CHAPTER EIGHT
The Sword Through the Mirror
For three days, I was ill. I could not return to the Red Forest and the only thing that brought relief was the water that I froze for myself.
I took a sip of water, froze it in my mouth, and sucked on it, allowing the heat to melt it on my tongue. I sat in my bed, repeating the process over and over as the water slid down my burnt esophagus.
From my bed, I stared out over the window at the mountain view. I tried to calculate how hard it would be to make a planet if you were one person tackling the project one step at a time. Order these molecules to make a mountain. Order this water to collect here. Move this, change that, and alter the face of a planet. It would take millions, perhaps billions, of years to accomplish.
I sighed. That was what the science books said.
I looked at the glass bishop Pricina had left in my room. It was a far greater reminder of what I could accomplish than anything else. Could I do something like that too?
I looked at the interior of the castle, the disorderly, madcap slabs of stone that made up the walls, and I realized they were disorderly because the lesser gods wanted to give a person like me a chance to practice reorganizing matter. I ordered a few of the stones in the wall using angry looks instead of words and organized them into something resembling a pattern, but it tired me. If I did that, I couldn’t freeze the water in my mouth.
No matter what knowledge the Other Christian had given me, I was still very new at actually doing it.
I was healing. My body was racing to heal, but the damage was vast. I couldn’t speak. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe. There was only the ice that I froze when it was on my tongue. It melted, but I froze it again when it was in my esophagus, and again when it was in my stomach. I felt some relief. It could have ordered the melted ice back up my throat, but separating it from my stomach acid was a nuisance. It was easier just to drink more water.
On the fourth day, I was a bit better. I could croak out words and my breathing was comfortable. I no longer felt like sucking ice chips and I decided to try traveling to the Red Forest.
I didn’t go straight to the heart. I went to my throat and oversaw the repair work that had already started. It was hard to describe the damage. It was different from other wounds I had repaired within myself on other occasions. It was like the damaged cells were warped instead of just broken. Staring into the dark lines like harp strings that made up my vocal cords, I realized the cells weren’t different because they were broken. They were new cells because I was changing. They were different because my body was moving away from producing the human cells it had before. This was the start of becoming something different from the inside out.
I could instruct my body to stop what it was doing… to heal the damage by making the cells the way they had been made when I was human, or I could let these new cells take control and spread.
The new cells made up a better design. I could see that immediately. If I allowed this to continue, I would no longer be fragile, but the process that transformed me into a truly immortal being would take a long time if I was the one in charge of the change. It would probably take the same amount of time it took to terraform a planet—millions of years.
I allowed it to continue.
I snapped my fingers to attention and ordered a clean-up of the area, which meant tying down nerve endings so I wouldn’t feel any more pain.
As I watched different parts of myself flail like ivy vines in the wind, I realized one of the reasons people gave up being immortal. They lost their nerve. Everything that was happening inside me was outside my life experience and expectations. It flew in the face of everything I had ever been taught to wish for or dream about. Those dead gods must have longed for something familiar, something that made sense to them.
I felt a stab in my chest as I thought about Trinity. She was the only thing I was leaving behind that bothered me.
Once I knew I had given my body enough instructions that there would be no more pain, I was eager to speak to the Other Christian and found myself standing outside the shrine of his heart.
Inside, he was pacing the length of his chamber, balancing the sword over his shoulders as though he were in stocks. Upon seeing me, he bounced it off his bare shoulders and caught it in his palm. He rushed to me and kissed me.
It was not like a real kiss. It was like the gut-wrenching memory of a kiss that couldn’t really materialize in this place.
It could not last. The feelings I had when I was kissed rolled around a few times in my stomach and dissipated. We separated and our eyes met.
“Do you know what happened to me when we pulled the sword free?” I asked, my voice smooth as butter—very unlike the way I had spoken when I was awake in the castle.
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He shook his head. “You left to rule your Red Forest. Didn’t you?”
“It looks different out there. What we’ve done has changed me.”
“As we hoped it would.”
“Did you know the pain I would suffer?”
He shrugged because he was helpless. “I couldn’t have prevented any pain you suffered and I didn’t make you eat the stones. They were a pleasure to eat, so there has to be an equal and opposite effect.”
I took a step backward. “There’s no way that the pain I suffered was equal to the pleasure I experienced eating those rocks.”
“It wasn’t just the pleasure of eating them that had to be paid. It was also all the knowledge you gleaned. You’ve practiced out in the real world, haven’t you? Moving stone? Shifting matter? Speaking to water?”
