Transcribed by Song Sparrow, Seeker to the Old King

Reefer’s Edge market square, Age 5.8 U.C.

I sit speaking with a retired guard of Longan’s Keep. He’s agreed to speak with me on the condition that I buy him a drink. It’s early morning—he’s contracted to a local fisherman, and they set sail before the sun rises—so we sit leaning against the dock poles, sipping steaming cups of satcha. [Unnamed] keeps with the tradition of the Plains, even though he’s been gone from them since his twenty second year and wears his gray hair in a long braid down his back. He tucks it into his belt on the boats to keep it from twining with a fishhook. He takes a deep breath and begins his tale.

-::::::-

My armor never weighed as much as it did that bleak day we followed Aril down the dragon’s hole.

I grew up admiring Aril—she was most of the reason I chose to join the guard after I left ma’s farm. Sis and I’d watch her ride in from patrol in those early winter days when people first went missing, and the ground was too hard to till under the snow.

She wore this armor—we’d spot her on the road a mile away, it was polished to shine more like a pearl than steel. You can’t find armor like that on the Plain, and people liked to gossip in those days that Aril had charmed a benefactor from Samwhin.

Ma stopped us going to town frightful-quick, though, when those missing people started popping up. The first charred corpse appeared overnight on the road through the Partways Plains.

Sis had a friend in the scavenger’s guild at the time. He said the body looked like it’d been walking towards the Keep. He also said it split open like a thin sack of meat when his party tried to move it. The boy had his eye on sis at the time, so I would have taken this for a turn at catching her attention, if not for the red footprints his riding boots stamped into the snow.

Two years later and I was on the guard when Longan’s own daughter went missing. The Lord ordered Aril assemble a squadron to search for her on the Plain, and I was honored to be one of the ten men she selected.

The guard had been sent in search of the missing before, but this time was different. Trying to find your way through sledgegrass is nearly impossible without a compass, but it had stopped snowing two nights before, and the Lady had left tracks.

When we found the hole, and the tracks leading down it, I immediately felt off. This was my first time doing anything more than standing intimidatingly outside the Keep and overseeing training exercises. I should have been excited, or nervous, or something, but the hole…it’s like every feeling I had got sucked in. Aril kept a tight grip on complaining, but the silence as we dismounted was unusual and I knew the others felt it too.

We filed in after Aril. I was third in line behind her, and the licorice braid of her hair bounced against her fine silver armor. I focused on it thumping her back until we were so deep, we wouldn’t have known up from down if not for the torches.

Then we found the mirror. At the bottom of the pit.

It was just… hovering there, shining this lightning-bright light. A river the color of a clear summer sky trickled out of the rocks and reformed in a smooth, snaking trail to its base and seemed to flow into it.

The mirror was almost exactly wide enough for a person to stand in. I think about that all the time.

Aril ordered us to spread out all around it, so we stood in a circle gripping our swords, none of us sure what to do. We’d come expecting to gut a monster—a dragon, we’d thought—but this was strange enough on its own. I was standing to the side of the mirror, and it looked like a sliver in the air it was so thin, like staring along the sharp edge of a knife. The river didn’t reappear behind it.

No one was surprised when Aril hefted her shield and moved to stand in front of the mirror.

I had a clear view of her face from where I was—it was a face like an anvil, unchanging and solid. I’d seen her take a fist to the nose without flinching. I’d seen her bury friends without a shimmer in her eye.

I should have known something was wrong right away.

Aril began to look curious. It started as just a slight raising of her eyebrow, but then she was relaxing her shield arm, taking a half-step closer. I still wonder if I could have gotten to her in time if I’d moved then.

But then, Aril wasn’t just curious, she was fascinated. She had the look ma did the day sis was born, like no one had ever seen something so beautiful. I wanted to know what she saw.

Aril went from rapturous to horrified in a second.

She choked, dropped her sword and shield, and yanked at her armor. There was a smell, like the time our horse barn burned down. Smoke was curling from Aril’s collar; her hands were scrabbling with the ties on the side of her breastplate. Her beautiful silver armor was glowing brighter than ever, like the end of a cattle brand.

She screamed, and that’s what snapped us out of it. We moved to help her, but even as I drew my sword, thinking to cut the armor from her torso, I knew it was too late.

She was still screaming when her skin started bubbling, then splitting open. I watched Aril’s face melt and drip to the floor like wax.

None of us heard when she stopped screaming because we were already running, shouting for our own sakes. Someone stumbled and the only torch that wasn’t Aril’s fell into the water. I was blind, dragging myself along the wall, desperate to get as far away from the mirror as possible.

There was only one way out and we collided against it in a deafening clang of steel, but the opening was narrow. We’d had to come through it single file, and we’d have to leave the same way.

There was nothing but shadow in front of me, but I didn’t care, not when the only source of light was a flashing blaze behind me. It’s amazing, how it feels to pound against someone like there isn’t flesh beneath the armor. I tore my gloves clawing at the man in front of me. I’m still not sure who it was.

The flashing got brighter, someone started shrieking at the back of the pile and it seemed to never stop, his voice captured in that dark hole forever.

Then it got hot. The heat was at my back and more people were screaming, so many voices I couldn’t tell if one of them was mine. The sweat dripping down my back felt like it would boil.

It hit me then; we were moving out too slow. The few men up front were going to be the lucky ones—they might squeeze out from this chamber while the rest of us got cooked alive.

I was not going to be of the lucky ones.

Ma used to tell me this story about a man who thought he could cheat death. He ordered his servants to cover all the mirrors in his house the day he died; something about death not being able to find you if it can’t see you.

I couldn’t remember how the story ended—I still can’t—but it was all I could think about, so I closed my eyes and laid curled on the ground, trying not to move. I’ll admit I wept. My friends were tripping over me while they melted, sealed inside hot metal cans.

I just wanted it to stop… it did, eventually.

There I was panting, breathing ash into my mouth, and I realized I was tasting my friends on my tongue.

I don’t know how long I laid there, too scared to move. The mirror must have gone dark because eventually it got cold again, and when I tried prying my eyes open, I couldn’t believe how black it was.

I crawled to the surface. There were greasy black spots seeping into the ground at the mouth of the cave. They were the people who made it out ahead of me—not so lucky after all.

I don’t know why I survived. Maybe it was because I kept my eyes closed. Maybe I was the only one who didn’t look in the mirror. Maybe whatever monster was down there got full and got tired of watching me tremble at its feet.

The scavenger’s found me walking up the road the next morning. They thought I had been touched by the cold; I was shaking so hard it took three of them to help me onto a horse. All I could think about were the bodies we’d found on the road—they’d made it that far only to die nearly in sight of the Keep.

Some days I wake up and still feel it—that old worry that I haven’t escaped it yet, that my skin will start boiling and my face will slough off into my hands.

I left home after that. Ma was real upset about it, but I couldn’t stay on the Plain anymore. Not when every shadow between the sledgegrass looked like a puncture wound bleeding nightmares. I galloped my horse through the Partways so hard he had to be reshod at the next town.

I don’t know if the Keep ever stopped people going missing, or why they kept wandering down a hole to look in a mirror. I’ve never told anyone about it, only that ma and sis need to look after each other, that they should never go off the main road.

But those aren’t the things that leave me sleepless, all these years later.

From that first moment lying between the sledgegrass, struggling to breath, I’ve wondered what Aril saw in the mirror. Whatever it was, it was no dragon.

And when I wake up in the night, my wife and son still asleep, I come and sit here and stare out at the water. The way the moonlight catches a wave; it shines just like Aril’s fine armor. I still don’t know who gave it to her.