The journey back from the Mirage Temple should have felt triumphant.
By any objective accounting it was progress: the Glass Wastes survived, the guardian defeated, the second fragment claimed. I had done what Jake had died trying to do, what players before him had died trying to do, and I had done it at Level 5 with a thermal wrap and careful water management and the specific advantage of knowing exactly which mirror to break.
Instead I felt like I was carrying a graveyard in my pocket.
The fragment pulsed against my leg where I had stashed it in the secure pouch, and with each pulse came impressions. Not voices exactly, not audible, more like emotional textures arriving without invitation: the specific quality of Jake's determination in the final approach to a goal he did not reach, an
