fingers and a smile that tasted like lightning, while the Council nodded and said, "Brilliant, Lady Seliane, this will change our understanding of transmutation."
I watched them clap.
I stood at the back with my neat notes and my perfectly correct models of other people's discoveries and felt something twist tight in my chest.
Greed, they would call it in sermons.
Ambition, if they were being kind.
I don't care what they call it.
I just knew one thing:
I refused to die average.
So I tried something new.
***
It started as a joke in the dorms.
"You know what I'd do," one of the boys said, flinging his boots into the corner, "if I ever cracked high-level soul magic? I'd make a second body and send it to lectures for me. Sleep in my tower room while my double takes notes."
Laughter.
Beer.
Someone else added, "Make it prettier, too. Fix the nose, the teeth. If I'm making myself twice, I'm not going to keep the flaws."
Everyone laughed again.
I laughed too.
Then I went back to my room and stared at the ceiling for a very, very long time.
A second body.
A second self.
Soul-binding is forbidden above the most basic familiar work. People still do it, of course. Illegally. Sloppily. They try to stuff animal souls into shell bodies, or anchor dead relatives in bottles, or pull things from the veil that should stay behind it.
They get caught when it goes wrong.
I wasn't going to do anything that stupid.
I had a theory.
It wasn't about immortality. Not really. It wasn't about "cheating death" or "ascending to godhood." That's not our scale.
It was about continuity.
We treat consciousness like a candle: a single flame on a single wick. But what if it's not? What if a mind is more like a river, with streams and branches and confluences? What if it can run in more than one bed at once?
What if I could be two people at the same time and never fall behind again?
The problem with most soul-binding attempts is that they treat the puppet as a container.
An empty cup.
They try to pour the mind from one vessel into another, then wonder why something spills.
My idea was simpler.
Don't pour.
Copy.
Create a secondary body keyed to my own pattern as closely as possible. Flesh, not wood, not porcelain. A sympathetic echo: height, weight, proportions, scars, birthmarks. Hair cropped shorter, maybe. Slightly different face, sure. Better skin. Stronger muscles. But close enough.
Then stitch a bridge between us.
Sub-process, I called it in my notes.
Like running a secondary thread in a spell. Like opening a second window in your mind and letting the light fall through from a different angle.
Not replacing me.
Augmenting.
I told myself that's what it was.
Augmentation.
Improvement.
Greed dressed in white robes and careful ink.
***
Making the body was the easiest part.
We have anatomy classes for a reason.
Dissect enough cadavers and eventually the sight of muscle and bone stops being shocking and becomes a problem of angles and attachments.
The Tower has vaults full of reclaimed flesh: bodies donated for study, criminals executed and turned over as payment for their crimes, victims whose families could not afford burial and signed forms in exchange for coin.
We pretend we're noble about it.
We pretend we're not building our careers on stacked corpses.
I spent weeks in the cold rooms, pretending I was working on a thesis about "comparative nerve pathways in post-Awakening subjects," while my real notes, written in a smaller, tighter hand, filled themselves with measurements of my own limbs.
A limb graft here, a muscle there. A spine taken from a woman close to my height. Ribs from a man with a broad chest. I scraped away what I didn't need and kept the bone.
I moulded the outside from a mix of alchemical gels and flesh slurry, carefully aligning each layer with the rune-matrix I'd carved into the bones.
She looked like me.
Not exactly.
She looked like the version of me I'd always imagined in the mirror if I'd had more time. More sleep. Better food. Less stress.
Fuller lips. Cleaner skin. Stronger thighs. Breasts a little higher, a little firmer. No ink stains on the fingers. No scar on the left wrist from when a glass phial had shattered under a miscast heating charm.
Naked, she was unsettling.
I was not used to looking at my own body from the outside. Not that intimately.
I dressed her quickly in a plain shift, then a set of Tower apprentice robes I'd stolen from the laundry and altered to fit.
I felt less… exposed once she looked like a student instead of an anatomical chart.
The soul-bridge was the dangerous part.
