The Phantom could taste it, all around him—as tremulous and tender as once he called it, an unspoken whisper, were such a thing possible beyond a world of dreams. Yes, and there I admit it at last. "Dreamworld".

He looked instinctively at the solid, dark presence of the piano, enthroned within its surrounding candles, a shrine to some forgotten musical God who had once sang so sweetly to him, but now offered only silence. Forgotten. He had not touched it since she left. A few musical notations were scattered about—a sheaf reclining against the stand, here a loose page curling drowsily as if in sleep, there a stack haphazardly leaning, tribute to disorganized delirium. Pittances, really, none enough to be called "music."

His music—the music of the night—had died with her. Not that she was dead, in all likelihood… dead only to him. His hands clenched futilely until the leather of the gloves creaked. His was the music of silence, now, broken whispers and fragmented dreams—a shattered mirror, each sliver echoing a sharp reflection of a distorted life, each image a knife cutting with deadly and keen edge.

He had tried, but chords no longer came to him with their former exalting triumph, their tender glory. It was as if the music had truly died away, an old decrepit thing no longer turning to him.

He paced restlessly, this imposing fragment of night, the candles gleaming about him like deathwishes. He hardly gave the mocking lights a second glance. Once, months ago, he had thought to end it all that way. His mouth twisted in a bitter smile at the thought.

"Not even a Phantom slays an Angel," he said, and was surprised when the echoes of his own mellifluous voice ran back at him, softly persuading. His voice, the one instrument of beauty… he laughed harshly, and an intense painful satisfaction wrenched through him at the sound.

He paused to regard his reflection in a mirror; green eyes stared out mockingly from a face half-godlike, half-demonic. The irony of the mask did not escape him. Light over darkness. "How empty, senseless, dusty, seem all the prospects of this world." How had the lines gone? Oh, that the Almighty had not set his cannon against self-slaughter! Aye, they were something close to that.

"What Almighty?" he spat aloud, and the darkness answered; the darkness of the lair, of his hating eyes, of the world. "Too long you've wandered in winter, far from my far-reaching gaze…

He slammed his gloved fist against the mirror in anger; the shock of contact ran up his arm. The glass hummed high and sharp, a shrill cry. On his bed, the man—Raian—shifted in his slumber.

Thoughts of darkness faded as the Phantom turned to look at him. The young refugee, the prey, the untrusting invalid. He almost laughed at his own description—would have, if he could not so easily reconcile the young man with himself. "Why are you alive, boy?" he asked, and answered, "Christine." But the word felt wrong as he said it. That, more than all else, gave him pause. His incapacitated guest had actually made him think—nay, speak—her name. Yet it tripped wrongly from him.

Who are you?

It was an odd thought, a twisted mirror—"Who am I" the question had always been. The Phantom turned to look in the mirror again, hesitant fingers reaching out to himself, meeting only the cold hard glass, pitiless and silent, untouchable.

Encased within a dream.

Hate flared in the green eyes before him, a bitter anger, a self-loathing that brooked no rival. His gloved fingers trailed across the mirror's surface, touching the image of the mask, white and immobile. Abruptly he laughed again, cold and rough as untempered steel. His cloak flared about him and he paced away.

Behind him, the mirror reflected back only empty darkness.