Chapter 235, The Deep Zone (3)
The forest thinned.
Not gradually, the way forests thin at their natural edges. Deliberately, the spacing between trees increasing in a pattern that communicated intention rather than ecology, as though whatever had shaped this environment had wanted the approach to the third encounter to be visible from a distance.
What was visible from a distance was a second clearing, larger than the first, and in the center of it, something that was not an entity in the way the first two had been entities.
It was a mirror.
Not a physical mirror, not glass or polished metal or any reflective surface he had a name for. A mirror in the conceptual sense, a space in the clearing's center that showed him something other than what was directly in front of it. He stopped at the treeline and looked at it from thirty meters.
What it showed was him.
