You growled and immediately went for another marble, but hesitated before deploying it, eyeing the space where that barrier had appeared with trepidation. “Bitch,” you muttered.

My heart had seized when you took the blast, the shadows churning at my feet, but seeing you mostly recovered I instead turned to the simulacrum of Zdenka and demanded, “What do you want? What are you?”

Zdenka raised an eyebrow, and then her appearance rapidly shifted to mimic mine, light hair and dark eyes, crone’s robes becoming a floral dress. My doppelganger smiled at me. “I am you.” She shifted again, hair darkening and form changing to take yours again. “I am her.” Then her form split down the middle, left half yours and right half mine, and she said, “I am no one.”

You gritted your teeth and pushed back to your feet, standing up straight and pointing Vorpal at the two-faced reflection. “Enamored of that phrase, aren’t you? No one, from cradle to the grave. No one lives, no one dies, no one is forgotten. Well I’m not no one, and neither is she.”

The gestalt entity laughed. “What would you know of the princess, Homura Bloodfallen? You don’t understand the first thing about her.”

“That’s not true!” I insisted. “Homura is the only one who understands me.”

The gestalt morphed to Ruzica and laughed at me. “Fool girl, you think she even cares about you? She’s just using you to get the throne. She wants to feel like she’s special, like she’s important. She’ll take any excuse to feel like she matters, and she’d burn that whole castle and everyone inside if she thought it’d get her a spot at the top of the world.”

You snarled beside me, brimming with rage. “They deserve to burn! There must be justice for what they’ve done to her. They’ll pay for all their sins. That’s what this is about. That’s what this has always been about.”

The entity shifted to a man I’d never seen before, tall and haggard, who you recognized with narrowed eyes and clenched fists. “And what of your sins?” he asked. The entity morphed again, this time a sickly woman who shared your eyes, and your expression grew pained before tightening. “Your birth is a sin,” she spoke with sorrow, “and it follows you forever.”

You clutched your blade and spat, “Do you think this will deter me? Do you think this will hurt me? Your taunts are empty and meaningless.”

The simulacrum of your mother laughed bitterly, and then your father looked down at you with cold fury. “No, I don’t think this will stop you. You’ve killed your mother once already, after all; if you hadn’t been born, she might have lived. You’ve known that all your life, seen it in the way I looked at you. And you’ve dreamed of killing me more times than you can count; you’d slit my throat and call it justice, burn with hate and call it righteous. But tell me, truly: what have you done to earn this life you’ve stolen at our expense?”

In a flash you were lunging at the entity, Vorpal surging with red and silver light, purple and green joining from spent marbles. “Go to hell!” you screamed, and as your blade neared the entity and its barrier sprang to life you shouted “Reversal!”

Sword clashed against shield, energy crackling and reflecting back on itself over and over, your magic straining against the entity’s, and for a moment I saw the barrier crack, but then with a final surge of power the magic reflected back on you once more and sent you flying away from the mirage of your father. You slammed into one of the pillars, hard, and slumped at its base.

“Homura!” I cried, and took a step toward you, but then the entity changed forms and took the shape of my father, King Dawnbringer, in all his golden glory.

The illusion of my father commanded, “Stop!” and despite myself I skidded to a halt, frozen by fear, paralyzed at the sight of a man I knew wasn’t really my father but still couldn’t stop myself from wilting before, just a scared little girl out of her depth. He shook his head, disgusted with me. “Look at the company you keep, my worthless daughter. You invite this mangy dog into our house, feed her our scraps, and then she bites the giving hand. Is it any wonder you’ll always be no one in my eye?”

It was like being back in court, withering under his scorn, the fires of rebellion snuffed out by his overwhelming presence. My shadows were growing more agitated, my control fraying as fear and anger and concern warred within me. I needed to help you. I needed to stand up to him. I needed to control myself. I could do none of those things, weak and worthless and helpless, and my shadows undulated and sharpened as they spun around me.

You propped yourself up on one arm, looking wounded and weary but still full of rage. You crushed a marble in your hand and stumbled to your feet, using the column to steady yourself, energy seeming to rush back into you as you rose. “You want a fight,” you snarled, “pick it with me. But shut up with these blatant lies. Reska’s not no one, and she deserves better than this—from you, from her real father, from every damned soul in that court.”

