SWNOVELXO Chapter 240: Shattered Glass
Sunny stuck his arm into the trash can with the solemnity of a priest reaching into a sacred altar.
Not for food, nor for necessity.
But because trash cans were wormholes of infinite possibilities.
He remembered the first time he found a lizard in one. Half-dead thing, missing a leg, tail all mangled, twitching like it was too stubborn to die. He was six back when the sky still had smog instead of stars and the streets were more rust than road. It had been wedged between a crushed soda can and the remnants of someone's dinner. And his childish mind thought:
"A dragon!"
He called it a Mister Dragon.
Built it a home out of a shoebox and newspaper. Fed it crumbs and bugs and the warmth of his little hands. Rain, his dearest, totally not estranged little sister, merely an infant at the time, must have thought it was royalty with how often he excessively glazed the crippled creature. He didn't tell her it hissed at her when she wasn't looking. That was part of it's charm. Ferocious dragons, and such.
One day, he dragged Rain and Mister Dragon out of they're cold apartment complex. He had somehow deluded himself into thinking that Mister Dragon needed to be let out into the outside door to grow back it's wings… of course, lizards found in trash cans didn't have flying capabilities.
The outskirts were — and probably still are — a dangerous place. Later on, Sunny counted himself lucky that they didn't run into gangsters with no policies against harming children and their pet lizard.
Instead, there was merely a stray, malnourished dog that considered a lizard to be a decent dinner. Sunny wasn't sure what dogs normally ate, but Mister Dragon was inevitably part of it's meal.
While Rain was holding Mister Dragon to the polluted sky, not quite understanding why she was doing so, but listening to Sunny anyways, the dog scurried out of the alleyway, clamping the lizard beneath it's maw.
Sunny wasn't quite sure what was going through his mind at the moment. Running on instinct, he had grabbed a stick and stabbed it into the dog's eye. It died very quickly, but when Mister Dragon fell out of it's mouth, only it's tail was left.
Rain cried after. Meanwhile, Sunny had been stabbing into the dog's corpse a few times until his father dragged him away, kicking and screaming about how it wasn't enough.
In Sunny's eyes, trash cans were a void of endless potential.
Schrödinger's trash can: The idea that every trash can is simultaneously both worthless and filled to the brim with treasures until the contents are directly observed.
How did he know who Schrödinger was? Well, he searched up a term that encapsulated his theory, and found a very similar one related to a cat. Great minds think alike.
And nothing was greater than valuables!
A gold coin in a pile of rot was still a gold coin. A blade was still a blade, even if it was buried under eggshells and plastic wrap. And a soul was still a soul, even if the world decided it belonged in the gutter.
Like Sunny himself, who was unfortunate enough to fall asleep while most of his body was deep within the trash can. Some passerbys sent strange looks at the pair of legs sticking out, but nobody commented.
***
He lingered in the glass again.
Not bound. Not free.
The hall loomed around him, vast and hollow. Light poured through tall windows, but the warmth it brought died before reaching the floor. The air shimmered with a false stillness, touched by something deeper — older.
Seven chains sprawled across the floor, their shackles cracked and runes dulled. Once, they had held something terrible. Now, they held nothing.
He should have stayed forgotten.
But someone had reached through. Someone who moved like a man but wasn't. A thing in a white coat, with a face that didn't belong in this world. Dice for a head. Tricks for a voice. He'd peeled the mirror open like a wound and pulled him out — not to save, not to help. Just to move a piece into play.
Then he left.
Left him in this prison masquerading as a tower, where darkness gnawed at the seams of reality and time forgot how to pass. No words. No promises. Just abandonment dressed in amusement.
He didn't care. Not really.
Hate had kept him warm for longer than he could remember. Hate had taught him patience. Hate had taught him to smile. The ones who buried him once would pay for it in kind. All of them. Every single one. The cold, shining eyes that looked down on him. They destroyed his body. They destroyed his soul. And even then, he lived, chained as he was to his reflective prison.
He remembered each face.
He remembered what it felt like when the blade stopped shaking in his hands.
He had carved his way through reflections. Made puppets from heroes. Painted stories with borrowed mouths. And he would do it again. He would do it better. Not out of revenge, but because it was right. Because it was necessary.
He would wait.
The shadow; slippery, strange, and extremely valuable. A good body, it was. The bait was right before him, the strange rift in reality.
When the shadow passed through, he would hitch a ride in silence. Follow him into the next trial. He didn't need a body. He just needed to wait. For the moment he could take the perfect vessel.
And when it came, he would take everything else.
Until then, he waited.
He dreamed of shattered glass and torn throats. Of silence filled with screaming. Of a future soaked in red.
And through it all, he smiled, glancing at the curious Attribute he had recently received.