Sonder didn't answer immediately.
Instead, she dipped one last finger into the little jar and let Sireacht finish the last drop she had been offered.
The featherling gave one final contented coo before drifting upward and settling once more upon the sorceress' shoulder.
Sonder closed the jar.
She placed it carefully back into her pack. Then she stood.
She looked at Aronia through the enchanted gates in a long stare.
"I've asked myself the same question ever since I found the first shard."
She rested one hand upon the staff.
"One fragment tells you almost nothing. It could have belonged to a sword. A crown. A mirror. A door. A piece of armor. Anything. I've seen something similar once before. It was a mirror with strange power. But it wasn't this. I found one just by happenstance, and then I found myself needing more power, so I kept on searching. I found another and another, eventually six.
She looked at the fragments embedded within the staff.
"Six pieces are enough to form suspicions. Not conclusions. You begin to notice the curves and angles. The way broken edges seem to seek one another. There are still many possibilities."
She raised the staff.
Not threateningly, but it lit up slightly.
"Then I came here; maybe I would find answers. Maybe this place would still the question."
"And?" Aronia asked stiffly, figuratively on the edge of her seat as she was standing. "You haven't seen them, so that's not a lot of help, is it? And I don't think you'll be allowed to see them, seeing how obivously you want them. It's never a good sign."
"I don't need to see them."
The air inside Vault Twenty-One shimmered.
The containment wards brightened instinctively.
Dark threads of magic flowed from the staff.
They gathered in her other hand. A tiny point of darkness appeared.
And then another and another.
They floated there together like pieces of broken glass.
Aronia recognized them immediately.
The six fragments from Sonder's staff. Each one perfectly reproduced. The illusion rotated slowly.
Then, without warning, two more fragments appeared.
The two shards from Vault Seventeen.
Exactly the same size. Exactly the same shape.
Aronia narrowed her eyes. There was no need to question how she knew. It would be a waste of time.
The projected fragments drifted together. They didn't touch each other yet; they simply aligned.
Individually, they remained meaningless.
But together they formed something unmistakable, even though there were still pieces missing.
The curve of a brow, the line of a cheek, the beginning of a nose, and an eye.
It wasn't a mirror, or a crown, or armor. It was a face. Or rather, a mask.
But she didn't know the likeness.
"Do you know who this is?" Sonder asked.