A Mirror Can’t Dream Without Breaking - ACT I
Kaveh dreamed in broken mirrors long before he knew he had something to hide. In each dream, the glass never shattered the same way twice, sometimes splintering into cathedral windows, sometimes folding inward like ribs trying to protect a heart that wasn’t there. He’d wake with the taste of dust on his tongue and the distinct sensation that someone had been watching him, not from beside the bed, but from inside the mirror. He stopped telling people about it after the fourth therapist and the third expulsion. The Academy didn’t ask questions when he applied. Just took his schematics, took his name, and showed him to a dorm with one bed, one desk, and three full-length mirrors he couldn’t seem to cover, no matter how many times he tried.
He stopped checking the time when he woke up like that. Started sketching instead, nervous, manic lines in the corners of his notebooks, outlines of doorframes that didn’t belong to his dorm, faces without eyes, figures folded in half by reflections. At first he told himself it was just catharsis. Muscle memory. Something to occupy his hands before his mind caught up. But the sketches kept recurring, certain shapes resurfacing night after night: a boy with a closed mouth and mirror-cut skin, always framed by geometry too precise to be imagined. Cathedral arches. Lecture halls. The kind of symmetry that suggested someone had meant it.
And always, the boy in the drawing was looking at him.
The Academy of Theoretical Architecture and Harmonic Cognition, or Thornehill, did not list its location on any map. Kaveh only found it because he knew to stop looking. The train from Sumeru City dropped him on the edge of a forest with no paths and a sky that felt three degrees too pale. The rest of the way, he walked. Past a broken obelisk, a row of lampposts with no bulbs, and finally a wrought-iron gate that opened as if it had been waiting.
Inside, the campus rose like something imagined in the middle of a fever: towers spiraled where gravity should’ve stopped them, courtyards rearranged themselves depending on which door you exited from, and every wall bore veins of mirrored glass, narrow and subtle, like veins of mercury beneath the plaster. The dormitories were quiet…too quiet. Most students kept to themselves. Kaveh didn’t know if that was by design or just consequence. He didn’t ask.
His second day, he met Cyno.
The man stood motionless at the end of a glass corridor, arms crossed, gaze unreadable. "You're the new transfer," he said. "I’m Cyno. Disciplinary lead. I enforce the architecture of order."
Kaveh blinked. “Do you… mean that metaphorically?”
Cyno turned and walked, expecting Kaveh to follow. He did. As they passed through twisting staircases and observation halls lined with still-active models of spatial cognition loops, Cyno recited school policy like gospel: No unregistered mirrorwork. No dream-mapping outside supervised labs. Never enter a room if your reflection isn’t already in it. Kaveh thought he was joking until they passed a hall with one blacked-out pane, cordoned off with brass chains and etched with six names no one seemed to speak of anymore.
“There are doors here that open inward,” Cyno said. “But not into the building.”
That night, Kaveh dreamed again of the boy behind the mirror. This time, the boy was standing in a lecture hall made entirely of glass. At the front sat a figure reading aloud from an open book. When Kaveh moved closer, he saw his own name written across every page. He woke at dawn and found the sketch already half-drawn in his sleep.
The academy’s curriculum was less a syllabus and more a labyrinth. Each week Kaveh found new phrases scribbled in the margins of the posted schedule, “Dreampath Theory (mirrored room)” or “Applied Psychoarchitecture: bring gloves.” He attended whatever seemed most unstable. The classrooms were always too cold. Most professors spoke like they’d forgotten how to address anyone not inside their own mind.
The first time Kaveh saw Alhaitham, it was during an open seminar on "Spatial Memory Decay in Multidimensional Halls." The room was full, the table ringed with older students, but Alhaitham sat apart at a desk that hadn’t been there a moment ago. He didn’t take notes. He didn’t blink. And every time someone spoke, he looked not at them, but at their reflection in the mirrored panel behind the podium.
There was something unbearable about his stillness.
Kaveh watched him from across the room and felt suddenly, disturbingly recognized.
Not in the way strangers sometimes held a gaze too long, but in the way mirrors did. Like he was being read from back to front and found lacking.
“Who is that?” he asked the girl seated beside him, an older student with a sapphire pendant and tired eyes.
“That’s Alhaitham,” she murmured, without looking up. “He’s top of the second-years. Specializes in dream-logic architecture. Spatial cognition compression. He doesn’t speak unless it’s necessary.”
Kaveh stared harder. “Has he ever—?”
“Yes,” she said before he could finish. “He’s always like that.”
She didn’t need to clarify what that meant. Alhaitham looked like a fixed point in a collapsing diagram. He wore his stillness like armor, his silence like a mirror turned outward.
When class ended, Kaveh stayed behind, unsure why. Alhaitham didn’t acknowledge him. Just passed by, steps soft as chalk on stone. But in that moment, Kaveh swore, his reflection didn’t move at all.
Later that week, Kaveh was assigned his partner for the midterm project: a collaborative spatial reconstruction of a “mind-palace”, a symbolic rendering of the internal self as a living architectural form.
Of course it was Alhaitham.
Cyno delivered the announcement without irony, arms folded in the doorway of Kaveh’s design lab.
“Your metrics align well,” he said.
“My metrics?” Kaveh repeated, incredulous. “What does that even mean…”
“Cognitive resonance index. Spatial emotional density. Reflective harmony. You’re very noisy. He’s not. It balances.”
Kaveh didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
Cyno arched an eyebrow. “Would you prefer someone else?”
Kaveh hesitated. Thought of all the other students, quiet and strange, too busy building thought-mazes to meet anyone’s eyes. Then he thought of Alhaitham again, how his presence had felt like standing too close to a pane of glass that might crack at any moment. Like something already broken, but cleanly, clinically, as if it had chosen to break.
