Rio pushed through the translucent grey wall, swimming through space and into the void.

“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Rio said.

Gio walked forward, outstretching his arms towards the formless barrier… and felt the wall. Although most of the detail was lost being so far away from a reflective surface, it seemed that the wall was still somewhat present.

“Uhh… how are you doing that? It still feels like a dusty wall to me.” Gio said.

“You can’t figure it out? I’m tempted to let you flounder for a bit, but we need to get going so I’ll have mercy on you. Use [Mirror Jaunt].” Rio instructed.

“OH! That… sort of makes sense? Maybe?” Gio exclaimed.

Gio cast the spell, not even needing to reference the page in his spellbook. The familiar pattern answered his call from his grandfather’s spellbook holstered at his hip. The wispy silver magic coated his body in a thin sheen of mana. Instantly, he was less solid… or perhaps, the world was less solid to him.

He pressed forward, and Gio floated through the wall as it formed around him, like moving through the steamy air in a sauna. Gio smelled the cheap construction materials as he passed, getting an unfortunate and intimate sensation of passing ephemerally through mildew, cobwebs, and decay, though subdued as it was by the weakness of the reflection in the corner away from the light.

Gio floated or perhaps swam through the air towards Rio.

“So… how am I not suffocating right now? When I use this spell normally, I have to hold my breath.” Gio asked.

“You also usually need a reflective surface to use it on. You’re still thinking about this dimension wrong. Just… look around.” Rio said, motioning to the starry abyss around them.

Gio paused momentarily, moving past Rio and floating through the space between reflections. He looked back, seeing the casino already fading away. What was once a sprawling expanse of ragged, once gaudy decor had become distant fragments of light. He focused on another pinprick to his left, watching as it came into focus.

A sparkle of blue light began to expand outwards, blooming into a panorama of color. A scintillating reef of glowing coral, bedazzled by shining geodes the size of boulders appeared before him. Gio’s window into this view seemed to be a large crystal of some sort, surrounded by a school of tiny iridescent fish with beady purple eyes. The geometric lines of the crystal warped the display, causing the image to stretch and contort away from him. Out past the reef, a colossal black-scaled beast with webbed appendages and a maw filled with ivory daggers quickly swam into view and began snapping up the school of fish by the dozen as they scattered, darting away in eye-catching formations.

Gio involuntarily flinched away from the scene, causing the image to fade as quickly as it came into view. Quickly, several other reflections bubbled up around him. A mote of light expanded into a reflection that was no more than an arm’s length all the way around. It became a dim display of neatly arranged silver cutlery, lit only by the sliver of light displaying a busy kitchen full of chefs in uniform.

Another star from the void came into view, becoming the quickly approaching underside of a bird, just before the bird splashed into it, rippling the water of the birdbath and then its image into incoherence.

The galaxy of reflections around him sparkled, as he let the light wash over him. He had been here before, in a mostly forgotten dream. He was like a grain of sand in a vast delta, allowing a pristine river of lights to flow through him.

This was the essence of the place between reflections. Perhaps the true nature of the mirror dimension was formless potential, waiting to become a copy of whatever the light touched in the waking world. Only by witnessing reflections did this place become shaped, and by being on this side of the mirror, Gio could see anything… if he knew where to look.

A dam burst inside of him as if the system woven into the core of his being had finally been able to let a torrent of information flow freely. Little pieces of knowledge intertwined with the connections he had just made on his own, reinforcing the nascent ideas into fully-fledged thoughts. At least part of this flood of information clearly came from Baphelus, as he felt his [A Student’s Dilligence] skill feed him a bite-sized amount of his mentor’s expertise, though thankfully not enough to distort his personality with the lich’s potent magical influence. Gio embraced the moment, basking in the sensation. He was only woken from his reverie by a soft chime.

-Bend reality with Mirror Mana.

-Travel to the Realm of Mirrors.

-Embrace your Reflection.

-Witness the Between.>

[Enlightened Catoptromancy] Y/N?>

“Incredible,” Gio whispered.

“I agree. I’ve been pretty excited to show this to you.” Rio beamed, floating up beside him.

“I mean yes, but also I just got a skill evolution,” Gio said, accepting the advancement.

[Catoptromancy] - Better Mirror mastery. You have an innate, mystical understanding of the way that mirrors reflect the world and the way that the world shapes Reflections.This is a learning skill.

The extrasensory input of his skill upgrade was almost staggering, but the headspace he was currently in was helping him adjust. The first and most noticeable thing that he felt was a new sense of how tangible the reflections around him were. Some, like the drawer of cutlery, were almost entirely tangible. Gio felt that he could reach into the drawer and pull out a spoon. He did so.

“You got a skill? What are you- how did you do that without using mana?” Rio asked.

“Dunno. Did you not get a copy of the skill when I got it?” Gio replied.

“Not yet. Maybe if I…” Rio started.

He reached out to Gio, and pulsed a little bit of mirror mana between the two of them.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“That worked! Whoa, this new sense is weird.” Rio said.

“You know, it’s kind of unfair that you get my abilities, plus a whole other class,” Gio complained.

“Trust me, when we sit down and compare statuses, you won’t be as jealous. [The Shattered Man] has some gnarly drawbacks. And besides that, it’s my racial trait that ties my status to yours. Not my class. And besides the point, if it weren’t for the mirror in the training room, I wouldn’t be able to do anything besides exactly what you do.” Rio said.

“Oh? What’s your racial trait?” Gio asked.

“It’s literally just [Mirror Construct - Reflection of Giorgio deGloria]” Rio stated.

