The two bands of light, formed from pure life energy, connected Dawn and Mirror with the precision of living vines.
There was no warmth. No healing.
It was a deeper, more primal touch.
The altered "memories" of his sister betraying him remained vivid in Dawn's mind, and the anger of being deceived still burned in his chest.
But he felt something new.
A resonance he could not describe, yet knew was real.
It came from his heart, his blood, every dividing cell in his body.
He could "feel" the girl he resented at the other end of the connection. Her heart beat like his. Their pulses shared the same rhythm.
The feeling had nothing to do with memory or emotion.
It was like a physical law: cold, objective, undeniable.
Mirror's body trembled slightly too.
The hurt in her eyes remained, and the implanted "echoes" of her brother looking down on her still tormented her.
But the green band of light let her sense him clearly.
Not through sight. Not through sound.
It was a kind of... handshake in their blood.
That connection ran deeper than any memory, beneath any emotion.
It told her that no matter what had been stuffed into her mind, she and the young man before her were two copies of the same blueprint at the most fundamental level of life.
The standoff between them had not ended, but its nature had changed completely.
They were no longer two relatives turned against each other.
They were a system forcibly loaded with faulty instructions, now clashing violently with its own most fundamental hardware protocols.
"How...?"
On the throne, the God of Forgetting's body, which had only just grown a little more solid, began to turn insubstantial again.
The Bond Severance he fed upon was being forcibly "welded" back