“No,” he muttered. “Fine.”
“Good.” Cyno handed him a packet of schematics and an access card labeled Mirror Lab B. “You begin tonight.”
That evening, Kaveh arrived early.
Mirror Lab B was a cube of polished stone with no light fixtures and three mirrored walls. The fourth was glass, facing the void of the central atrium, which looked more like a dungeon than a courtyard.
When Alhaitham entered, he didn’t look surprised to see Kaveh already sketching. He just set his tablet on the nearest surface and asked, “Do you dream often?”
Kaveh looked up, startled. “Excuse me?”
“For the project,” Alhaitham said, like he hadn’t just opened with a loaded question. “We’re mapping internal architecture. I need a reference point.”
Kaveh narrowed his eyes. “Do you dream?”
Alhaitham paused. It was brief, but enough. A pause edged with static, like his programming had stuttered.
“No,” he said at last. “I never have.”
Kaveh didn’t know why that made something in his chest ache.
He looked away. Back to the paper. “Then I guess we’re starting with mine.”
And just like that, it began. Kaveh cracked himself open, sketching fragments of dreams he’d never spoken aloud, floating staircases, red-tinted corridors, the ever-present sound of glass breathing. Alhaitham reconstructed them in software: an unholy fusion of algorithm and emotion, logic and nightmare. They worked in silence, mostly. But when they spoke, it was never small talk. Only questions like: “What does this door represent?”, “Why is the ceiling lower in this memory?”, “If you had to lose one part of yourself forever, which would you choose: vision or voice?”
By the end of the week, Kaveh was dreaming in their cathedral.
And in every dream, Alhaitham stood at the altar, staring back at him, expression unreadable, hands empty, waiting.
Kaveh told himself it was just projection. The mind assigning meaning where there was none. You work with someone long enough, study their angles and silences, and of course they begin to appear in the spaces where your defenses are lowest. But the dreams kept shifting. Always glass. Always blood. And Alhaitham, sometimes older, sometimes distorted, never wrong. It didn’t help that their waking hours were just as disorienting. Building a shared memory palace meant letting someone into your psychological blueprints, and Kaveh hated how easy it became to talk to him. Not because Alhaitham made it easy, but because he didn’t.
Alhaitham listened with that infuriating, surgical stillness, never offering comfort or critique, only precise questions that felt more like cuts than conversation. Kaveh didn’t even notice how much he started craving them. The way Alhaitham would tilt his head, like Kaveh was a puzzle worth solving. Like he was real.
And then everything burned.
The simulation started normally. A fourth-year named Satre had volunteered his personal dreamscape for in-class analysis of a reconstructed childhood home encoded with both architectural and emotional symbols. The assignment: enter the dream as a group, locate the structural weak points, and present a theoretical “collapse pattern” of the psyche.
Kaveh felt uneasy the moment they stepped through. The walls of the dream bent wrong, like they'd been rearranged too many times and were trying to snap back. Doors opened to memories that bled. Mirrors flickered with images that didn’t belong to Satre.
And then Kaveh saw it: his own blueprints.
Folded on a desk in the dream’s central atrium, laid out in perfect order. The same ones he'd drawn weeks ago in Mirror Lab B. But with one addition: an embedded kill-switch, a self-collapsing loop meant to fracture the space from the inside.
Kaveh moved to touch them. The dream trembled. Glass screamed. And in the next breath, the ceiling collapsed.
He woke in the simulation room choking on air, skin freezing, eyes burning. Students were shouting. Alarms blared. Instructors rushed in. And Satre was dead. Not just collapsed inside the dream, but gone. Mind unresponsive. Heart still beating. Soul nowhere. And Kaveh...Kaveh was still holding the blueprints.
He didn’t remember being taken to the holding wing. Just flashes: Cyno’s voice like a blade, the snap of security cuffs, the sterile white of the observation chamber. He couldn’t tell if it was a hospital or a cell. Maybe both.
“You were the architect of the loop,” someone said. “No one else had access to the interior scaffolding. No one else touched the override sequence.”
“I don’t…” Kaveh tried, throat raw. “I didn’t build it like that. I never…”
“You’re not being expelled,” said a different voice, this one cooler. “That would be merciful.”
Instead, they gave him a sentence.
Locked inside a simulation of his own fractured memory. Forced to relive the incident until he could piece together the truth of what he’d done.
“Memory instability,” they said. “You might not remember the loop at all. That’s part of the process. Let the guilt rebuild the shape of the crime.”
Kaveh laughed. Hysterical. Broken. “What if I didn’t do it?”
But they were already putting him under. The first loop began with the sound of shattering glass.
He was standing in a room he didn’t recognize tall arched windows, cathedral lighting, cold fog rolling in through a breach in the wall. Outside, it was snowing. Inside, the floor was blood-warm beneath his feet. There was a boy standing across the room. Not moving. Kaveh tried to speak, but his voice caught. The boy took a step closer. He had blood on his hands and blueprints rolled under one arm. His expression was unreadable. Not unkind. Just familiar in the wrong ways.
“I know you,” Kaveh whispered. The boy didn’t answer. Just looked at him like he was a question no one wanted to finish asking. In the control wing, Alhaitham watched the dream-simulation flicker on the monitor, frame by frame, pulse by pulse.
“Loop initiated,” said Tighnari beside him. “Vitals holding.”
“You’re sure this is ethical?” Alhaitham asked, voice neutral, though his hand tightened on the table’s edge.
Tighnari gave him a look. “You helped write the sentencing protocol.”
“That was before I knew who we were sentencing.”
Then: “He won’t remember you,” Tighnari said. “Not properly.”
Alhaitham didn’t reply. Just kept watching as the boy in the dream, Kaveh, turned toward the mirror.
And didn’t blink when his reflection didn’t follow.