“Huh.” Gio said.

“Yeah. Oh, hey- check out that one. I’ve seen it a couple of times, it always gives me the heebie jeebies.” Rio said, pointing upward.

Rather than craning his head to look upward, Gio pushed out with his arms, emulating a swimming motion to orient himself to see whatever was overhead better.

A giant mirror spider. The behemoth creature had twenty spindly legs, with ten on either side of its elongated carapace. Each leg was like a great tree, snapped in several places and joined together. Its body was a suit of armor made of silver chitin that made it nearly blend into its equally reflective surroundings, if not for its massive proportions. At the crown of its head, were dozens of perfectly spherical eyes, each of which looked like a drop of liquid mercury.

And mercury was abundant in the spider’s lair. A river of flowing quicksilver spilled from the ceiling, just underneath the glittering web the spider was suspended on. The walls seemed to spiral into bizarre patterns as if designed to catch the light. The room itself was faceted with interlocking panes of polished slates, giving the whole cavern a metallic sheen.

Gio and Rio shared a petrified look between themselves as their newest sense informed them in no uncertain terms that this reflection was in fact completely tangible. At any point, the massive spider could reach out and touch them. Another quirk of the skill let Gio know that one of its mercurial eyes was trained on the two of them, which was off considering the perfectly reflective surface bore no pupil, or identifying mark. Gio just seemed to know that the spider was watching and waiting.

While they were stuck in a tense staring contest with the giant spider, another reflection bubbled up from non-existence. At first, it was one tiny red dot. Then another. Then, a pool of red began leaking out into space. The reflection inside the bloody puddle was positively apocalyptic. The puddle first revealed the grim visage of a dead man lying on his side, with holes where his eyes should be. The man’s mouth was locked into an expression of sheer horror. The ruby sky above him flashed with crimson lightning, alighting a forest of blackened spikes, many of which seemed to impale a mangled body. Something came into view of the puddle. A rag-covered skeleton with glowing eye sockets that floated eerily through the air, like a sad puppet with not enough strings trying to dance.

At once, the skeleton’s lambent eyes locked onto the puddle, causing a wave of nausea and disorientation to roll through Gio. In the silence of the place between reflections, Gio could swear he heard the far-off sound of a heart-wrenching scream- a scream of loss, and pain, like a mother losing her child.

A sharp clack rang out as the spider clicked one of its many legs against the glassy ceiling of its dwelling.

Motion scared Gio out of his trance. A fast moving trail of quicksilver snaked through the image, moving all the way from the pool underneath the spider to the edge of whatever silver wall was projecting the image into the mirror dimension. Once it hit the edge of the reflection, a smaller spider emerged from the liquid, effortlessly crossing into the mirror dimension. It was still the size of a particularly large dog, but was much smaller than the massive spider. It seemed to have only twelve legs, but each of them looked like well-sharpened blades. Glittering silver eyes locked onto the red reflection, and it bolted out, quickly and effortlessly stringing up the image with gossamer strands of light. The spider seemed to move through the mirror dimension upsettingly easily. Its spearlike legs seemed to latch onto empty space, as it propelled itself three-dimensionally around the bloody image, wrapping it up like a defenseless fly with its many legs. Once the image through the web of light was no longer visible, the spider clamped down with sharp fangs, causing one mercury eye of many to glow red for just a moment as the ball of light in front of it vanished into silvery motes of mirror mana.

“I… uhhh…” Rio stammered.

“I think I get it. I don’t know if you can hear us, but thank you for protecting us. We won’t stay here for longer than necessary.” Gio said, bowing his head to the great spider.

Another two clicks rang out from the massive spider, and it began sedately moving through its web, slowly vanishing as it stepped into the wall, moving elsewhere in the mirror dimension. The reflection it was nesting in began to distort, as streams of mercury moved to follow the larger spider. Some seemed to flow out into other mirrors. Two smaller rivers of mercury flowed out towards Gio.

Once they reached the edge of the reflection, they poured out into space, becoming all manner of mirrored creatures. There were a large number of smaller spiders, but there were also irregular, fishlike shapes that had angular features, as well as other, almost avian or lizard-like forms. One such creature was a somewhat mechanical bipedal entity that had two muscular legs that ended in shiny claws but had an odd upper half. In place of a head, arms, or any sort of usual features, the creature appeared like some sort of stringed instrument. It had two bowing limbs that curved out from its trunk, and many silvery strings that connected its arms to its base. It plucked out a tinny series of discordant notes as it circled Gio, ending in a strangely cheerful twang. It paused as if surveying the two identical mages, and then dove straight into the drawer of cutlery, vanishing into the reflection of a serving spoon in a puff of silvery mana.

“Okay, well that wasn’t what I was expecting,” Rio said.

“I think it should serve as a good reminder that we’re still just small fry in the grand scheme of things. Even in the mirror dimension, where my class should be extra powerful… we still need to be careful. Whatever that red reflection was… nasty business. I assume you have some way to guide us back to your copy in the Crystal Ring?” Gio said.

Rio held out his arm, and a jagged line formed, cracking it into shards.

Gio yelped in surprise.

“Relax, it doesn’t hurt,” Rio said.

In between his now floating hand and his shoulder, a large, pointed shard of glasslike flesh spun around, pointing off into the distance at a precise angle.

“Looks like we’re headed that way,” Rio said.

“Alright. If we hurry, we should be able to make it back before anyone notices that we’re gone.” Gio said.

“No shot. Chandrika has already checked the mirror room. She’s looking for you.” Rio said.

“What?! It’s the middle of the night!” Gio said.