When the mirror fell towards him, Hugo didn’t try to avoid it. He knew the score. This was hardly the first time he’d gone through the looking glass, though, he noted that it was the first time he’d done so, lacking a reflection. He wondered how that would affect things this time.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. In an instant, he was transported from the room of broken mirrors to some Stygian abyss that was either deep underwater or somewhere in outer space. There were lights, but they were distant and blurred, and all they really told him was about the giant silhouette that lurked somewhere nearby.

Hugo pulled the glass shard from his side and held it like a knife, ignoring how it cut into his instantly regenerating fingers. A weapon like this was worth a little pain. When the first few eye stalks struck out at him along with their strangely distorted maws and sucker-covered tentacles, Hugo became a blur, slashing at all of them and severing from the body of the behemoth even as it roared in pain and outrage. That force might have liquified the organs of a lesser man, but it just made Hugo smile. He hadn’t been a lesser man in a very, very long time.

The carnage he left floating around him like a tiny solar system provided Hugo the clue he needed: which way was down in this topsy-turvy world. Even as he continued to lash out at any of the primeval appendages that got too close, he was swimming towards the surface or the edge of wherever he was.

He expected to surface on some dismal beach, but instead, he broke the surface to find the bright sun of his long-lost France. For a moment, a jolt of fear shot through him as he thought he would surely perish. However, when he did not burst into flames, he quickly realized that it was because it was not a true sun that hung above him but a memory of one. That was quickly borne out as he looked around and saw that he was standing in the courtyard of his lost and beloved Château Monmoreant.

He allowed himself only a moment to appreciate the gardens laid out around him immaculately in a way that he hadn’t seen since 1764. There was his beautiful hedge maze, and past it, he could see his kennels. As he spun around, appreciating the view, he even caught a glimpse of the long-dead Daphne on the third story, but even as his eyes began to well up at such a sight, he saw the fountain he’d just emerged from boiling and foaming.

“No,” he said flatly. “You will not taint the memory of this place with your presence, monster.”

The vampire’s force of will rippled out from him like a physical thing, and even as the tentacles erupted from the fountain sending chunks of concrete and stone in every direction as a miles wide creature tried to squeeze itself through a twenty-foot hole, time began to move forward for the imagined land as decades passed by in seconds. The Marquis refused to watch his beloved Daphne crumble into dust if she was still standing there, so he cruelly turned his back to her and instead watched the weeds invade his beloved gardens as the skies clouded over and darkened to the eternal night that he was so used to since he’d been bitten.

All around them, the world melted, and only the Château was constant, though it did slowly lose much of the beauty that it had in its earlier years. Still, even with fading colors and darkened windows, it had stood as an imposing edifice, lording over the countryside for over a century until the Germans finally came for it.

“Do you know where we are, Aazruthr’rhuren?” he asked the creature as he stepped back from its lashing tentacles while it rose ever higher. “Do you know when we are? If you wish to view the world and truly understand me, then you must go deeper still!”

What had once been a lurking leviathan was now a whirling tornado of eyes and mouths. It moved toward Hugo, intent of shredding anything that would dare defy it, and leaving nothing behind but flat, gray earth. The vampire watched it erase the whole world a few square feet at a time as he ran through the rear entrance hall and into the grand ballroom. It hadn’t been used in almost four decades, so a thick coat of dust was on everything, but he wasn’t concerned about that part. He was here because that was where the first shell had landed so many years before.

The monster was so fixated on who it wanted to shred and devour that it had paid no attention to when it was or how many tanks and artillery waited to break through the failing line of trenches to the east. When the first 15 cm high explosive shell hit the creature tearing its way through its home rather than shattering the hardwood floors like it did last time, Hugo smiled, but the success was only short-lived.

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The scene could no longer simply be called violent. Instead, it had become a storm of shrapnel, and even as the vampire tried to dodge the shattered masonry while avoiding the hungry tentacles, half of a brick impacted his left knee with the force of a cannonball sending him to the ground long enough for the tentacles to grab hold. A large one wrapped around his chest as two smaller ones seized his right wrist, trying to pull the mirror knife from his hand. Hugo resisted with all his might, and eventually, the thing was forced to yank his arm off at the shoulder to take it from him.

Hugo used that terrible pain to fuel his rage and ripped free of the thing’s grasp even as his arm started to regrow. Then he ran through the winding hallways that he knew even in the dark, buying him some time to escape the thing that chased him. When he reached the front door, he ran straight for the three Sturmpanzerwagen A7Vs slowly driving up his lawn. Hugo had nothing to fear from such mortal weapons, though he thought they would provide a good distraction for the monstrosity that followed him, devouring the world in his wake.

No, He was running to a precise moment he would never forget, and the one weapon that humans had ever created that he truly feared: the flamethrower. The way that this had played out the first time, he’d flown from his home in a rage to kill every last German that had dared to defile it, but he’d thought too little of their guns, and by the time he was only halfway through the trenches he’d been weak enough for a soldier to turn him into a bonfire. It had taken almost a month to recover from that wound, and it was the one memory that he would gladly feed the beast so intent on unmaking him.

This time he wouldn’t burn, though. This time he ran through the trenches in his torn suit and took the head of the Kraut even as it had the other version of him in their sights. Meeting himself was an odd sensation, but he thought that both versions of him handled it well.

“What is that thing?” his older version asked in French.

“Our true enemy,” Hugo said, belting on the fuel tanks of the weapon he hated so much. Half a minute later, when the watcher between reached the trenches and devoured the few remaining soldiers on both sides, they attacked. The remembered version of himself fought like a wounded animal, which he was, while the real version of himself assailed the thing with gouts of fire from 20 yards away, making it shrink in fear for the first time.

“Do you think that this is the only violence I can offer you?” Hugo shouted as the monster. “Do you think this is all I can hurt you with? You are vast but not yet infinite, and my centuries of pain may yet rival your leagues of power! How many eyes must I crush to render you blind?”

After the thing that should not be ripped the other version of him apart, it hesitated for a moment as the world around them stilled. Slowly the gunfire and the cannons came to a stop. In time even the distant artillery ceased, leaving the two of them in an infinitely flat and featureless field. Then suddenly, when he thought that it was going to unleash a second assault and force him to retreat back to earlier memories of wars fought with longbows and heavy cavalry, it faded out of existence, and its glowing red eyes became nothing more than globular clusters of distant stars, letting Hugo breathe a sigh of relief.

“I thought he would never leave,” Hugo said to himself as he went to retrieve the only way out that he could think of, the broken shard of mirror.

It took only a few minutes to find it among the short gray grasses and not much longer to stretch the thing into a doorway large enough for him to pass through. Still, once he was back in the space between all things, it became somewhat more difficult to find his way home. There were a thousand million worlds in the dark, and each of them had a million, million places and a million, million times for him to reemerge at.

Though there were other times that Hugo would have preferred to move toward, he had no way to find them. Half of those taken randomly would be during the day, resulting in an instant annihilation. Still, as he searched the void, he saw stranger versions of places he’d once visited.

He saw strange, almost Egyptian worlds of endless dunes and pyramids so large that they made the mountains behind them look small. There were also whole arboreal civilizations and cities made of glass tucked away in the blue forests of unspeakable age. None of those were home, though, and so he held onto the only thread that might lead him there, and so he moved past all of those bizarre sights and began to gradually drift closer and closer to the heartbeat of Josephine Green as blood called to blood across infinity.