It's been years since our luck ran out and left us here
Like broken mirrors, ten million shards of glass and tears
But now we are awake enough to shatter what we hate
Like broken mirrors, reflections of an unfamiliar face

Broken Mirrors – Rise Against

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It was so strange, Azra reflected.

It wasn't better. It wasn't right. The past was mixed up, people and places coming in no coherent order as she called them. The future was similarly confounded, coiled in impenetrable loops and impossible to navigate. But with the Lantern, she could exist now. The current moment was like the eye in the center of a storm. Whirlwinds raged elsewhere, but here she could focus.

Here: she walked, Mythoclast held tight and ready across her body. Spark was a comforting presence, close and affirming, a wall at her back. So, as she stepped over the broken slate of the Corridors of Time, she stepped confidently. The few Vex that lingered here were easily dispatched. Whenever they came to a new set of branching paths, she would focus and suddenly she knew which one was the way out.

To her left, Osiris walked. The Warlock was quiet. Though Azra could not quite grip how either of them had come to be here (here: not the actual Corridors of Time, but a version of it hardwired into the Infinite Forest?), her instincts told her to keep her mouth shut and keep walking. No use in poking that wasp nest. She'd have to focus enough to navigate out of this maze.

So she held the Mythoclast tight and said nothing. She was unsure of exactly how long they had gone on (Forever? Days? A few minutes?) when Osiris decided to break the silence himself. He drew in a deep breath, eyes still fixed on the path ahead, and then spoke. "I am sorry."

It sounded like a genuine apology. Azra couldn't guess for what- their circumstances were a rat's nest in her mind. She elected to not acknowledge the Warlock's words and to keep moving. That was a lesson she carried in her bones: when in doubt, keep moving.

"You have done much for Humanity… much for me," the Warlock said quietly, keeping pace with her. "I will admit I have failed to see that."

She tried to recall that failure and got nothing meaningful. There were fragments of emotions, doubt and guilt and anger, but she couldn't shake them out into anything real. She sighed and let it go. It was so tempting to chase the rabbits of these memories down their holes, but she knew that was the path to her insanity. The Lantern clipped on her belt bumped gently against her leg as she stepped, a reminder to stay present. It would be unwise to-

"Heloooooo," Sagira said.

Something blocked Azra's path. She stopped and raised her gun on instinct, only to realize a moment too late that she was pointing it directly at the golden Ghost. Sagira had been trying to catch her attention. Alarm, both Azra's and Osiris's, blared in the Light. Sagira whirled away, quick as a hummingbird.

Azra settled the Mythoclast back to a rest position, shook her head, and kept walking. When all else fails, keep walking. Her heart pounded in her chest from the close call. Her finger had been tightening on the trigger when she'd caught herself. She didn't know why they were here but if she just kept moving forward, they could be somewhere else.

"I thought you were feeling better," Sagira said. Azra couldn't decide if it sounded like a complaint or an apology. The Ghost was staying on the far side of her Guardian now, peeking out from behind his back. Osiris scrutinized Azra with an odd expression on his face.

"I am functional," Azra said sharply. "I am not better."

"Can you understand what I'm saying?" Osiris said. Azra did not appreciate any sort of curiosity from him. Not after…

Well, she couldn't pull any exact memories up. But her gut said attention from Osiris was not a good thing. She grimaced and turned away.

"Perhaps the apologies can wait until later," Osiris said. He sounded curiously defeated. Why? That tone wasn't a familiar thing, not from him.

The words came out of Azra's mouth before she'd really thought of them. "You're not apologizing for the right reason, anyway."

"What?" Osiris said.

"You said…" Azra struggled to recall. It had only been a few moments ago and it was already teetering on the edge of the abyss. "You talked about what I've done and said you were sorry for misunderstanding me."

"Basically," Sagira agreed.

Azra tried to sort her thoughts. Lessons from Jaren Ward and Tevis Larsen washed up on her shores like debris from sunken ships: Intention. Justice. Understanding.

"You're apologizing to her, but she doesn't care about herself," Spark began.

"Really," Sagira said in dry doubt. "Your whole issue with my Guardian is because of what he did to you. You can't tell me you don't care."

