Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  “How long do we have, do you think?” he asked.

  “What? Until the world ends?” Eira rolled her eyes. “You do know that this doesn’t really happen all that often, right? We don’t generally keep a schedule.”

  Marcus paused for a moment. Time spent adapting to Kendra’s more casual craziness had left him unprepared for another round with the Master’s biting sarcasm. “Can we stop it?”

  “I don’t know,” Eira said, and shivered. “I don’t like saying that. Maybe if we can stop Keithus and drag him back over here before too much time passes, there won’t be any significant damage.”

  “Why not just kill him?” Marcus said.

  “That – what? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “How would you know what I sound like, Eira?” Marcus asked dangerously. “You don’t know anything about me. Were you aware that Keithus and I had our places switched in our worlds when we were young, thanks to Viaggiatori meddling? Did you know that I was originally from the Mirrorworld, but circumstance forced me to grow up on Earth, under the care of his family, and vice versa? Did you know that he was from Earth, and that everything he’s done against you was driven by a desire to return to the life that your organisation tore him from when he was too young to know?”

  Eira had to admit that she had not known those things. “So.. that’s the connection?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “That’s the connection that you placed so much hope in. I have suffered the same experience as Keithus, but that’s as far as we are connected. Now I’m trying, I really am trying to be the better man, to let it go, but I’ve had a hell of a day so far and it doesn’t look likely to end soon.” Marcus stepped back and put a hand over his eyes, fighting down a horrible dark feeling that had been growing inside. “I just want to talk to him.. Maybe I can talk him down. I’m trying to not fall off the deep end, to set a better example, but it’s not easy.“ It was true. Accepting these problematic truths about his past was proving just as difficult as he’d expected, but he knew that, bit by bit, he was solidifying his desire to let it go and move on. The fact that Kendra was still here, bestowing upon him one of her smiles, helped a lot. “But if it comes down to it, I’ll kill him, and face the consequences. This is Death’s scythe, you know. That’s another thing I didn’t mention. The Grim Reaper’s own. He wants it back. If I kill anyone or anything with it, it’ll draw his attention to me.”

  Eira folded her arms. “Good lord. Anything else I should know?”

  “The Assassin is a bit dead,” Kendra put in. “Also, we lost Lucin, but he’ll turn up. Also,” – her voice cracked slightly – “we found Lit Kai. He died too. But we made his ideas work.” Her smile turned again to sadness, and Marcus felt moved to catch her hand and give it a squeeze. Eira observed this with an eyebrow raised high enough that the Assassin himself would have been proud.

  “What do I respond to first?” she asked, sighing. “I need a notepad. And a coffee. Ahh, there’s just not enough time. I’m sorry about Lit Kai, Kendra. I know you two were close.” She turned to Marcus. “I’m sorry we screwed you up so bad, I’m sorry we dragged you into this. But if you have an idea for anything that might work, then, well, this is our absolute last chance. The worst has happened, the wizard is on Earth, and no, I have no idea how long we have before everything collapses around us, but I’m damned if I’ll spend that time sitting around waiting for the end.”

  “I don’t have any ideas,” Marcus admitted. “I just don’t want to give up.”

  “Good for you,” Eira said. “Later, if we get a later, we’ll talk about this.”

  Marcus shrugged. There was no time for laters at this time.

  “Master,” Fervesce said, from where he had peeled off to the side, moving through and calming the Viaggiatori who were still alive and hadn’t fled the room at the first opportunity. “We who are assembled here will still fight. We have other allies, too. The trolls are no longer on Keithus’s side. They’re on the side of their queen, whose side is also ours, for now at least. I can follow Keithus’s trail to take us to him, on Earth, and hold the portal so that backup can come through after us. Although I swore that I would never do this again.. I’m good at transportation. I can help.”

  Eira nodded, seemingly past the point of questioning developments. Marcus stepped up, still hand in hand with Kendra, as Fervesce moved over to the mirror and started muttering to himself.

  “Chasing the wizard again, are we?” Kendra asked him.

  “Yes. For the last time,” Marcus answered. They shared a smile.

