The Affliction Dust was once the Divine Reflection. It has also been known as Pride's Mirror (by the NEH) or the Looking Glass (by the ancestors of the Divine Principality).[1]
Like the other Afflictions, it can summon minions; its pawns are "beings made of compacted dust that ruins electronics and suffocates people if they touch them."[1] This dust, which also muffles sound (save for the stomping, roaring or distant rustling of the Affliction itself) and limits sight when it settles over a region, can only be escaped by confronting oneself in the form of one's pawn doppelganger.
Appearance[edit | edit source]
Dust is larger than a skyscraper[2] and looks like "if a mummy could be a mech, shawled and wrapped and deteroriating."[3] Dust can take a smaller form, but it is unable to leave the Diadem except by taking its "big mode" to fuck stuff up. This has left it unaware of what is going on outside.[4]
History and Involvement[edit | edit source]
The Divine Reflection was once part of the Divine Fleet. The followers of Reflection originally used their dust doppelgangers to talk through their own feelings, sort of like therapy.[1]
Like the other Afflictions, it was one of the Divine Palisade's "greatest collaborators", having left the Fleet with him before the creation of the Twilight Mirage. Over the five thousand years between then and its appearance in PALISADE as an Affliction, Palisade was put under threat repeatedly by war, imperialism, monarchy, and Divine slavery. Dust's purpose turned, cynically, inwards. It began to build an endless catacomb, forcing everyone touched by its dust to enter a vision of another self and "fence-sit" interminably.[5] These visions of possible futures do not include the active presence of Dust, as "it can't imagine a good version of itself anymore."[4]
There exist Delegates of Reflection, with no indication as to how this came about.
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After Cori and Perennial create consecrated areas for the Afflictions, Thisbe brings the Chimeric Cadent to negotiate with Dust. The final results of this negotiation are not shown immediately, but eventually, the Chimeric Cadent, Chimera's Lantern and the Afflictions disappear from Palisade.
Curiously, at the same time, Reflection is said to have been one of the Divines freed from Fidelity's garden[6] and integrated into Wakeful.[7]