Mirrors

A/N: An original piece. It's set in the same literariverse as my NaNoWriMo novel, but it's sort of a prequel, so it's okay if you didn't read that. This was written for a challenge issued by one of my friends to write a story that included "for they were not creatures of beauty. They were creatures of substance and not of the ephemeral. They possessed little of the ethereal quality that had for so long captured the minds and imaginations of men. They were imperfect and somehow this made the watcher want them all the more."

******
How far is it to the other side of a mirror?
No more than a breath, says logic. No more than an thin sliver of reflecting glass.
But how far is it from the Kingdom to the land of the Gods and fairies?
Much farther, says logic. Muct farther, if those places exist at all.
But the watcher knew the truth. He knew that the two distances were one and the same. The watcher alone knew that if one stood before this mirror, just so, one could see…
A garden, full of flowers. A tall tree in bloom. Silver lights flashing by in the sky. Things indescribable to anyone in the Kingdom who had never seen them. And one could see people.
By their dress they could have been fairies; by their surroundings they could have been Gods in their paradise beyond the borders. Most people, looking into this mirror, would have instantly recognized these enchanting visions as one of the two. Mesmerized, they would have reached into the vision and found that it could be entered into completely, and there they would likely have been lost forever, never to return.
The watcher was not like most people. He looked twice. He looked closely. And he knew that these people playing beneath the tree were people, and not Gods or fairies, for they were not creatures of beauty. They were creatures of substance and not of the ephemeral. They possessed little of the ethereal quality that had for so long captured the minds and imaginations of men. They were imperfect and somehow this made the watcher want them all the more.
Selfishness was his defining characterstic, if he had one. He rarely desired someone sexually; what he desired was control. His only lust was lust for power, power over people. He nearly had the Kingdom already. Here, before his eyes, was a challenge-- another land, another people, to make his. And they would be his, because he wanted them.
He did not know whether the imperfections of the people he saw made him want them, whether his need to possess them and control them came from some unconscious need to fix them somehow. But he did know that he was beautiful, and these people were not so, and this made them inferior to him. Gods, now—Gods would have been perfect. He would have known a God, had he seen one, by the utter perfection of its form, for why would an omnipotent being choose to be less than perfect? These people were not Gods. And if they were not Gods, he could control them. It would be a challenge, yes, but not impossible.
The interesting point here—and he rarely used an adjective more favorable than “interesting”—was that, should he show what he saw to the people of the Kingdom, they would believe that they were seeing the land of the Gods. If he used this knowledge now, it would be of little benefit to him. But if he waited… Who could stand in the way of the man who controlled the Gods themselves? What power would such a man wield? Who would dare oppose him in anything?
The senior priest Maddeg was not like most people. He took all of this in within the space of an hour, scarcely pausing to linger over the demise of his religion.
That night he wept, and he hardly knew why.

***
Maddeg was wrong, though, in thinking himself alone in this perception of mirrors. The great wizard Talwyr knew, and one other. This other was a young woman who lived in a border village just like any other. Her name was Mella. Nothing very much distinguished her from any other village girl except that once, when she was but a girl, she had been granted an audience with the wizard Talwyr all by herself.
It had been very kind of the wizard to take the time to humor the child, everyone said, if a little bit silly. After all, no one else in the town, not even the elders, had ever had a private audience with a wizard. Surely he had more important things to attend to than a little girl who claimed that she had seen a fairy. And wasn’t she too old for such fantasies anyway?
No one had ever thought of believing her. Her mother briefly wondered aloud whether Mella should be sent to the Temple, but Talwyr assured her that was not necessary. No one knew what had passed between the girl and the wizard during their meeting, and few truly wondered. Neither did anyone notice the way she would linger over the long mirror fixed in the border wall each morning.
Mella was glad of this; she would not have liked to say that she had promised to be there each day, in case the fairy girl came again.
No one noticed the necklace she now wore, either.
The fairy girl had given it to her. If she hadn’t had it, even she might have begun to suspect that her meeting with the fairy in the mirror had not really happened. As it was, she had only to touch the necklace and remember.
The story, when she told Talwyr, went like this:
It had always seemed strange to her that a mirror should be fixed in the plain stone wall of the border, far out in the forest. Mella had looked into the strange mirror and had seen, instead of her own reflection, the little dark-haired girl. She had tilted her head, and the other little girl had not. She had raised her right hand, and the other girl had raised her right hand. Mella had been standing in the forest and the other in a lavish room.
Fairyland, Mella had thought immediately. And so this girl must have been a fairy.
Suspecting some sort of magic, Mella had reached out to touch the mirror's silver surface; the little fairy girl had done the same.
And, where Mella had expected to touch glass, her hand had touched the fairy hand...
After an hour spent on the other side of the mirror, she had returned to the village to find that a whole day had passed and that people were looking for her everywhere, thinking that she had run away into the forest where it was dangerous and she could be eaten by wolves or dragons. No one had listened when she’d told them that she’d been in a palace.
Mella had been ten years old then.
Now she was a woman grown, and while it was remembered that she had spoken privately with Talwyr, it was forgotten what precisely she had spoken with him about. Only Mella remembered, and she still went to the mirror every day, in spite of Talwyr informing her that she would likely never meet her friend there again. Because she had promised. Just in case.