The false king morphed into the form of Luka, and then he smirked with his too-perfect face. “Tell me, Lady Bloodfallen: what does my sister deserve? Please, be frank with us. I’m dying to hear it.”

“She deserves respect! Reska is better than you, better than all those simpering courtiers, better than everyone in that castle and countryside and all the lands beyond, and she deserves to see that whole rotten kingdom kneel before her and chant her name in praise. She deserves to finally be acknowledged as a princess, not a pariah—and then, with my help, a queen. I will help her attain everything she deserves: hearts and minds and that Sunlit Throne.”

Luka laughed. “Oh, you really are a fool, aren’t you? Reska isn’t like you, Homura. You’re terrified of being no one because you can’t stand the idea of being irrelevant, unimportant, replaceable. You want the attention. You need the limelight. It burns you up that anyone in the world wouldn’t know your name. But Reska? She just needs to matter to someone, anyone, just a single person who will show her that she is loved and wanted. That she’s not no one to them. That’s what she wants from you, Homura, not any throne or crown. Can you give that to her?”

You didn’t hesitate. “Of course I can.”

Again, Luka laughed. “And that, my dear fool, is exactly what she fears most.”

And then Luka was gone, and in his place stood a woman I had only ever seen in sketches and paintings: my mother. Her face so close to mine in every curve and angle, her hair the same pale blonde, her lips the same shade and shape, every detail like mine but just older and kinder, crinkle lines around her mouth and around her eyes… those gleaming, golden eyes. Those eyes so unlike mine, those eyes that could never be mine.

“I am your original sin,” my mother told me gently. “I am the shadow that haunts you. I am the murder that cannot be forgiven.”

My heart pounded and mind went blank. I knew it wasn’t her, it couldn’t be her, I felt so stupid for reacting at all, but I couldn’t help it. The shadows writhed around me and lashed out at random, carving lines in the tile, and I tried to force them back, to settle them, but I lacked the composure.

The phantom tilted her head as a strand of darkness reached for her and wavered at the threshold between chamber and dais. “Going to kill your mother twice, darling?”

I couldn’t breathe, or maybe I was breathing too much, thoughts scattered like so much noise. You stepped in front of me as if protecting me, shielding me, face hard and Vorpal ready. “Neither of us killed our mothers,” you said with burning conviction that I couldn’t share. “And you are not Reska’s mother.”

“No,” the fake admitted freely. “But that doesn’t change how she feels, does it?”

I felt pain, guilt, grief, and regret. All my fault. The reason my father hates me. The reason the whole castle fears me. It was my fault, it must have been. A tear streaked down my cheek, and then another.

The image of my mother became an image of me again, and I felt relief that lasted only until she opened her mouth. “I feel what she feels,” my doppelganger told you. “I want what she wants. Why else would I take such relish in her anguish? I want to hurt her. I want to make her suffer. I want to make her pay for all her sins. I want her to admit the truth of her existence and every secret fear and yearning, and I want her to admit what she really is, deep down: a monster.”

You looked back at me with sincerity and concern and love that hurt worst of all. “You’re not a monster, Reska. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you are. They may call you a monster, but you’ll never be a monster to me.” My heart ached and I kept crying, unable to speak.

My reflection laughed. “She may not be a monster to you, but she is one to herself. Would you like to know why?”

“I’d like to kill you slowly, shapeshifter,” you remarked with tranquil fury, slipping another marble of crystallized magic from the hilt of your sword.

“Ha,” she said, and then I blinked my eyes and she had traded places with you, standing right in front of me while you were up on the dais. You tried to take a step toward us, reached for us, but you slammed against an invisible wall separating the room. You were trapped behind glass, and you shouted but your voice didn’t carry, though I somehow knew you would be able to hear everything the reflection said.

The false Reska grabbed me by the wrists and grinned with wicked glee, eyes turning pitch black. “You see, Homura, what you have to know about Reska is that she really is as dangerous as she tells you. She’s volatile. She’s a threat. She’s always on the verge of snapping and someone around her getting hurt.”

My shadows churned, swarmed, begged to be unleashed. I couldn’t move or speak, frozen, warring against conflicting emotions as I tried desperately to control my magic, to tame the swirling shadows. I wanted to deny her words, but how could I when I still couldn’t control my magic? I was proving her right just like I’d proved my father right when I stormed into the throne room, or dozens of other times that I had lost control of my magic like a child full of chaos.

