Mirror Mirror

Wander for long enough, and it will find you, for the forest hungers just as every living thing does. There are many different tales told by many different tongues. Each carries a measure of the truth, muddied though it becomes in the telling. Many are kind enough, speaking of the healer who came for four months to tend the ill, asking only a small fee, or of the mysterious adventurer who could locate anything or anyone with a few words. Some talk of a fae being, a benign entity of a magical forest only glimpsed in passing or seen escorting the unwary out of the forest. Last are those who have only met her in passing, and these are the most known, as she does not seem ever to remain in the lives of others, and they offer rumors of witchcraft, or of a spider spirit ensnaring hapless travelers and attacking trespassers. Whoever she really is, all will tell of her woods, and of the terrible changes which have beset them. Once whimsical, they have turned quiet and dangerous, shrouded in an oppressive night. None may enter. Few have dared attempt it, and of these, all have come away bewildered and with a strange lethargy. Whatever tale has befallen them, it is as unknowable as their guardian. She herself cannot know or tell this tale in full, being, as she is, in the heart of it all. The true and full story begins once upon a time, and must be saved for another. In the midst, Mirror is far from her forest home, though nestled in a bed of moss. Dark curls wreath her face in a wild mass. They tremble and bounce at even her slightest of movements, or would if she was not still as a statue, her head bowed over three stones weathered and worn by time. She cannot make out the letters by sight alone. She does not need to. The placement feels familiar to her, and she is as comforted as she is melancholy in their presence. Only one thing breaks her reverie, and that is the fact that she cannot remember why there are three and not two. It should be two. Leaning closer to the third, she realizes why it seems so out of place. It is poorly carved from a stone much rougher than the other two. By squinting, she can just barely make out three of the words chiseled painstakingly into its dark surface: Her heart begins to race, but as she tries to clamber to her hooves, the graveyard begins to break apart. Her parents’ tombstones crumble into the melting ground. Hebe jerks upright, gasping for air - She is in her own forest, sitting by the pond. Her face is wet. Everything is dark. The dream flutters through her mind, slipping away faster the harder she clings to it. She is Mirror, alone in her woodland prison. A dull headache settles into the center of her skull. Has she been using magic? Could it have been more than just a dream? A frustrated groan escapes her. She tries to stand, only to find her limbs tangled in vines. Struggling makes their grip tighten until the thorns dig into her skin. Even when she cries out, they hold fast until she goes at last still and limp, straining for breath. Despair and panic should be fighting for control of her mind. Exhaustion has already won, however, for she feels no hatred or anger, only a vague sense of disappointment smothered by acceptance. She is tired. The ground she is knelt upon seems very comfortable, almost soft. When they weren’t tight enough to cut, the vines could almost be pretended as a blanket wrapped around her; she could cajole herself to believe the place to be… cozy. After all, she seems to be trapped for the moment, until she can loosen the bindings of the forest. What harm could come of it, really? She may as well pass the time with a nap. Perhaps this time she will dream of going home to her mother and father.

Another turn, another wall of thorns. Another path that leads nowhere. By now, Mirror has grown to expect it. She turns back the way she came without so much as a sigh to show her discontent. The warm summer air is bordering on stifling, now, with the thick sweater that hangs almost to the forest floor on her thin frame. Mirror is drowsy, and separately, she is tired. Tired of seeking a way out of her own home. Drowsy from the lull of crickets, little light, and warmth. The thought of laying down in the grass to rest tugs at her mind. No, that would be too easy. She knew well what would happen then: the forest, once her home and guardian, would cement itself as her prison. Time would be lost on her. Sleep would come and take root. A story came to mind. One she had been told long, long ago; the tale of a princess cursed by a scorned fairy. The princess had fallen to a sleep like death. All around her grew thick bushes and thorns to keep out any who might seek to wake her... How had that story ended? Nevermind. If Mirror's life were any sort of fairytale, she would stand no chance. She was the witch lurking in the dark woods. At best, a forgotten casualty of 'happily ever after'. Another little 'x' marked on another stone, placed in the center of a path. Mirror was back where she had begun. Another path ruled out. Aloud, Mirror spoke to the forest. "If your paths lead nowhere, I shall make my own, and all the worse for you. Trapping me here will not quell the fury that burns within you any more than it will protect me." Her declaration went unanswered. She scowled, briefly, and then turned her attention to what she could see of the sky above: it was dusk, streaked in red and orange like bloody spices. If only she could fly, she might be freed that way, up past the heavy boughs silhouetted above her. Discarding the thought, Mirror shook her head. She could hardly hack away to foliage and trunks that blocked her in, for they would regrow at once and with vigor...Witch that she was, a spell came at once to mind. It was one she had long studied. The will-o'-the-wisp spell. A guiding spell named for those mischievous spirits who would lead travelers to their doom, given the chance. Most often regarded as a caution against hubris rather than a spell, sometimes even thought to be a trial from ancient gods which would curse its user, it had been buried deep in magical archives, pieces of it planted throughout. Mirror had gone through much trouble to reconstruct it, but had never been quite willing to try it, however desperate she had become. Always, she had found another way. Now, with every other option exhausted... was it worth it? She could, theoretically, cast herself through the trees in little sequential fragments which would lead ultimately to anyplace on which she focused wholly. A single slip of her mind would shred her into a thousand little pieces, doomed to become one of those spirits herself unless she could force another to take her place. It would not do to dwell on that, not now. Total concentration was a must if she was truly going to attempt such a difficult spell - and one so spiritually abstract. For now, she had only to decide where it was she meant to go. ‘Out' was hardly specific enough. She'd be destroyed at once. Mirror needed someplace tangible to go; a location, an object, perhaps even a living creature, and yet she could think of none that gave her even a hint of the determination that she would need to carry out such a tedious and complex spell. Brow furrowed, Mirror began to follow another path through the woods. Until she had answered her own question, she would continue to search as she had been; path by path, turn by turn, step by step.