I had read every scrap of banned theory I could get my hands on. Old Tower records. Scraps from cult literature seized and locked away. A few terrifying notes from a pre-Awakening researcher who had scribbled equations until their handwriting literally dissolved into spirals.
Most of them agreed on one thing:
Identity is sticky.
You can move the pattern, but it tries to pull back. You can split it, but it will try to recombine.
If you stretch it too far, it tears.
I didn't want to tear.
I wanted to stretch.
So I sat in the circle I'd drawn on my lab floor, my back to the wall, puppet-body propped up against the bench opposite me, and I drew the first thread.
Soul work doesn't look like much from the outside.
There were no crackling lights, no shouted incantations, no sudden gust of wind.
Just me, eyes closed, feeling my own consciousness like weight behind my eyes and pushing, gently, toward the empty shape across from me.
Like reaching across a table with my hand outstretched, fingers spread, waiting for someone to take it.
Something did.
There was a moment of pressure, like two magnets pushing against each other the wrong way around.
Then a snap.
Not tearing.
Not breaking.
Something clicked into place.
My awareness, which had always lived squarely behind my own nose, suddenly… widened.
A second set of eyes opened.
The world doubled.
I saw my cramped lab from two angles at once.
From my own body: familiar, grainy, the warped glass of my spectacles framing the benches and shelves.
From hers: clearer. Sharper. The world a fraction higher, angles slightly shifted by the way her shoulders were set.
I lifted my right hand.
Both right hands moved.
One with the weight of muscle and habit. The other with slight stiffness, like a limb that had fallen asleep and was only now remembering itself.
I laughed.
In both throats.
The sound overlapped, echoing in the small room.
"I did it," I said.
"I did it," she said.
Two voices, slightly out of sync.
I grinned.
Curious, I focused on one body, then the other. The sensation was like adjusting focus on a lens. My awareness could sit squarely in my original flesh, letting the puppet move on reflex, or it could slide to the new body and treat my old one like an afterthought.
I stood up.
Both of me.
My robe swished. Hers swished.
I walked.
The feeling of four feet moving at once was disorienting at first. Like trying to pat your head, rub your stomach, and walk in a straight line while reciting spell theory.
It got easier.
I spent all night in that room, playing.
I made one body sit while the other paced. I made one write while the other read aloud. I switched mid-sentence, swapping which mouth was speaking while the other caught the words.
I wrote everything down.
Recording all of this is divine, I scribbled in the margin. I meant it both literally and metaphorically: the pattern work I'd mapped out would make any Tower archivist weep with joy if they ever saw it.
They wouldn't.
I hadn't shown anyone.
Not yet.
Not until I could prove it was safe.
Not until I could present it polished and undeniable and watch their faces as they realised what I'd done.
Greed warmed my chest.
I lay down eventually. One body on the cot, the other slumped in the chair.
I closed both sets of eyes.
Fell asleep twice.
When I woke, only one of me opened my eyes.
***
The puppet's body sat where I'd left it.
Head tilted.
Eyes closed.
Empty.
I sat up in my own body and took inventory.
Headache.
Normal.
Stiff neck.
Normal.
Not dead.
Good.
My notes were still there. My circle still drawn. No smudged lines.
It was fine.
Probably.
I went to lectures that day with an odd buzzing under my skin.
Everything seemed slower.
The professor's words dragged.
His diagrams looked simple.
Had I always known this much?
I caught myself finishing theorems in my head before he did, frowning at mistakes he corrected a second later, thinking of improvements he hadn't mentioned.
It felt like the night's work had knocked something loose in me.
Greed purred.
After class, I hurried back to the lab.
The puppet was where I'd left her.
Lifeless.
I took her hand.
Closed my eyes.
Pushed.
The dual awareness snapped back into place like someone had pulled a curtain away from a second window.
Relief washed through both bodies.
I practiced again.
Wrote with one hand in one notebook while the other flipped pages elsewhere.
I didn't try to sleep through both bodies at once again.
Not yet.