“She’s terrified of hurting someone. Terrified of losing control. She’d rather destroy herself than risk letting another come to harm.”

The darkness was alive, liquid and solid and gas, moving around us and dancing to the song of my fraying psyche. A stray tendril brushed against her cheek and split the skin of a face that looked like mine. Horns sprouted from her head and grew, and the hands around my wrists became claws that dug in and drew blood, the same blood as dripped from her.

“But you know, Homura, that’s not what makes a monster. If Reska locked herself in a tower far away and hid from the world, alone with her magic and her fear and all her self-destructive tendencies, well, then she’d just be a tragedy.”

Horns and claws receded, and black tears ran down the false Reska’s face, her expression distorted in liar’s anguish.

With sickly sweet voice, she said, “What makes her a monster, my dear, is the exception: you.” My reflection became your reflection, lovely Homura, charming and rakish, with that signature manic grin. Her hands around my wrists weren’t harsh anymore, nor cutting; they were gentle, firm, and warm. “Hey there, princess,” she purred in your voice.

“No,” I whispered, pleaded, voice nearly too soft and plaintive to be heard. I wanted to beg her to stop, but that pathetic little cry was the most that could escape my throat.

“Oh, Reska,” she chuckled. “You’re so scared to let anyone in. Tou think that if you let yourself feel anything too sharp or too bright you might become just as dangerous as when you’re in a fell mood and your shadows start snapping.”

The darkness curled around her, vicious and hungry and scared and longing, brushing so close to her body but always retracting at the last moment.

“You think that if you open your heart to someone and let them in, they’ll go the way of your dear old mother. You have to keep to yourself, isolate yourself, stay lonely. You know that, to do the right thing, you should stay away from the pretty girl with dark eyes and a silver tongue. But you don’t. You can’t.”

She chuckled again, your silver tongue speaking her twisted words, and she winked at me with those eyes so dark and so beautiful. My shadows spasmed.

“You need me, princess. You need me more than you’re afraid of hurting me, and that is what makes you a monster. And the worst part of all? There’s some piece of you that still thinks that maybe, just maybe, just this once, you can let yourself love me. You can be loved. You can show me who you really are, monster and all, and I’ll still want you like you want me.”

She leaned in, letting go of one wrist to brush a lock of hair out of my face, her lips too close to mine. I felt panic and desire and confusion and need, desperation, but it wasn’t you, it wasn’t really you and you were watching from the other side of the glass. Her hand strayed toward my lower lip, tugged on it.

“And then—”

A tendril of shadow sliced the fingers from her hand and she stumbled back, letting go of me. I saw her face—your face—transformed with fear and revulsion as she looked at me with eyes full of horror beginning to twist toward hate. And it wasn’t you, it wasn’t, but she looked just like you and like every waking nightmare I’d ever had about the moment where you finally saw me for what I really was. I love you, I need you, I can’t lose you, I can’t live without you. You looked at me the way they all looked at me. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t go. I already knew the word she’d say next. I dreaded it. I was terrified of it.

“Demon,” she cried, and I lost control.

I screamed with all the anguish and longing in my heart, and my magic burst out of me like it never had before. My shadows swarmed your reflection, enveloped her, poured into her through eyes and mouth and skin. The blood from my wrists and the blood from her hand was sucked into the swirling vortex of darkness, black streaked through with red, and then it all poured inside until not a drop remained.

The false Homura shuddered. Her arms went limp. Her head drooped.

She looked up at me with pure black eyes and an expression of unadulterated adoration. “I love you,” she said. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

She took a step toward me and I cried “Stop!” and she did, going still and silent but still staring at me like I was the most beautiful thing in the world.

I wanted it to be part of the entity’s game, another trick, another ploy of the labyrinth to break me down, but it wasn’t. I could feel the strings wrapped around her mind, her body, her very soul, and winding back to mine. I reached out to her with my will like I would to shape my shadows and found her just as pliable, just as malleable.

I willed her to step back, and she did. I willed her to change shape, and she flitted through forms until I had her stop on my own. I released my direct control, letting her move and speak again, and found the strings still there waiting to be plucked, like the strings of an instrument or those holding up a marionette.

“I love you,” she said again. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

I threw up.

I was horrified and reeling, shaken to my core by the atrocity that my own magic had somehow wrought. Why can I do this? How can I do this? What’s happening? No, no, no!