"I don't want to be the kind of person who does," Azra corrected. "I don't need an apology for what's happened. I'll find a way to move on." Would she? She recognized her own tendency for letting go of the past, but the knot of hurt and anger in her chest felt old. Something she'd been carrying for a long time. Then again, what could she say now to the events of the past? Yesterday seemed as distant as twenty years ago right now.

If she let herself keep talking, the words came naturally. "I don't care about me, I care about the people who come after me. The next freak who comes along-" she spat the word freak with more fire than she thought she had, "-the next person you decide to sacrifice for your intentions. How can I forgive you if it enables that?"

The silence between them was tense, now. Azra checked the magazine on her gun.

Finally, Osiris spoke. "I am sorry," he tried again.

But Azra wasn't satisfied with that. "Why are you apologizing in the first place?" she asked, a little bitter. Why you, why now? "What changed your mind?"

"Azra, you just… you killed Panoptes!" Sagira exclaimed. And… wow, Azra did not remember that. It made sense, though, if something big had just happened. Osiris was acting odd because he was shaken up.

"You have saved all of Humanity. And not for the first time," the Warlock added solemnly. "I was wrong about you."

So now he was apologizing. Not for hurting her, but for being wrong in his reasons for doing so. Anger flared suddenly in Azra's chest. "So I'm worth more as a human being because I did something?" she growled. If he'd been wrong, why hadn't she deserved an apology before? "Now that I've proven myself, now I matter?"

"No," Osiris protested.

The rage hit her all at once. It was such an Osiris move, only caring about things when they affected him personally. She turned on him, fury like ice in her veins. "I'm redeemable now because I did something for you?" She didn't know where this anger was coming from. Was it some decades-long hurt that she'd refused to let heal? Was it a recent slight? Was this, somehow, the impact from a future-that-may-be filtered down to her in this state?

"I don't think that," Osiris protested. But he didn't sound sure of himself.

"What do you want, Osiris!?" Azra shouted. "Why are you apologizing? What do you aim to get from this?" That was the only angle she could picture from him.

"I was wrong!" Osiris shouted back. His voice was forceful and loud- it reverberated in the air a few moments after he'd spoken. "I was wrong," he continued, a bit quieter but just as intense, "and I nearly doomed the universe for it. If you hadn't been there, the Vex would have killed us all someday."

"If you hadn't come back- if you hadn't convinced Osiris to some with you, I'd be dead," Sagira said flatly. "And then he'd be dead."

"I have failed in nearly every way I fought to succeed," Osiris said. "I know I can be… prideful." His hands curled into fists at his sides. "You have saved me from my pride today, not once, not twice, but three times. You deserve an apology." He hesitated a second before continuing. "You always have, though I have only realized it now. Perhaps I deserve to grovel at your feet like a street dog."

There was such sick self-hatred in his voice, it gave Azra pause. Somewhere, sometime, she'd known what it was like to blame herself for the bad things that had happened to her. She, too, at some point, had hated herself.

The thing with taking the world on your shoulders… Azra reflected, it gives you purpose. And a good deal of moral power. But the issue is, when you fail you have nobody and nothing else to blame but yourself.

You don't owe him anything, Spark said. He's done enough- hasn't he? But Spark didn't remember the details either, caught up in the storm of their unremembered past.

Azra couldn't sort the emotions swirling in the Light- shame clashed with anger, pity curled around hatred. "I can't even remember what it is you're apologizing for," she said gently.

Osiris met her eyes and whatever words she had planned next got stuck in her chest. Was the Lantern getting dimmer? Was her bit of stability crumbling beneath her? She swallowed, trying to keep the bile from creeping up the back of her throat.

Then she turned away and the moment was over. "We need to keep moving," she muttered. Why were there tears in her eyes?

She started walking. After a second's pause, Osiris followed. "I suppose the apology can wait until later," he said.

The fact that there would be a later was something Azra had to take on faith. They walked on for a while in silence, Azra choosing their path out of the thousands offered up to them through the Corridor's many thresholds. Whatever argument they'd been having slipped away from her (and she was all too happy to let it go).

She was unsure of exactly how long they had gone on (Forever? Days? A few minutes?) when Sagira decided to break the silence herself. "You really can't remember?" she asked.