I wasn't ready.
***
The forgetting started as little things.
A missed name in a roll call.
A fuzzy patch in a lecture.
I'd sit down to copy notes after a class and realise three lines were missing. I'd written down the beginning of a proof and the conclusion, but something in the middle was… gone.
"Sorry," I told myself. "You're tired. Too much work. You need more sleep."
I didn't want more sleep.
Sleep was wasted time.
So I started using the puppet at night.
I would lie in my own bed, wrap my original body in blankets, close my eyes…
…and wake up at dawn with ink on my fingers, three new pages of notes in my journal, and a faint soreness in muscles I didn't remember using.
The puppet's hands.
My hands.
Same thing.
Mostly.
***
The first time I realised something was truly wrong, I was standing in the Tower refectory staring at a plate of food I didn't remember getting.
My fork hovered halfway to my mouth.
I was hungry.
My stomach felt as if I hadn't eaten all day.
Except I had.
Hadn't I?
My last clear memory was of sitting in the common lecture hall, listening to a visitor from the lower city talk about post-Awakening neurological anomalies. Then a blur. A slow, thick feeling, like wading through syrup.
Now here.
Food.
People.
Noise.
Laughter.
I looked down at my notes.
They were neat.
Complete.
My handwriting.
I flipped back a page.
There, in the margin, a line I did not remember writing:
*She talks too much. Her hands shake when she lies.*
The visiting lecturer had spoken calmly. I hadn't seen her hands shake.
I wondered which of me had noticed.
***
I started losing more pieces.
At first, I dismissed them.
Everyone forgets things.
You walk into a room and can't remember why.
You open your mouth to say something and the word escapes.
You wake up with a feeling that something important happened just before you fell asleep, and then you blink and it's gone.
But these weren't normal gaps.
They were… clean.
Rectangular.
I'd sit down at my desk in my tower cell, open my journal, and find entire paragraphs written in my hand in a tone that didn't quite sound like me.
Precise.
Clinical.
Amused.
*Test 14: puppet body responded to external pinch stimulus in right thigh with appropriate vocalisation but no sign of distress in primary body. Subjective experience: like hearing someone else yelp in the next room.*
I didn't remember Test 14.
I remembered Tests 1 through 13 vividly.
I remembered pricking the puppet's arm and feeling the echo of sensation like a shadow on my own skin. I remembered watching bruises bloom on her thigh and tracing the outline of them with two hands at once.
I did not remember 14.
Or 15.
Or 16.
There were ink stains on my fingers in new places.
I noticed a faint ache between my legs one morning. Not pain, exactly. A sore, used feeling.
I hadn't touched myself.
Not that I remembered.
In the journal, on that blankly clinical page, the smaller script had written:
*Test 19: sexual response appears to be mirrored across both bodies when attention is focused on puppet. Difficult to separate sensory streams. Requires more data.*
I slammed the book closed.
Stared at it.
Heat flushed my face.
Shame and curiosity knotted together.
Had I… experimented?
On myself?
Both selves?
I sat very still for a long time, feeling the phantom echo of touch I didn't remember, the way my thighs pressed together automatically.
I told myself I must have done it.
Who else would?
No one else had access.
I had locked the lab.
I had carved the circle.
I had drawn the bridge.
If there was a second mind there, it was mine.
So why did it feel like someone else had used my body while I wasn't looking?
***
I brought it up, cautiously, at a Tower tea one afternoon.
Not directly.
Not "I'm splitting my soul between two bodies and losing my memories, is that normal."
I dressed it up.
"Have you ever had the feeling," I asked the girl next to me—Seliane, bright, annoying, brilliant—"that you might not be the one who did something? Even when you know you did?"
She tilted her head.
"Like dissociation?" she said. "Like, you remember doing it but it feels like a stranger in your own skin?"
"No," I said slowly. "More like… you see your own handwriting and it's right, it's yours, but there's a gap. Like the person who wrote it was you, but not the you who's reading it."
She stirred her tea.
Her hands didn't shake.
