i genuinely wasn't prepared for og zandik to be dead like i had it in the back of my mind as a possibility but i guess i thought he would've at least found a way to upload his brain into the cloud or something. but no he died at 85, lived a normal human lifespan and died of normal natural causes, and everything since then has been this bizarre house of mirrors. all him but not quite, eerily eternal, cannibalizing his still-warm corpse for scientific insight and then carrying on his legacy for the next four hundred years. but if what they did with it was exactly what he would do we have no way of knowing. we get to know him refracted through a prism, through these versions of himself half-clone half-creation, but we will never know the real him. not fully. this man this monster he lived a human life and died a human death. as finite as anyone else and as much as the segments stretch the concept of "self" they know they are not him. fucked upppppp

what is a reflection of a person without that person to reflect. "the eyes i have placed in the dimension of time" omega said in sumeru but he didn't do that. zandik did. whatever their original roles they surely had to redefine themselves in his absence. i think some of them never got there. how else could omega wipe the others out so easily? if no other reflections remain, he reclaims his place at the center, he becomes the one looking into the mirror rather than one of the ones staring out. and there is something so horrifically fitting about how zandik died, looking into all of those reflections one last time and finding no compassion. why would there be? what kind of a life did he live? god. i have to go eat glass