"Remember what?" Azra replied, not taking her eyes off of the path ahead.

"What we were just talking about," Sagira said. She sounded disbelieving, in a you-can't-possibly-be-this-dumb sort of way.

Azra bristled. "I am functional," she said. "I am not better."

"Could I see that Lantern?" Osiris asked.

Azra stopped walking for a second to look at him critically. There was no malicious edge to the Light around him- just a sense of curiosity (and a strange bit of sadness from Sagira?). "No harm will come to it. I give you my word," the Warlock assured.

With a shrug, Azra unclipped it from her belt and passed it over. Osiris held the light up before his face. The illumination added a spark to his eyes and washed the shadows out of his wrinkles, making him look like a younger man. "Fascinating," Osiris murmured.

Azra fidgeted. She wanted to move. Some part of her didn't trust Osiris to keep her interests in mind.

"Quite complex work," Osiris said to himself. "Yet intuitive. How has Praedyth come to know so much about temporal and causal reactions?"

"I don't know," Azra said. "Osiris, can we leave now?" The Infinite Forest was in an odd state of disarray, but the Vex would begin to protest their presence at some point.

Osiris looked over at her, then back at the lantern. "One moment," he said, hastily fumbling in his pocket. There was a clacking sound as he withdrew several glowing bronze cubes. "I could not make this, but I can improve upon it."

Azra opened her mouth to argue- if it isn't broken, don't risk trying to fix it- but before she could speak, the cubes in Osiris's hand spun and joined together in a blinding flash.

When Azra blinked the spots from her eyes, it was strange. It still wasn't better, it still wasn't right, but…

Osiris handed the Lantern back to her. Azra took it automatically, a bit stunned. "Do you find your memory improved?" The Warlock asked.

"…Jesus." All Azra could do was swear. She'd been trying so desperately to catch the scraps of remembrance that had floated her way. Now she plunged her hand into the bucket of her past and came out holding fistfuls of the stuff. It was still unsortable, but she could hold it here and turn it over and think on how she felt about it.

She tried to remember what it was she was upset about and a dozen memories assaulted her. Every cool glare from across the War Room table ran through her head, every dismissal he shot at her, every bounty or Vanguard assignment he posted that mysteriously got cancelled when she signed up for it. The self-doubt that had eaten at her in her younger days. The self-doubt that still ate at her now.

"Praedyth may have a unique understanding of nonlinear causality," Osiris bragged, "but as for the mind's mechanisms of recall and their relations to human perceptions of time, he should do more research."

"I'm still angry at you," Azra decided. "What were you thinking?"

"You'll have to be more specific," Sagira said. "He's screwed up a lot." She sounded almost smug about it, like she was rubbing it in Osiris's face.

Azra would be very upset if her Ghost laid her bare like that. But Sagira was not her Ghost and Osiris was not her. "Idiot," she grumbled, clipping the Lantern back on her belt. "Thinking you could take hold of the whole Infinite Forest like that. Thinking that you could take on Panoptes by yourself with no Ghost." She paused, then took a deep breath. "Thinking that you couldn't possibly be wrong about anything."

"It wasn't whether I thought I could be wrong," Osiris said. "That was not a risk that could afford to be taken. I have seen what hells could have been." His words were hot but his tone was cool and certain. "I have seen the depths that lay in the space between possibilities. With no way to determine what may be, I had to act against any threats that might be."

"But out of what was," Azra said, "Isn't this just about the worst-case scenario?" She fought the waver in her voice. "Imagine what we could have done. The chaos we could have wreaked across the Vex network, if only we had worked together. Maybe, if you'd been there in the Vault, I wouldn't have-"

She stopped that train of thought on its tracks and shook her head. "No, never mind. That… that was crucial to killing Atheon." Those memories were stuck in her mind like a knife lodged in the trunk of a tree. "And even if it would have been company, I wouldn't wish it on anyone else." She held the Mythoclast a little tighter, hunched her shoulders a bit. "But maybe… maybe I wouldn't have been gone so long. If you'd have been there."

"Would it have mattered to you?" Osiris asked. "A week, a hundred years- how do you measure a length of time with no beginning and no end?"

Azra couldn't help but laugh a little. "I'm trying," she said. "Traveler."