All of that was true. Perhaps it was an even trade, yet I still felt somewhat cheated. “You could have warned me.”
He tilted his head to the side and said, “I did. It’s just that every time you gain something, you lose something else. This time, whatever was capable of hurting felt it when you became so much more. Please remember this rule and try not to call foul every time a natural consequence crops up.”
I groaned. “I hate maturing!”
He waved to me to come to him and I did. “You’ve been asked to mature much faster than… pretty much everyone. I’ll let you complain. All you want. Go ahead.”
“It really hurt! It took me three days to heal enough so that I could come back here.”
“Only three days! You good girl! I thought it had been three weeks!” he exclaimed.
I pouted. “Are you mocking me?”
“It amuses us both.”
I stuck out my bottom lip. “What are we going to do with the sword now that we have it?” I asked dully, still weak from three days of agony.
“You’re going to break the mirror in my chamber,” he said with an adorable tilt of his head.
I took the sword in my hand. The Other Christian gave it to me with a grin. It was the first time I held it. In a different world, he’d be a delighted husband, handing his wife oversized scissors for her to cut the ribbon on the day of her boutique’s grand opening. As it was, he was handing me a black sword and asking me to stab a mirror.
I did not feel excited in the least. I felt weak, depleted, and sick at heart.
He put his arms around me and positioned me in front of the mirror. His hand covered mine on the hilt of the sword.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m supposed to split the mirror by impaling it? I get that part, but what is supposed to happen after that?”
“I will disappear because you are sending my information to the real me. You’re using your image in the mirror to indicate where you want to send the information. When you stab the glass, you need to stab yourself in the heart,” he said with calm, measured words.
“Stabbing myself in the heart seems like the exact opposite of what I should be doing,” I complained.
“It seems so, but you’re no longer completely human and many of the things we do to accomplish our means look like we’re about to commit suicide. We do it that way because they are acts that are not normally performed by humans. We have to do things that remind us that we’re not human or we might slip and allow ourselves to revert back to what we were. After all, we still look human. Besides, this is nothing. You’re attacking a mirror image, not yourself.”
I agreed and wondered what acts of self-destruction I would need to do in the future if I stayed on this path.
The other Christian continued, “When I arrive on the other side, I’ll repair your heart and get it to beat.”
“I thought you didn’t do anything in the Red Forest because you only control inert matter?”
“I don’t, but when I arrive, I’ll be able to relay your command to heal the cells there. In the same way you’re in my heart now, I’ll pull the blade through the mirror into the halls of your heart, completing the connection. Once I run out the door of your heart into my Red Forest, I’ll again become part of Damon Christianus. Christian will remember me and the next time we meet, he and I will be one person. The mirror will become like glass and you and I will be able to talk through it and arrange how we can meet again in person.”
“You’ll pull it through?”
“I’ll grasp the blade of the sword, cutting my fingers, and pull it through. You forged it with great pain and I’ll pull it through with great pain. The joy we’ll feel at the end will be on the far side of happiness.” He breathed fervor and fire. “Are you ready?”
“No! Will there be a version of me in the chambers of my heart when you get there?” I wondered loudly, interrupting his rush to get started.
“It’s unlikely,” he explained, slowing down. “Unless you deliberately planted a part of yourself there, then it is probably empty.”
“That sounds sad,” I said, plumping my lip out in a pout.
He looked at me twice, enjoying something about me before continuing, “It may be, but if we are very successful, by the end of this, all these broken parts of me that sit around here like dumb idiots will step through the mirror and rejoin my body. Then, these chambers will be empty too. Because I’m not actually supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be with my body, ordering matter, and bringing down the halls.”
With the hilt of the sword between both my hands, he crushed my fingers between his.
“I can’t wait to see you,” I said breathlessly, glancing upward at his set jaw.
“If you think I fell hard for you before, you should know I’ll fall much harder when I see you now. I’ll be your slave. Are you ready?”
I nodded, fearing what danger the real Christian was in, wherever he was.
The Other Christian let go of me and stepped back. “Drive it through the mirror!”
I backed up, unsure of how much force I would need to push it through. Running, I slammed it through the mirror’s surface. I should have expected it, but the surface of the mirror was not hard like a mirror in the real world. It was soft and fleshy and I felt an acute pain in my chest. Like the thinnest needle in the world had slipped between my ribs and pierced my heart.
I screamed and fell, clutching the frame of the mirror.
Then I heard the pounding footsteps of someone running toward me.