  “Wait!” cried a new voice, and they turned to see Eustace come running into the room. “Where the hell have you been?” Eira demanded of the old scholar.

  “Hiding, of course!” the man said, coming to a stop and panting heavily, hands on his knees. “You thought I’d stick around after telling you the wizard was coming? I’m not an idiot. I was hiding in my secret bunker that you’ll all promptly forget that I ever mentioned, but then the quake-“

  As if to underscore the point, the ground shook again, more violently than before.

  “No time, Eustace,” Eira said, as Fervesce stepped back and the mirror began to shimmer. “I assume you’re here because your morbid scholarly curiosity wants to know how it ends. That is not a healthy point of view, but, well, if you want to know, come on through this mirror with us, to the end of the worlds. Should be educational, if nothing else.”

  “Master,” Eustace said, with a bow, “it would be an honour.”

  Eira sighed. “Can I fire you, Eustace?”

  “No. I have tenure.” The sort of tenure that would probably survive the apocalypse, if Marcus was any judge. He could almost imagine Eustace sat at his desk, floating through a collapsed void of nothingness, carefully filing away all documents pertaining to the end of everything.

  “Fine,” Eira said, and turned to address the rest of the Viaggiatori. “The rest of you.. this is our fault. This has never been clearer to me than it is now. But I won’t force you to come with us. If you want to help maybe save the world, you’re welcome to. If you want to go find your families, feel free. If you just don’t want to, then that’s fine too, but on the off-chance that we do save the world, I hope for your sakes that you’re not still here when I get back.” The gleam in her eye was terrifying enough to send half of the crowd running for the doors, but the other half stood firm. “Alright,” Eira said, relenting slightly. “Thanks guys. Now, less talk, more moving between worlds to do battle with crazy wizards, please.”

  Marcus and Kendra stepped through the mirror together, and the strange sensation that this left in the mind instantly gave way to the perfectly bizarre normality of the bridge they found themselves walking on. It was of a white-stone pattern similar to the one that they had watched Rashalamn craft, thirty years ago, and with a start Marcus realised that he was now walking over the aesthetic legacy of the experiments that had indirectly led him to this point, and started to feel dizzy.

  The bridge was short; the exit mirror was already visible ahead of them. This was probably a good thing, because despite his efforts Fervesce seemed to be having some difficulty holding the bridge together. As they walked over it, followed by Eira, Eustace and the remaining Viaggiatori, parts of it kept detaching themselves, warping into random objects, and floating off. Or exploding.

  “Mirrorline feels.. angry,” Fervesce said, wiping sweat from his brow. “It’s under a lot of strain, more so than reality. I can barely hold this.”

  They reached the far mirror. Marcus paused, staring through the shimmering at his own distorted reflection. One more step, and he’d be back on the wrong planet again, returned to the heartland of his unenviable past. On this precipice he was gripped by a moment of indecision, seized by a sudden desire to turn and run, but it didn’t last long as Kendra either sensed his pause and moved against it, or just plain ran out of patience for staring at mirrors. Either way, she stepped through, tugging
him after her, and so, with a stumble and a curse, Marcus returned to Earth.

  They came out on a large stone staircase that twisted around the edge of a mountain, falling away before them to an expanse of forest far below, and almost fell over the blackened, charred corpse that was waiting to greet them. Kendra poked at it with a morbid curiosity as Marcus stepped over to take in the view. The forest stretched off to the far horizon, which was framed on one side by the further peaks of the mountain range on which they were stood, and was cut through only by the faint lights of a distant highway. Apart from the fact that the sky was a disturbing shade of purple, and that said horizon appeared to be fluctuating in height as if it were exposed to the melancholy snarl of a seasick heat haze, it all seemed very familiar; a scene that Marcus had seen before.

  “Oh Helm,” Eira said sadly, stepping onto Earth through the ornate mirror that decorated the mountainside, and providing identity to the broken body. “Another one we failed to save. I ignored him into being a hero, and this is what it cost us. Killed by his own creation, by the Mirrorline he only ever wanted to play with. Is that ironic, or just tragic?” She sighed. For his part, Marcus tried to feel some sympathy for the man, but he was too distracted, and hadn’t really gotten on with him in the first place. But whose fault is that? he asked himself in rebuke. It’s not like I was trying to be particularly pleasant person to be with when I was with him. Settle your debts, Marcus Chiallion.