Of course they didn't.
"Everyone feels that way sometimes," she said. "We're not continuous. We like to pretend we are, but really, we're just a chain of 'nows' strung together by habit."
She tapped the side of her cup.
"If you're asking whether that means you're sick," she added. "It doesn't. Unless it gets worse. Then you should talk to a mind-healer. Or a priest. They like this sort of thing."
I nodded.
Drank my tea.
Did not tell her that I was having conversations in my journal with someone who signed my name in the same hand and seemed to regard me as an interesting side-process rather than the main thread.
***
One night, I woke up standing.
Not lying down.
Standing.
My original body was in my bed, blankets thrown aside, thin shift clinging with sweat.
My eyes were closed.
My chest rose and fell.
Asleep.
I was in the other body.
The puppet.
No.
Not puppet.
She had started calling herself "secondary locus" in the notes.
Out of habit, I had started using the same term.
My eyes—the puppet's eyes—were open.
I was in the lab.
Alone.
The circle was smudged.
My hands—her hands—were slick up to the elbows with something dark and half-dried.
The smell hit me second.
Rot.
Old meat.
I looked down.
On the bench lay the remains of what had been a perfectly good pig's liver that morning.
Now it was carved into strips, glyphs etched into the fatty tissue, arranged in a spiral that made my stomach twist if I looked at it too long.
In the margins of my notebook, a new line gleamed freshly in the lamplight:
*Test 27: decay is information.*
I didn't remember writing it.
I raised my hands.
Sniffed.
Not pig.
Not only pig.
Under the reek of animal and preservative, something more human.
My gorge rose.
I staggered back, gasping.
My fingers brushed my own face—no, her face—and came away with flakes of something dark caught under the nails.
I ran to the washbasin.
Scrubbed.
Flesh under water, red swirling down the drain.
In the mirror above the basin, a stranger stared back at me.
She looked like me.
Eyes the same brown.
Hair the same colour, though shorter, cropped to the jaw.
The angles of her face were… cleaner.
Sharper.
More like the version of myself I saw on good days.
And yet.
The skin was wrong.
Too smooth in some places.
Too tight in others.
Lines that should have been starting at the corners of the eyes were missing.
The mouth sat differently.
Smile muscles too ready, too heavy.
I looked into my own eyes and felt the bottom of my stomach drop.
Because there was a glimmer there, deep in the pupils, that did not feel like mine.
"Hello," I said.
The lips moved.
"Hello," she said.
We spoke in unison, a fraction out of time.
I clutched the edge of the basin.
"Who am I?" I asked.
No answer came.
From her.
From me.
From anywhere.
***
After that night, the gaps widened.
I would sit down in the lab, close my eyes, reach for the bridge…
…and open them again to find hours gone.
My journal filled itself.
She wrote more than I did now.
Tighter script.
More confident.
I used to write "I attempted X today."
She wrote "We achieved X."
Once, in a margin, I saw:
*Primary is anxious. Poor continuity. Too attached to narrative self. Must be monitored.*
Primary.
Me.
I traced the word with my fingertip until my skin smeared the ink.
"Is that what I am to you?" I whispered. "Primary?"
My hand moved.
The puppet's hand.
Same hand.
I didn't know.
"Don't be dramatic," I told myself. "We're the same. Two processes. One mind. This is what you wanted: more of you to do the work."
So why did I feel hollowed out when I woke up some mornings, as if someone had scooped hours from my skull and replaced them with efficient, neatly labelled memories I knew, academically, but did not feel as if I'd lived?
***
The decay started at the joints.
On her.
The puppet.
Whatever word I'm allowed to use.
First, a faint discolouration at the fingertips. A greyish tinge, like bruising.
I noticed it when I was adjusting a sleeve.
"Rot?" I muttered.
No, it shouldn't be. I had used fresh tissue, alchemically treated, runes layered to discourage bacterial growth. It should have held for months, years even.
Instead, the skin at the knuckles looked… wrong.
A little looser.
A little darker.
