[It isn't an answer to her question. He doesn't... He doesn't call himself real nor admit to being a mirage, just another hallucination she sees of someone she felt she had to apologize to, who she wanted to forgive her even though none of those false mercies received thus far have done anything to assuage her guilt. Maybe they would have, if she'd not seen the falsehood stripped away.

He asks what happened to her, instead. She should push, demand or beg him to just claim to be one or the other, real or imagined, but...

No one... No one really asked her what happened to her. Not like that, not in a way that wasn't tinged with the more barbed insinuation of intending to draw attention to her new weakness or to be vengefully cruel about what rights she now had to act as she did. She hadn't let them, she supposed, or they hadn't cared because she hasn't managed to allow anyone to. Not anyone here.

But he asks.]

... I went to Achamoth.

[She is surprised she answers. Ashamed that she does, that she's really that desperate for companionship that isn't needling or sarcastic or tinged with distaste.]

I don't... I don't remember why.

[There's something missing, something that had been in the shallow crack of her obsidian shard. She finally pulls a hand from the dirt to press absently into her sternum below where it sat, her brows furrowing above an eye and a hole.]

But I fought. [So many times. So many people.] There was a demon... with the Kenoma, one I'd never seen before.

[Her throat is visibly tight, a swallow she can't quite complete bobbing up and down her throat.]

He took it.

[Didn't "cut it out", she didn't "lose it" to an injury... He took it. And left her alive, like a woman not even worth killing, forced instead to bear the proof of her loss and her shame for all to see.

She'd cried out, then, to the sky, for him to come back and finish her. But he hadn't. No one had.]