  “Where are we?” Eustace asked, peering around short-sightedly.

  “Nepal,” Marcus said. “I’ve been here before.”

  “Why on Earth – hah – would Keithus come to Nepal?” the scholar asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said, curiously poking at the creeping feeling that was coming over him. Was it coincidence that he should end up back here, or was this an indicator that were still some greater forces at work? Did he even care? “Is this definitely where he came out? Right here?”

  “Definitely,” Fervesce said, stepping out of the mirror, which was but in reality only one small part of the many carvings that decorated the cliff edge. Marcus remembered it well from how he had marvelled at the fresco, which twisted alongside the length of these stairs from the ground far below all the way up to the nearby summit. He had gazed into this mirror for a while before completing the last leg of his initial journey here, marvelling at how peacefully it reflected the effortless dominance of the sky over the surrounding vistas. Now, that view was lost in a familiar shimmer, and Fervesce sank to the ground from the effort of holding it. “I re-opened the exact path Keithus used,” he said, breathing heavily, “or maybe it was Helm’s. Either way, I did it, and I made sure to keep the exit in the same place. Whew. Wasn’t easy.”

  “Where is this, Marcus?” Kendra asked, stepping up beside him.

  “It’s a temple I visited, back when I was, hah, searching for enlightenment. I told you about it, actually. It was where I met that strange old man who-“ he stopped talking, because a huge light bulb had just gone off in his head. “Oh.” He turned and started to run up the steps towards the temple.

  There was a peculiar haze to the air that Marcus didn’t remember from his first visit to the temple, a sense of weightlessness that lay seemed to lay across the breadth of reality, denying it substance. All around him, infinitesimal particles of existence were gently unhooking from each other, and leaving behind their earthly tethers for a chance to dissolve into the air. The world seemed less tangible when it was being eaten by the sky, a sky that was bloating into an uncomfortable purple hue as it lay lower and lower overhead. But Marcus persevered; vaulting steps that were gently surrendering their existence underfoot, he conquered the last of the mountain’s incline, moving through the remains of the gate and inside the walls of the temple. Here, he found Keithus’s orcs, allayed along the sides of the long garden that dominated the temple’s interior space, and the wizard himself, who stood at the entrance to the temple proper, atop wide steps at the garden’s far end, in the company only of an old man whom Marcus had met before, who he had seen so recently in memory. The two men stood framed by pillars, one tall, young, afire with madness, and the other old, frightened, kneeling in a gesture of subservience that was enforced by the problematic end of Keithus’s staff. The wizard wore a look of cold triumph, but it cracked into an expression of vindictive pleasure as he spotted Marcus moving towards him.

  “You’re here!” Keithus said. “I wondered if you might come. Do you know who this is?” He indicated the man next to him, whose eyes were downcast.

  “I know who he is,” Marcus said. He heard the sounds of allies arriving behind him, but didn’t take his eyes off the wizard. He was aware that he was stood in the centre of the garden now, with orcs on all sides that would descend upon him without a thought.. but he knew they would only do so at Keithus’s command, and Marcus was banking on a few more minutes of gloating yet. For now, they were holding court. “I know who he is, and I think it’s kind of petty that you came after him.”

  “What?” Keithus asked, a crack appearing in his cheery façade.

  “Look at you, Keithus,” Marcus continued. “You talked about returning to a planet that needed you, and taking up your rightful place, whatever that means, but the first thing you did was come here, to a temple in the middle of nowhere, to take meaningless revenge on the person you hold responsible. It’s not very elegant, is it?”

  “This is just the beginning,” Keithus said irritably. “In due course I will move to attain my rightful place in the world, and then I’ll show you some bloody elegance. But first, this. What this man did is unforgivable, and he must pay the price of his sins. Don’t you want to see him burn, for all he did to you? Or are you going to tell me that you enjoyed growing up on the wrong planet? That thanks to this fool and his foolish meddling you lived a wonderful life full of joy and hope? No, I don’t think so. We’re the same, you and I. I know how you felt about your life, because I felt it too. Well, here’s the man responsible. You want to see him suffer, right?”

