Elias looked away from the reflection and fixed on the Doctor.
The wrong image still sat in the corner of his vision, like a second room had been folded behind the first. Elias tried not to look at it directly. Each time he did, the reflection almost became someone else, another shard bearer standing where he stood, asking a question that did not belong to him. He did not like it. He liked less that the Doctor looked unsurprised.
A chair wheel rolled over the cloud floor with a dry crunch that made no sense in a place without stone.
The Doctor turned, writing on a sheet of paper with a construction pencil. The pencil left dark lines that changed shape after he wrote them, diagrams becoming words, words folding back into arrows. Elias wondered if the man actually needed to write or if the habit only made him look less like the impossible thing he was.