"Osiris," Sagira scolded. "Aren't you supposed to be saying you're sorry? This 'I did what I had to do' argument doesn't sound much like 'I'm sorry' to me."

"Perhaps you are right," Osiris said. "Perhaps I am apologizing for the wrong reasons."

"It's not about you," Azra said. "What you think is just isn't the end-all and be-all of morality. Your point of view isn't the only right one."

Osiris, blessedly, let that pass without argument. They walked on.

"My entire life, I have strived for great things," he said after a minute of consideration. "Power, security, knowledge. Every step I took, I received pushback. Doubt. I have learned to disregard it. If I had listened to every person who told me I was going too far, I'm not sure the City would still be standing today."

"And that's not a metaphor," Sagira interjected. "Like, literally-"

I saw you at Six Fronts," Azra said in acknowledgement. "I don't think they'd have held the line without you." His Reflections were unnerving, sure, but she remembered seeing the crackling gold in the sky and feeling secure that Osiris would be where he was needed. "I couldn't do something like that. Don't know anyone else who could have, either."

Osiris had stopped dead in his tracks a few sentences back. Azra turned to look at him, confused.

The Warlock asked a question, sounding positively haunted. "You remember the Battle of Six Fronts?"

Azra shrugged. "Everything's a mishmash still. I'm functional, not sane."

"But you remember it," Osiris asked again, demanding confirmation.

"Yeah," Azra said. "What's the big deal?"

"The big deal?" Sagira interjected. "Azra, you weren't Raised until after Six Fronts."

"Over a century afterwards, in fact," Osiris added. "How?"

Azra paused to consider that herself. But the past was a tangle and the future was locked in splintered glass. "Leave it," she decided. It wasn't something she could afford to lose herself over.

Osiris opened his mouth to argue. Azra interrupted before he could. "Leave it," she hissed.

There was half a second of tense silence. "Alright," Sagira said gently. "We'll leave it."

Azra turned and walked away. Osiris stepped quickly to follow her.

"You surprised me," Osiris said. "I will not make the same mistake twice."

"You won't have the chance," Azra said. "We're almost through."

"That Lantern is not a physical object," Osiris pointed out. "When we leave the Forest, it most likely will not come with you."

Azra shrugged. "Probably."

"Will you be functional without it?"

Azra didn't answer. The silence spoke her uncertainty for her.

"Then before we go-"

"I don't want to stay here any longer than I have to," Azra said.

"Give me the opportunity," Osiris demanded.

Osiris was supposed to be aloof. He'd always been aloof before, removed, hard-eyed, no sympathy to blunt his sharp edges. Why was he so insistent now? Had recent events finally managed to put a dent in his impenetrable ego? Had his decades of isolation left him with a new view on Humanity? Why was he looking at her now with gratitude and compassion?

"When I look at you, I see a bit of Saint-14," Osiris admitted.

"We'll find him," Azra said, not quite knowing if it was a promise or a prediction.

Osiris nodded at her. "When the next freak comes along-" he used the word with a frank blandness, so different than Azra's earlier spite- "When I look at them, I will see a bit of you. And fate will turn on a different facet."

Is that enough? Spark asked silently. He himself still had anger born of protectiveness. After all he's done, all the guilt he seeded in you, do you really believe he'll change?

I want… I want things to be better, Azra thought back. I want things to be able to be better.

So you're going to forgive him?

How is he supposed to be a better person if we don't let him try? Azra thought. No risk, no reward.

Spark didn't answer that with any concrete thoughts. Azra took his worry, his own fear of failure, and wrapped him in the mental equivalent of a hug.

"I'll accept that," Azra said aloud before she could talk herself out of it. She came to a stop before the last threshold, taking in the scenery around her one last time. A pool of Radiolaria sat in the center of their room. Chunks of rock sat propped in its center like some fountain ornament. The room was ringed with doors marked with incomprehensible symbols. Yet this door, so unremarkable, was the one that led out. Azra could feel it in her bones.

"We're here," Spark announced. "Are we ready for what's on the other side?"

"Never," Azra said confidently. She grabbed Osiris's wrist (whether to make sure he didn't get lost or to make sure he didn't chicken out) and then stepped through.