I ran. But running in Nikraria during Delirium is like running in a dream—your legs are pillars of wet sand. The streets folded. An alley I entered at midnight spat me out at noon the previous day. I watched myself arrive at the city gates, clean-shaven and confident. I tried to shout a warning. My mouth filled with seafoam. The cure for Delirium, I later learned, is not a medicine. It is a surrender.
“No,” he said, tying a knot. “You are the Delirium. You always were. Nikraria is sane. You are the fever dreaming a city.”
She looked at me.
I looked out the window. The canal was a spine. The cathedral was a skull. The fog was the exhalation of a sleeping god.
The fog, however, had other plans.
And the mirror-woman? She was standing behind me. Smiling with a thousand cracked lips. I am back in my room now. The pier. The rust-smelling sea.
— A fragment recovered from the sea wall, written in charcoal and salt water. The author was not found. Delirium -Nikraria-
I am writing this from a room at the end of a pier in the city of Nikraria, where the sea smells of rust and old prayers. Three days ago, I was a cartographer. Now, I am a cartographer of the inside of my own skull.
When a mirror looks at you, you do not see yourself. You see every self you have ever failed to become. An alley I entered at midnight spat me