Shade stood there blankly, staring at the water's surface, while that beautiful human head had already pressed itself fully against his back. Countless dripping hands seized his Destiny Ring, stopping it from turning, while leg after leg bound his body.
It gradually wrapped around him, its mouth whispering by Shade's right ear:
"People call me Desire, but you are the one who truly is—"
It drew even closer to Shade, wanting to truly lie upon his back and speak intimately against his ear.
But by chance, following Shade's gaze toward the pool, it saw something. The silver-haired woman in the mirror was still blurry to Shade, but the thing lying on his back and calling itself Desire saw the silver-haired woman in the mirror looking directly outward.
It could not see the silver-haired woman's face clearly either, but those eyes—
Shade could not hear anything, but it could. Those silver eyes gazed beyond the mirror, beyond the water's surface, at the human head behind Shade:
Only I may speak from that position.
An ancient language, bearing the weight of true ages. It was as though a wind from the distant past had blown into the present. That archaic grammar, traversing several epochs, made the woman's head recall the past in the long-unheard language of the Ancient One—a past so distant that even relics had long since worn away.
It froze.
Shade, meanwhile, suddenly frowned. Then he turned to look behind him, staring into the head's eyes from up close.
"Wait. You said I'm a man, and that I'm from the Sixth Epoch?"
"What?"
The head saw in Shade's eyes the gleam of intelligence that signified normal thought.
"Of course I'm a man. But the Old God told me that, strictly speaking, this is no longer the Sixth Epoch. Wait, you