The skin around his soulbind burned, and Vincent had to clench his jaw from crying out in pain.

“You think your clever Brotherhood scribble is going to save you?” Vincent’s right hand clenched his left forearm unbidden, pain spreading like wildfire up the entire left side of his body. “I’m not just some weak creature from the Minor Circles, exorcist.”

The pain was making it difficult to concentrate, but he kept his eyes moving. Mirror to mirror, in rhythm to the chime in his memory of the afternoon prayer back at the Academy.

One of the reflections should be off, maybe just by a millisecond. The puppeteer of crooked mirrors.

“Yeah, that’s what you all say.” Vincent grit out. “But y’all sink right down through the dirt, in the end.”

Mirror to mirror. Sunlight that sets your heart at ease. Sister Alma’s melodious laughter, as she comes to summon them for their Advanced Demonology practicum. Vincent always inevitably did something stupid, searching for the sound of that laughter.

“I am nothing like the trash that you’ve had the honor to encounter in the miserable excuse you call ‘life.’”

The left sleeve of his fire-retardant cassock sitting right above the soulbind was beginning to smolder.

Fucking shit, he probably wasn't lying.

Vincent felt his back slouch, his head beginning to loll.

Oh, that pitch-black darkness in the corner of your eyes? Just the feathery locks of your beautiful hair. Keep looking at the mirrors, buddy.

“Oh yeah? What’s your name, then, Mr. High-and-Mighty?”

Vincent wanted that to sound cocky and sure, but it came out more of a pathetic whimper grit out between clenched teeth.

The demon laughed, and he could hear the laugh inside his own skull.

“Nice try, exorcist.”

In the mirror directly in front of Vincent, one of the thousands of his own endless reflections tilted its head, laughing, at odds with reality. The lie within the glass.

His body could barely move, under the crushing weight of the fire spreading beneath his skin.

“Yeah,” he whispered, “it really was.”

Then he pressed the trigger release on the side of his staff. The compact tube sprung forward with the smooth perfection demanded by a thousand years of monster-hunting, hurdling true towards the mirror with the laughing demon. The metal ring on top of the staff rang out against the glass of the mirror’s surface, like the singular note of a prayer hall bell.

He could see his own reflections duplicate and contort beneath the spiderweb of cracks racing across the surface of the glass. The image of his own smooth golden skin burned, turning ashen and gray.

The demon was probably screaming.

But all Vincent heard was the whispers of a waterfall of glass, shards sparkling in the yellow moonlight.