I knew then, that I had to be a demon, and all those hateful words from everyone in the castle had to have been right all along. What else but a demon could have done something so monstrous to another living soul?

When the contents of my stomach were emptied onto the cathedral tile, when at last the chaos in my thoughts was parted by remembrance of necessity, I clung to the nearest pillar and looked back at the reflection, and at you still trapped behind the barrier of glass.

With rasping voice I commanded, “Let her out.”

The entity complied immediately, halting her mantric repetition of love to wave a hand and shatter the magical shield. You took a cautious step past the threshold line, then another, and then you looked at the entity with undisguised fascination.

“What did you do to it?” you asked me.

“I don’t know!” I nearly sobbed. “This shouldn’t be possible, this—this isn’t magic that should exist. The soul is sacrosanct, Homura, and to defile it like this is the highest taboo. I’m a monster. I’m a demon.”

“Woah, hey hey hey, it’s okay, you’re okay.” You rushed to my side, finally registering how much distress I was in, but when you got close I shrank away. I was shaking.

“D-don’t come any closer! I don’t know what I’m capable of. I-I don’t want that to happen to you.”

You stopped. You looked at me with rapidly growing concern, and you bit your lip, silent for a moment, but then you resolved on a course of action and found your words. “I’m not afraid of you, Reska,” you said gently. “I’m not going to turn on you. And whatever happened here, it doesn’t make you a monster. Okay?”

I nodded tentatively, not truly believing you but desperately wanting it to be true.

“Okay.” You looked back at the entity bound up in my strings, which had returned to repeating its love for me. “If you can control it, then you should, because that’ll be a lot easier than trying to beat it in a fair fight. Have it send us out safely and then destroy the labyrinth on top of itself.”

My instinct was rejection, shock, an insistence that it would be wrong to do that, but I couldn’t voice those concerns. Not when you were defending me, comforting me, still by my side even after seeing what my magic could do to others. Could do to you, if I lost control.

So I nodded, and I gathered myself, and then I gave the false Reska its orders. I was expecting it to argue, to disobey, to have any kind of negative reaction to being to told to kill itself for me, but it didn’t. It just told me that it loved me, and then I was back in the estate bedroom, the mirror gone, with you by my side. The labyrinth was closed, destroyed, and that manor was the only physical mark it had left on the world.

My stomach tried to rebel again, but it was empty, so I dry heaved in a corner of the bedroom as more tears ran down my face. You were there, keeping the distance I’d asked for but as close as you could be within that range.

Through broken, sobbing laughter I told you, “I really am a monster. A demon. An abomination. It was right. They were all right.”

You were silent, and that silence stretched on and filled me with fear. I was terrified, despite all your reassurances, that this would be the moment I lost you.

Instead, you asked, “Does it matter?”

“What?” I turned around, shocked enough by your question that I could finally look you in the eye again. “What do you mean, ‘does it matter?’ Of course it does!”

Your expression was firm, your surety as unwavering as ever. “The thing back there, the shapeshifter, it said that you just want to be important to one single person in the whole world. If that person is me, then listen to me, Reska: I don’t care if you’re a monster. I don’t care if you’re a demon. Neither of those things change how I feel about you, and they never could.” You paused, gave me one breathless moment to process what you were saying, and then you asked, “May I touch your hands?”

My brain was full of noise, thoughts scattering at random, full of fear and hope and terrifying possibility. Slowly, I nodded, and you gently reached out and took my hands in yours, holding them. You were warm like sunlight breaking through the clouds on a cold and stormy day.

“You don’t have to be afraid around me,” you said, voice so caring and gentle. “You don’t need to worry when I’m here. And you don’t have to hide your feelings from me.” You tilted your head. “Was that creature right, when it said that you want me, and that you want me to want you? As more than a friend, closer than that, something more… intimate? Something carnal and romantic and deeply loving?”

My eyes were wide, my voice stolen, but my body betrayed me with the deep blush reaching my cheeks and the hitch in my breath at each forbidden word.

You smiled, and then you asked, “Reska Ines Zelic, greatest sorcerer of the era, my dearest, closest, most beloved companion… do you want me to kiss you?”

Somehow, I found my voice, ragged and breathless, to reply, “Yes. Very much yes.”