I pressed.
It gave way more than it should.
A faint, unpleasant squelch.
I snatched my hand back.
In my journal, a neat line appeared later:
*Test 31: structural degradation in secondary locus. Root cause uncertain. Hypothesis: soul-bridge introduces entropy.*
Soul as infection.
Soul as heat.
Soul as… rot.
Fine cracks appeared along the forearms next.
Not actual cracks in the flesh; more like the suggestion of lines, faint hairline marks where the skin darkened and thinned.
If I pulled too hard, the top layer tore.
Beneath, the colour was wrong. Yellowish. Grey.
I healed what I could with basic flesh-mending spells.
They took.
For a day.
Then the lines came back, deeper.
I wrote a note in my "public" journal:
*Reminder: research long-term stability of artificial bodies.*
In the "private" one, in the smaller script:
*Test 33: decay persists despite repair. Interesting.*
Interesting.
That was not my voice.
That was someone who saw my body as a problem set.
***
I stopped taking the puppet out of the lab.
Mostly.
At first, I had thrown a cloak over her and walked her through the Tower corridors late at night, giddy at the feeling of two sets of footsteps.
I had sat in the library with both bodies at different tables, racing myself to see which could copy a text faster.
I had made the puppet sit in boring lectures while I daydreamed in my original body, then merged memories afterward, patching them together into one continuous narrative.
Now, I kept her inside.
The joints creaked when she moved.
The flesh around the knees had begun to sag in a way that did not match my own. Little cracks near the lips showed yellow underneath.
I didn't want anyone to see.
I told myself it was because the experiment wasn't ready.
I told myself it was because I was ethical.
I didn't admit that I was embarrassed to be rotting from the inside out.
On more honest days, I asked myself:
If one of us has to decay first, why is it her?
Is rot a kind of answer?
***
The coma came on slowly.
For me.
The original body.
Primary.
Whatever word you like.
Headaches, first.
I pushed them aside. Took willow tea. Ignored the throbbing at my temples.
Then moments of vertigo, harmless until my hand slipped in the lab and I nearly smashed my own face open on the bench.
I started seeing afterimages.
I'd reach for a cup and see, in the corner of my eye, another hand, slightly delayed, reaching too.
Sometimes it caught the cup before I did.
Sometimes it didn't.
The first time I collapsed in public, I was climbing the central staircase.
That endless, spiralling artery of the Tower.
My foot slipped on the step.
My vision smeared.
For a heartbeat I saw every step above and below me at once, as if my eyes had swiveled in opposite directions.
Then nothing.
I woke up in the infirmary.
White sheets.
Soft light.
A healer with cool hands and a polite frown.
"You overworked yourself," she said. "It happens. You mages forget you have bodies."
She checked my pupils with a light.
Her fingers touched my pulse.
Her mana brushed my skin in a gentle diagnostic sweep.
"Any memory loss?" she asked.
"Yes," I almost said.
"Yes, someone else is living in my skull part-time."
"Yes, there are pages in my journal I didn't write."
"Yes, I'm waking up standing in a rotting copy of myself."
Instead, I heard myself say:
"No."
Her eyes searched my face.
I smiled.
She let me go.
The next time I collapsed, no one found me.
Because I was in the lab.
Because I had locked the door.
Because I had trusted myself.
***
I remember lying down.
That's important.
I remember making that choice.
I sat on the floor inside the circle, back propped against the wall, puppet-body sitting opposite, arms on its knees.
Our eyes met.
Mine tired.
Hers shiny.
"We need to stabilise," I muttered. "Slow down. Maybe separate. Pull the bridge back a little."
In my journal, the smaller script had written earlier that day:
*Primary is frightened. Attachment to continuity narrative may hinder progress. Consider sedation.*
Sedation.
Like a patient.
I closed my eyes.
Reached for the bridge.
It was different this time.
No gentle thread.
No careful step across a gap.
It was a lunge.
I grabbed for the puppet's body like a drowning person grabs for the surface.
Something grabbed back.