  “No,” Marcus said. Thunder crackled, somewhere in the distance. “For a while, back there, after you showed me the truth, I thought maybe I did, that maybe yeah, our only choice was to be the same. We’ve both got a piece of the Mirrorline in us, after all. You know, while you got the infinite potential of possibility, which I can only assume gave you your incredible magical ability, all I got was the infinite part, a big old hole in my head that drowned all the good stuff and left me with a life of forced sobriety. So yeah, we may have both been forced to grow up in lives that weren’t our own, but you at least got lucky in the superpower lottery and were able to get drunk about it. All in all, I’m kind of surprised that we’re standing in the places we’re standing right now, because compared to me, you have nothing to complain about. Yet here we are; you’re the crazy one, so I must be the voice of reason, because, in the end, no, we’re not the same. Despite everything I’ve been through.. I don’t want to see that man die. I would never have wished destruction like you have reigned today.”

  “Really?” Keithus asked, in a voice laden with disbelief. “You forgave them?”

  “Oh no,” Marcus shot back, “don’t mistake my lenience for forgiveness. I know that something terrible happened to me and I’m not quite ready to let it go yet, but I wouldn’t kill. Ha, I’ve been forced to make a habit of not killing my opponents lately, and that’s probably part of it. But mostly it’s because someone way wiser than me told me that I didn’t have to go that way, and they were right. So while I won’t deny that Rashalamn made a mistake, I’m not going to wish him dead for it. He didn’t act out of malice, but ignorance, and that might not absolve him, but it shouldn’t necessarily doom him, either. How many of the people who’ve died today actually had a direct hand in messing us up, Keithus?” Marcus thought of Helm, of the Assassin, of the innocent people of Portruss, of all the lives that had been extinguished to pay for a sin they’d had no part in. “How many p
eople did you tear out of existence without caring to learn their names, their faults, their virtues? Too many. Who appointed you the judge of their worth? What’s the price of your revenge in innocent lives?”

  “Like I care,” Keithus said, and spat. “The Mirrorworld is nothing to me.”

  “Well it is something to me. It’s a place full of life, just like this world. All this emphasis on Earth.. you forgot that the Mirrorworld is just as real. But look, that’s not the point. There’s a whole bigger picture at work here, and no matter what you might think you’re doing, this is the truth of it. Look at you! You’re a wizard! You’ve come charging over to a planet where you don’t belong, throwing your power around, not to mention your mythical creatures.. and now, well, look.”

  Marcus gestured wide, taking in the walls of the temple, which were slowly eroding, the horizon, which was fluctuating wildly in its relative distance, and the sky above, which had begun to be filled with the same psychedelic Mirrorline clouds that had already claimed Portruss. There were no sounds of wildlife, no birdsong nor animal growls, just the unnatural silence of a world slowly dying, punctuated only by occasional rolls of thunder; reality groaning in pain.

  “You were wrong,” Marcus told Keithus firmly. “The Viaggiatori might not know everything, but they were right about this. Your being here is breaking everything.”

  “What would you propose, then?” Keithus asked, icily.

  “Come back to the Mirrorworld,” Marcus said, since it had to be worth a try, “and maybe we could do this properly. It doesn’t have to end like this.”

  “Ha!” the wizard snorted. “Why would I go back? No, no, no, I refuse your worldview. I don’t believe it. This? This is all Viaggiatori trickery. You want me to think this, so I’ll stop? Yes, that’s right.” His eyes took on a glassy sheen, and he appeared to be holding court with himself once more. “My dreams are all taking their rightful place in my waking world. Of course there would be side effects. Nothing bad is happening. Nope. I should continue, complete my vengeance, sort it all out. Oh yes..” The wizard raised his staff, pointing it at the side of Rashalamn’s head. The old man looked up for the first time, meeting Keithus’s eyes with a look of undaunted confusion, and for a moment the wizard hesitated. Then, his eyes narrowed, and with a roar, he fired.