***
Veren and Maddeg were in many ways very dissimilar. They came near, in fact, to being opposites. Yet the two men shared a certain vital quality in common, and that was lust for power. When Maddeg had at last stepped through the mirror, he’d known how essential it was that he find an ally immediately, one he could trust and who trusted him—in short, an ambitious opportunist.
He had found just the man in Veren, an up and coming politician in the Queen’s service on Dybera. He had less intelligence than would be needed to make his ambition a reality, yet just enough to follow the orders of an intelligence greater than his own to make it seem that he had. And his ambition was a great one—nothing less than to rule the Queen and, thus, the entire world. It had not been Veren’s idea to kill the current Queen and turn her only child into the figurehead of a government ruled only by the councilors. But he had seized upon it with a determination and vigor which might soon turn this plan into a reality. If so, Veren would be the head of this cabal of councilors. And Maddeg would control Veren.
It was all too perfect.
Aside from one thing.
Maddeg had, naturally, had to show Veren the mirror to convince the man of his sanity. What they had seen through the mirror had been the forested outskirts of one of the Kingdom’s many simple borderland villages. Before the mirror had been a simple young woman. The only thing remarkable about her, to Maddeg, was that she continued to be at the mirror every day. He was convinced that she could not see them, so far back did they stand from the mirror, yet every day she came. And Veren had fallen in love with her.
Veren and Maddeg were in many ways very dissimilar. Lust had no place in Maddeg’s world, yet was a very large part of Veren’s. And Maddeg never made decisions rashly. He weighed everything out, every cold detail of a matter, before any course of action was decided upon. Veren’s mind did not work in this way; he saw something that he wanted, and he made it his.
Maddeg had, he reflected later, not known enough about the workings of this type of mind. If he had, he would almost certainly have been able to predict and then prevent what later occurred. It was an event which would haunt him for a long time.

***
The appearance of the man in the mirror had shocked Mella badly. Attempting to recall it later, she was unable to decide whether it was more accurate to say that he had appeared all at once or faded into being out of shadows. It was no matter; there had been something menacing about it, regardless, and she had gasped and scurried backwards on her hands and knees. But when she looked again, any menace she might have detected was gone, and there was only a handsome, tall, shining man.
He was unlike the little girl she had seen in this very mirror years ago just as day was unlike night. Even Mella, who knew the truth about the mirrors, wondered briefly if he was indeed a God from the other side of the border. She stared at him in open awe. After a time, he faded away again.
Mella hurried her step somewhat back to the village that morning, but she also hurried more than usual in her return to the mirror the next day. Sure enough, the man was there again. Again they sat a long time gazing at one another. Mella thought that she could see, in his eyes, the same admiration that was in her own. His mouth moved as though he was speaking, but she could not hear the words.
Mella did not tell anyone about the mysterious man. They hadn’t believed her last time; why should they now?
More days passed in this way. Every day Mella went to the mirror and met in silence with the man; in her heart, she began to adore him, even to think that she might love him. She longed to touch him and to hear him speak. And at last, one day, just as she had done all those years ago, she put her hand up to the mirror. The man hesitated, then did the same.
His fingers wrapped around hers, and before she could think, he was through the mirror, standing in the forest with her, and his lips were on hers and, half by force, he took her, there in the shadow of the border wall.
He held her afterward, and told he that he loved her, and a long time passed before he went back to the mirror. But he never came again. For many weeks Mella went back to the mirror hoping that he would appear, but she waited in vain.
People asked questions, but since she did not know how to answer them, she remained silent.
The baby was a girl, and she was named Maia, after Mella’s fairy friend from so long ago. Far away in the Kingdom’s Temple, whispered voices were already calling her the Child of the Gods.



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