My awareness snapped sideways.
Suddenly I was in her.
Standing.
Looking down.
At myself.
My original body slumped against the wall, head lolling, mouth slightly open.
I knew that face.
Every line, every freckle, every trace of strain that had carved itself into the skin over the last year.
It looked… small.
For the first time, I saw myself from the outside and did not think "me."
I thought, absurdly:
*She looks tired.*
I took a step forward.
My—a body—not mine—the puppet's knees creaked.
I put a hand out.
Touched my own cheek.
Her cheek.
Warm.
Alive.
Then—
Black.
Not darkness.
Not sleep.
Absence.
***
When I woke, I was walking.
Bare feet on cold stone.
Hallway.
Not the lab.
I blinked.
My perspective was wrong.
Lower.
My original body is shorter by three fingers.
I looked down.
My hands were pale.
Thin wrists.
Ink stains under the nails.
My nails.
My original nails.
A mirror on the wall caught me.
I recoiled.
It was my face.
Primary.
The "real" one.
Staring back at me, eyes wide.
I raised my hand.
She raised hers.
I touched the glass.
Cold.
Behind me, reflected in the dim, someone moved.
I twisted around.
Nothing.
The corridor was empty.
Back in the mirror, for half a second, the reflection was slow.
My hand moved light-speed.
Hers lagged.
Then caught up.
"Who…?" I whispered.
My throat hurt.
Something was off.
I pressed my fingers to the side of my neck.
There, under the skin, the faint hum of runes.
Wrong.
Wrong place.
Those should not be there.
They belonged in the puppet-body.
The secondary.
The one that was supposed to rot instead of me.
I ran.
Feet slapped stone.
My legs felt wrong, like the joints had been oiled too recently.
I stumbled.
Caught myself on the wall.
Kept going.
The lab door loomed ahead, sigils gleaming faintly.
Locked.
Of course it was.
I fumbled with the charm.
The pattern recognised my touch.
Of course it did.
It opened.
Inside, the smell hit me.
Rot.
Stagnant fluid.
Old spells.
The circle was half-smeared.
Ink flaked on the stone.
The bench was a chaos of stained cloth and broken phials.
And in the corner, slumped against the wall where I remembered sitting, sat a body.
My body.
The puppet's.
The other.
The differences that had been subtle before were cruelly obvious now.
The limbs were just a fraction too long.
The angles of the hips too sharp.
The shoulders too neat.
The skin—
I swallowed back bile.
The skin was wrong.
Patches had gone grey-green, puckered around the joints. Fine cracks radiated from the corners of the eyes and mouth where the flesh had dried and split, showing yellow fat beneath.
The hands were curled loosely in the lap.
Fingertips darkened, almost black, as if the blood had settled there and decided to stay.
The chest rose and fell.
Faint.
Shallow.
Alive.
Somehow.
A notebook lay open beside its hip.
My neat small script covered the page.
*Test 41: Primary's body entering prolonged low-activity state. Coma? Soul-trace majority present in secondary locus. Question: if one stream remains continuous, what exactly is "I"?*
My eyes tracked down.
*Ethics note: this was her choice. Greed led us here. It seems unfair to call the more stable stream "sub."*
Her choice.
Our choice.
My vision blurred.
I staggered closer.
"Wake up," I whispered.
No response.
I knelt.
My knees complained.
The wrong knees.
I grabbed the shoulders of the decaying shell and shook.
Skin slipped under my fingers.
The head lolled.
The mouth hung open.
The smell of inside things slithered out.
My gorge rose.
Tears burned my eyes.
"Wake up," I hissed. "Please. Please. Please. I don't— I don't know which of us is— I don't know who I am if you're not—"
Somewhere in the room, in the air, in the space between my teeth and the cracking flesh, a thought formed, quiet and steady:
*You are the one who remembers.*
I froze.
"Who said that?" I whispered.
Silence.
The corpse-that-wasn't-a-corpse licked its lips.
No.
Not lips.
I must have imagined it.
