He had forgotten what weight felt like.

Not metaphorical weight. Not guilt or memory or centuries stacked like sediment. Actual gravity. The way it dragged at his shoulders, pinned his knees, made his breath scrape instead of flow.

The mirror gave him up inch by inch.

For hundreds of years it had been a skin he wore, a plane he pressed against, a cold, merciless throat that refused to open no matter how often he clawed at it. Tonight, it cracked. Not shattered. Not freed him. Just loosened enough to let him bleed through.

He dragged himself out like something half-born.

The room wobbled. Human dimensions were wrong. Too wide, too shallow, too fragile. The bed dominated everything, a soft altar he had been warned about long before the mirror ever claimed him. Foot of the bed. Threshold. That was where the veil thinned, where sleepers hovered between worlds.

So that was where the mirror had been placed.

Idiot girl, he thought dimly. Or brave. Humans were terrible at knowing the difference.

His feet hit the floor without sound. His knees nearly followed. He caught himself by instinct, claws phantom and gone, hands trembling as they adjusted to a shape that was not truly his. The dragon remembered wings. The demon remembered smoke. This body remembered only exhaustion.

Gods, he was tired.

The pull yanked at his spine, a constant, vicious tether snapping him back toward the glass. He could feel it behind him, humming, greedy. He had not escaped it. He had only stepped far enough away to be seen.

The girl lay frozen in the bed.

Her eyes were open. Good. Awareness mattered. Fear fed paralysis, and paralysis fed him. Not in hunger, not anymore, but in anchoring. He needed her mind caught halfway out of her body, just long enough.

She tried to scream. Nothing moved. Not her jaw, not her hands, not even her breath. Her terror bloomed anyway, hot and bright, flooding the room like spilled ink.

He hated that part.

He stood at the foot of the bed because he had no choice. The mirror would not allow him closer. It hummed again, warning, tugging harder. His vision swam. He lifted a hand to his temple, fingers threading into dark hair that was damp with effort.

So close, Zaidyn thought. After all this time.

His reflection flickered faintly in the glass behind him, warped and monstrous, horns curling where this body had none. A reminder. A threat.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he tried to say.

The words came out wrong. Hoarse. Ancient. More breath than sound.

Her eyes tracked him anyway.

He straightened slowly, forcing himself upright despite the pain screaming through every borrowed nerve. Exhaustion dragged at his limbs, but he held her gaze. Let her see him. Let her mind fix on him instead of thrashing.

Sleep paralysis was a door. He was a key that barely fit anymore.

“You put the mirror here,” he murmured, voice steadier now. “That was enough.”

The tether pulled again, cruel and insistent.

He had minutes at most.

And for the first time in centuries, Zaidyn was standing in a world that could feel him back.