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“So the dumpster man is Faustite’s husband. He’s Eles’s husband.” He laughed and then sighed. Then smiled a bit too hard, dimples like pinpricks. “I feel bad for them both. The one searching and failing. The other resenting being failed to the point it seems no one had even tried.” Sitting on broken column, surrounded by pale debris, Hybris idly watched the crystal float above his fingers.

“But at least...Eles will remember he’s Faustite, and that there’s a husband he loves with the sort of intensity that has the other going mad at the possible loss of it. He’ll have a past again, and a home to return to.”

With a flourish, he sent the crystal to his subspace, expression turning neutral. “And they lived happily ever after. The End.”

“We’re getting married. You’re invited.”

It was a quiet night in the Mirror, which was to say, a very normal night. And Malory loved its quiet. There were no ambient noises, no insects, birds, or even wind. No distant sounds of life to be had. No barely there hum of powerlines. There was also a lack visual noise, no vivid colors or contrasts beyond his own reflection. Very little in the way of pattern or different sorts of architecture.

It was, quite possibly, the quietest place in the world. Or of any world among the many distant ones.

Trailing his hand along the mirrors as he walked its halls, Hybris, for once, was mostly quiet as well. He felt fuller and stranger than ever before. Stripped down to a truer and truer version of himself by prying, insistent hands that knew just how to touch him. Just how to make him want. Just how to pull the thread of his hidden desperations.

When he’d found Eles in the graveyard, no memory, no money, not even a bit of identity beyond a body he couldn’t even recognize as his own…how could he have expected that it would lead him here, to a self he’d thought well hidden and nearly faded into its own non-existence? To a self that lacked the comfortable lies but rather, was ever hungry for a constant shared truth with that boy. One without end.

Reaching the door, through one hallway and into the next and…ah.

An unusual one.

They happened sometimes, and often came with little gifts.

His soft hum broke the silence as he took in the high, vaulted ceiling, the pulpit and the pews. Stark and pale as always, there was a grand feeling to the chapel. Its lines, at turns stark and angled, at other flourishing and detailed, felt…aspirational, in the way religion often did. Heart and mind meant to reach upward and outward; to strive for some kind of peace and fulfillment out of sight, but the faithful knew it must be there and close at hand.

That hope was worth the pain.

That their faith in another was not a question, but an answer.

Walking to the pulpit he beheld a small box, and when he opened it, the two darkly glimmering rings, Hybris found yet another answer.