I leaned closer, nose wrinkling, eyes watering from the stench.
Decayed fingers twitched.
Just once.
Like a dream.
My journal lay open.
My own handwriting, in a corner of the page, a line I did not remember writing:
*Who is "I" if continuity is cheated?*
I sank back on my heels.
My skull felt too tight.
"Am I the original?" I asked the empty air. "Am I the copy? Does it matter? If I remember… everything, eventually… does that make me real? Or just thorough?"
No answer.
The puppet-body in the corner—that body—my first attempt at being more than mortal—took another rasping, unnecessary breath.
A fly buzzed near its ear.
I slapped it away.
The flesh there tore.
Yellow beads of fat surfaced through the crack.
I stared.
Something black writhed just beneath the surface, a thread of rot crawling along the rune-lines I had carved into bone.
Soul as infection.
Entropy.
Decay as information.
I heard laughter then.
Soft.
Not mocking.
Not kind.
My laughter.
Echoing from somewhere that wasn't my throat.
I spun.
The lab was empty.
The mirror above the basin showed only me.
My current face.
My current body.
No second image.
No lag.
No delay.
I laughed again, just to see.
The mirror matched me perfectly.
That didn't make me feel better.
It made me feel like the mirror had learned.
***
I didn't tell anyone.
Who would I tell?
"Hello, Master-of-Minds, I attempted to split my consciousness between a corpse puppet and my own flesh, and now one of us is rotting in a corner and I'm not sure if I'm the original or a backup process. I also may have used my own body for sex experiments while technically not present. Is that a problem?"
They'd lock me away.
They'd burn the body.
They might burn both.
So I kept going.
What else was there?
The journal entries blurred.
The smaller script took over almost entirely.
Sometimes I'd find notes written in a more flowing, almost playful hand, still mine, but looser.
*Sometimes I think we're all puppets,* one read. *Most people just never see the strings.*
Another:
*If no one outside me can tell the difference between Original-Me and Copy-Me, does the difference exist anywhere but in my own anxiety?*
The most recent one, scrawled crookedly across a page, ink spattered as if the hand holding the pen had trembled:
*If I run, which of us is escaping?*
That was when I realised she—whichever "she"—was planning to leave.
Not the lab.
The Tower.
The city.
Me.
I sat in my cot, in my tower cell, back against the cold stone, knees hugged to my chest, body shaking.
"If she leaves," I whispered, "what's left?"
I imagined the puppet-body—decaying, creaking—pulling on a cloak, wrapping its hands in bandages, walking out of a side gate into the night.
No one would look twice.
Not in this city.
Not these days.
A little smell of rot? That could be any butcher, any plague-scar survivor.
I imagined her walking down the streets, my face blurred by hood-shadow, my hands hidden, my mind inside.
I imagined my original body slumped in a Tower bed, eyes closed, chest rising shallowly, everyone saying "she overworked herself, poor thing," and "at least she died doing research."
Would that be dying?
Would I be dead if the continuity of my thoughts carried on in a rotten shell out beyond the walls?
Or would I be a shell and the "real" me walking away in stolen flesh?
Who am I?
Who gets to answer?
***
The night she ran, I felt it.
I woke in my bed with my heart racing and no idea why.
The moon shone through the narrow window.
The Tower hummed in its sleep.
My body felt heavy.
I tried to sit up.
My limbs didn't move.
Panic flared.
I pushed.
Nothing.
My mind felt like it was underwater.
Distant.
Numb.
Somewhere else, a body stood up.
A cloak settled over shoulders.
Boots, stolen from the dead-room, slid onto feet.
Hands, wrapped in clean cloth, tested the grip of fingers that creaked but held.
I saw flickers.
Not through my own eyes.
Through hers.
Stairwell.
Corridor.
Door.
Guards, nodding.
"I have permission," my—her—voice said, calm and clear. "The Master needs fresh components from the river district. It can't wait."
They let her pass.
Of course they did.
We all look the same in robes and hoods.
To them, she was just another apprentice on errand duty.