I never thought myself a writer. In truth, I never thought myself expressive at all. In being alone I forgot, perhaps, what it was to have someone to whom a fleeting moment may be explained, to be understood. Pen and paper make poor substitute for the beloved, but they are all that is left to me here, and so I shall write. Not a week may go by without that awful thought. It plagues me day and night, an abyss that I should jump into by ever entertaining, and somehow a siren’s call that I long to follow to a watery tomb. A tomb, I suppose, is too grand for my sort. I have become a wretch. To wallow is unsavory, but I am here alone, and it is only for myself that I write, and thus why should I not permit myself to wallow? Perhaps in putting this terrible truth on paper I will finally be at ease, and it will be gone from me. I hope this to be true. Therefore here it is: I regret that I live still. Moreover, I regret that I did not have the fortitude and conviction to end my life while I still felt some hope and warmth remaining. There were days and nights, many of both, when an ending of it all felt so tangible and near that it would terrify me by its ease of access. Always something forbid me; though I felt despair and misery deeply, Faith’s countenance would restore peace to me, and when she could not do so, I struggled with myself to live. I knew not always for what I strove. Perhaps it was only a fear of pain that prevented it. Now that I have lived and have seen all I once hoped for come and then pass me by, I am haunted more and more by the specter of regret and sorrow. It is the cowardly sort which I hate to admit, but to myself, I must. By now I am quite certain that only I shall ever see these treacherous words, only I shall ever behold my own cowardice in all its wretched appearance, and that gives me some comfort at least. I wish more and more that I should have been spared all of this heartache. Nothing at all seems to await me as a future. When I thought most that I should be free of life and should extinguish the hope that rested on a distant horizon, I fell to a sort of melancholy like a daze at first. It seemed frightful. Death loomed like a monolith, and yet_ I found a peace with it. On accepting my death, I felt peace and then even joy and comfort that all was to come to an end. I bore no more responsibility, had no potential to cultivate, and no more did I have to retain my dignity. I would have the ultimate of calm. It gave me happiness. And then, as with many things, it was torn from me, for I was bid to live and to continue on, and I did. They told me I had been saved. That I had gone mad and been rescued from my madness by they, my saviors, my guardian angels. I entreat myself now to remember with the clarity of that moment that I was not mad. My reason was sound, my mind unclouded. I was gifted with that which I did not want and even recoiled from because they themselves wanted life and could not believe that any in possession of their wits should not. Day by day I feel the weariness of a life I have abdicated. There is nothing I want. There is nothing I hope for and nothing I may achieve. It is true ultimately that I am without purpose, that I am dead already in spirit and soul but forced to remain in my own body and in this world which proves again and again to me that it does not want me. Where, now, are those who bid me live? They did so out of pity and out of selfishness because they think it inhumane that a madmare should choose herself to die, and that it would be a stain on their consciousness to allow her to do so, yet once they are sure that I live, I find the truth. They bid me suffer. They have not saved me but condemned me instead to hell, to fire, to damnation. To life. When these thoughts come to me, it stirs in the coals of my heart a raging fire. I am consumed by anger and grief. I hate, hate those that stand by to my anguish and only leap in when I endeavor end this torture that is inflicted against my will. Perhaps I am mad. I must entertain that when I am lead to wonder if perhaps I did really die that day, and that this, this is the torment of eternity promised me for my sins. Perhaps this is the punishment for my meaningless existence, and it is meaningless, I say not to ask pity but because in all that I remember and can recount, I find myself to have been a bystander in this life, to have accomplished nothing and failed all that was expected of me. I live in mediocrity; worse, in failure. This is what I now believe wholeheartedly. It is twofold. First, that I was never inflicted with a madness to so wish for my own destruction, and second, that in dying I should have been happier than in life. And yet still I live. It is so, and for that, there must be purpose. Shall I yet become something besides a miserable creature? I have no drive or ambition to do so. Nothing seems to give me fire or purpose. I feel a shadow of myself, lost, only scarcely attached by a thread. Trapped as I am in my home, having lost all I hold dear, broken to a thousand pieces, I cannot imagine any future for myself. It is inevitable. I weary of the sound of destiny tick, tick, ticking ever nearer, saying in its sickly tone that I shall yet be the bringer of my own destruction and still refusing to release me from the iron grasp of life. I despair and reproach it. I am indignant, angry, even maddened by it. My mind feels ever smaller by the day until I fear I shall be suffocated by the crushing weight of my skull. Each thought is a struggle, each moment spent awake more dreamlike than the last. I dare not sleep, for fear that when I awake, many years will have elapsed, yet I long for the gentle embrace of unconsciousness like a cool pond on a hot summer’s day. I only wish it were summer, that I should be too aggrieved by the heat to spare a thought for my own miserableness. That a blade of light should pierce through the ever present night wrought by the intertwining of the branches above me… how I wish for the sight of a blue sky. A happy ending comes to those who know best when to cut a story short. Regrettably yours, M. M.