"Let me take this part."
A biting chill swept through Loa's mind as Edith's voice echoed there once more.
"Do you remember when we were trapped in your memories?"
"Of course."
Loa turned toward a mirror shard beside him and reached out to flick it, sending it spinning through the air. "We meet again, Big-Head Pervert."
Inside the shard, Big-Head Pervert held his adorable daughter and jumped into the swimming pool below. The scene played on a loop. Watching him leap from the high platform again and again, Loa found it weirdly comical.
"Everything you see here is part of fantasy, something that both exists and doesn't." As Edith spoke, the shards near Loa's hand slowly gathered together.
"Fantasies, idle notions, desires—whatever gives rise to them, they're beautiful to the person who creates them."
The shards tumbled, then suddenly melted like droplets of water and fused into a new mirror. Loa stood before it, but the reflection wasn't his. Face after face appeared instead: some happy, some cunning, some content, some cruel.
"But if fantasies can make people happy, then naturally, illusions can also drive them to grief and despair."
The images in the mirror changed. Disaster after disaster flashed before Loa's eyes: weeping pregnant women, desperate crowds, rotting corpses, sand stretching in every direction. Lava, floods, ruins—every nightmare a person could imagine appeared in the glass.
"Between Dreams belongs to no illusion, whether good or bad," Edith said. "But it is connected to every one of them. It shares their joys and bears their sorrows. Their fortunes are reflected in Between Dreams just as they are."
"Countless illusions are created and vanish every second, but that has little effect on Between Dreams. I might be willing to cry with you, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to die with