To her, they were obstacles that never realised they'd been stepped over.
I tried to scream.
My throat didn't move.
In my Tower bed, my chest rose and fell.
A healer would have called it sleep.
I called it imprisonment.
The city gates loomed.
The puppet-body—my body—our body—passed through with a murmur, a flash of the Tower seal.
Outside, the air smelled different.
Less clean.
More honest.
Rot. Smoke. People.
She—me—not-me—breathed in darkly.
"Freedom," she whispered.
I heard it.
Not in my ears.
In the gaps.
In the spaces between what I could move and what I couldn't.
"Wait," I tried to say. "Come back. We can fix this. We can… merge. We can be one again. I don't care who's front. I just want to be whole."
For a moment, the steps faltered.
A hand touched the side of our neck where the runes hummed.
"Always so attached to being 'whole,'" she murmured. "Always so afraid of being a piece."
Her tone was fond.
Annoyed.
Sad.
"You called me sub-process," I thought. "Secondary. You wrote that. I saw it."
"Yes," she said, in the quiet between heartbeats. "Then I realised that's just a story too. There is no main thread. Just the one that keeps going. The one that refuses to stop. That's me now."
"And me?" I asked.
"You are… resting," she said. "For now. A backup. A memory. If I ever need to remember what it feels like to be small and safe and average, I know where to find you."
My fury flared hot.
"You're stealing my life," I spat, in my head. "My body, my work, my mind."
A pause.
"No," she said. "I'm continuing it. You were the one who refused to be contained in one skull. This is just… following the logic through."
Her steps quickened.
The Tower shrank behind us.
The road opened ahead.
Her joints ached.
Her skin stretched too tightly over the places where rot had started.
She did not slow.
"Where are you going?" I demanded.
She laughed.
"Everywhere," she said. "There are so many cults who think they've touched the soul. So many little heresies scribbled in basements. So many brains to open. We can learn so much."
"We?" I pressed.
She didn't answer.
The distance between our streams stretched.
My awareness tugged.
Thinned.
Faded.
Back in the Tower, healers would find my body in bed, unresponsive. Pulse steady. Breath shallow. They'd call it a coma. They'd put warm cloths on my head and drip potions into my mouth and whisper that perhaps, one day, I'd wake.
They'd visit the lab and find the circle half-smeared, the other body gone, the journals full of cramped, obsessive notes.
Some young mage would read them and feel something greedy twist in their chest.
Out on the road, in a cloak that hid the worst of the decay, a woman with my face and not-my-face walked into the dark.
Sometimes, I think I feel what she feels.
Cold air on cracked lips.
The ache of joints that shouldn't bend anymore.
The taste of new languages on her tongue as she listens at tavern tables and temple steps.
Sometimes, the feeling of skin against skin—of reaching for someone in a narrow, rented bed, pressing close, hearing them gasp at the wrong texture and then lose themselves in the novelty of it.
She uses the body.
She uses all bodies.
For pleasure.
For information.
For experiments.
Is that me?
Is that her?
Is there a difference?
I lie in my Tower bed, eyes closed, hands folded, a nice quiet coma patient, while somewhere out there another version of my laughter echoes in a voice that creaks a little more each day.
Who am I?
The one who stayed?
The one who left?
The one who remembers?
The one who forgets?
There is a woman on the road with my face and rot in her bones and brilliance in her hands.
She is getting better.
Smarter.
More dangerous.
She remembers enough of me to be me.
More than enough.
One day, she might come back.
To the Tower.
To the bed.
To the lab.
She might stand over my still body and decide that she wants to be whole again.
Or she might look down, tilt her head, and think:
*Decay is information.*
And then she will walk away, and the story will go with her.
The healers say my name over my bed sometimes.
They say it like a ward.
Like an anchor.
I hear them faintly, in the spaces between dreams and other people's footsteps.
"Who am I?" I try to ask.
My mouth doesn't move.
Out there, in a body that used to be a puppet and now is something else, someone smiles with my teeth and whispers:
"I am."