So you did. It was my first kiss, and it swept away all the dark clouds still lingering in my mind after the horrors of the labyrinth. You left me dizzy and lightheaded, and when you broke away to let me breathe you smirked at me, clearly knowing the effect you were having. You asked, “How was it?” and I babbled, and you asked, “Do you want more?” and I begged for it.

One kiss became another, and then more, wandering hands and skin against skin, and we fell into the bed of that room and stayed there as the sun set outside, our bodies intertwined.

I fell asleep in your arms, and that night I dreamed of the doors again.

In the morning you made breakfast for me, a skill I’d never really learned, and it filled my heart with joy, but you could tell that I was still pensive about something. I assured you that it wasn’t about me being a demon or about the new power I’d discovered in that final room of the labyrinth, but you still wanted to know what was I was thinking about, so at last I told you.

“You mentioned, before, that you’ve been having strange dreams since arriving in this world. Well, I’ve had a strange dream since I was small—a nightmare, repeating with only minor variation every time. I don’t have it every night, but it never really goes away. In this nightmare, I’m wandering the castle, down a hallway I’ve seen while awake, and when I turn the corner I see a pair of black doors. There’s always someone in front of the doors, someone I know. Sometimes it’s Luka, sometimes Ruzica or Emil or my father. Sometimes it’s my mother. They all tell me the same thing: don’t open those doors, I musn’t open the doors. Every time, in every dream, I don’t listen. I open the doors, and I see something that changes me. Whatever’s on the other side… it shows me what I really am. And then the castle is drowned in darkness, and everyone dies screaming, and then I wake up.”

You sipped from a mug of tea and considered what I’d said. “Have you ever gone looking?”

I hesitated, but then I answered, “Yes, once. And I found them. The doors are real, though I’ve never seen anyone go near them. I don’t even know if anyone else can see them. I… I’ve only told one other person about those doors: my brother, Luka.” I winced at a painful memory, and you caught it.

“What happened?”

“The night that I found my third affinity, I was inconsolable. I knew that, as soon as the court found out, my life would be over. Luka was the one who comforted me, who promised that he’d stick by me, because back then we were still close. I shared so much with him that night, and I told him about my dream, and about the doors. He said that, if he was the one to open them, then it would be fine, right? So he promised to go look, and to tell me what he found.”

“And then?”

I was quiet, lost in remembrance, not even picking at the breakfast you’d made. You didn’t push, letting me find the courage to relive that awful moment in my life. “The next morning, the whole castle knew about my third affinity. Luka had told them all, and my life as the king’s daughter was over. I went to sleep that night still clinging to hope, and I woke up that morning to see it dashed on the rocks of my brother’s betrayal.”

Your eyes flashed with anger, body tensing. “Bastard. We’ll wipe that smug grin off his lying face. I promise.”

I laughed, bittersweet. “Thank you. But… I don’t know if it’s really his fault. I fear, sometimes, in the early hours after I wake from that dream, that it’s all my fault. Maybe he did open those doors, and maybe what he saw inside is what drove such a wedge between us. Was it really all a lie, the moments we shared before that cursed morning?”

We finished our breakfast in silence, and you offered to take care of the dishes while I relaxed in the manor study. It was cute of you, almost quaint; we didn’t even know if the estate would stay standing after we left to return for the castle, but you insisted on cleaning up after yourself.

I tried to read something, though my thoughts were still elsewhere, and at last you returned to me, mug of tea still held in one hand. You sat beside me and said, “We should open those doors.”

I blinked at you, surprised and dismayed. “Homura, did you not hear my story? Opening those doors is the last thing we should do.”

“I’m not convinced. If they hold answers that you’ve spent your whole life looking for, you deserve to hear them. And before you say it: I know you’re probably worried that I’ll betray you like Luka did, but I won’t. I promise. Nothing beyond those doors could possibly make me turn on you, Reska.”

You reached out a hand to pat mine. I wanted to believe you, but I was still so afraid. I felt so fragile and vulnerable in our newfound intimacy, and I didn’t want to do anything that could risk that going away. “You don’t know that. We can’t.”

You shrugged. “I know myself, and that’s good enough for me. But if you don’t want to come with, I can just open them myself and tell you what I find. Wouldn’t even be that long a walk from my bedroom back in the castle.”

I sat up straighter and stared at you with alarm. “What do you mean? Do you know where the doors are? Have you seen them?”

You pounded back the rest of your tea, wiped your face, and said, “Of course I do, and have. I found them the day we met.”