image [https://i.imgur.com/UvduvtT.png]

It was some time before my hands stilled their shaking as I led Spinner on through a mixed commercial district rich with guildhalls and enchanteries, streets pockmarked with alleys and the small ivory stone lunar shrines waiting patiently for evening prayers. What troubled me was not Ro'kash’s hatred, but that he seemed to know me in a completely different manner than before — the grudging hatred of a colleague. Not only that, but when I'd last seen him he was traveling in the service of the southern Mane.

The crowd thinned and I noticed for the first time the many proclamations hanging impaled by ivory lampposts. Each was unique and handwritten by scribes of His Holiness the southern Mane’s court. I was too afraid to stand in place to read, but glanced to find increasingly bizarre and detailed instructions on dress, postures to employ while eating, and the optimal practices for personal hygiene that seemed anatomically unsustainable. In all this time, the palace towers grew as I stumbled through unfamiliar streets towards my north star, until in a single revelatory moment the street opened into a windblown parade ground surrounding the Mane's palace. Something about the sight of the enormous structure on a bare field after everything I had seen up until that moment, made it all click together in my mind. The mirror, the claims about me, the constant confusion. For the first time I truly acknowledged what I was walking into, and realized a part of me had known I was coming here for some time.

I circled around the column of petitioners, diplomats, and merchants before a bronze portcullis. I had eyes only for the towering structure itself and the egg shaped metallic mesh propped betwixt the four towers which whistled and tweeted with the cries of countless birds trapped within, their white waste dripping off the pale stone structure below it like cake frosting.

The gate guards saluted as I hailed them. One, who I took to be the sergeant by the red feather plume crowning his helm, threw down his spear and ran up to me, calling: "Fate Binder! Was this one robbed? Call a —"

I waved my hands and begged them to spare themselves the effort. I spun the same tale of head injury and asked if either of them could assist me to my residence, claiming I was feeling light headed (and putting on a bit of a show of it in all honesty).

The pair exchanged a glance but I was relieved when the Sergeant gestured to open the gate before coming to my side to hold my elbow. I clutched my head for dramatic effect as the portcullis rumbled open, leaving only a set of long bronze teeth hanging above the shaded entrance hall.

Spinner's reins were passed to the other guard with promises to see her safely quartered. After seeing Spinner dance about in her way, his companion asked if the animal had also been struck in the head.

"No, but she saved my life. See her well taken care of won't you?"

Both men assured me my will would be done and we proceeded inside. I nearly had a heart attack at the threshold as a lynx-woman no taller than my hips called out in a booming voice:

"Let those who enter the Palace of Perfected Fortunes do so with their right foot, and leave behind the ill-favored dust of the world beyond!"

I must have looked a bit cross at the little creature, who looked back at me with equal perplexity. The Sergeant, to his credit, guided my foot as if I were a child to ensure I entered correctly before ushering me deeper within.

My heart was pounding as I was whisked down long corridors of ivory stone, carpeted in alternating patches of crushed salt crystals laid in peculiar runic arrangements and long crimson rugs stained white by tracked powder from the former. A haze of rosewood incense, and everywhere were servants clad also in white with small bells ringing down the lengths of their sleeves.

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I was almost immediately lost and would have been helpless without the Sergeant’s escorting grip as hallways shrank and grew in a manner no man would have designed — with here a knee-height passage and there a cavernous hall better suited to bears than bipeds. It was more insect colony than palace.

Soon we were trudging up spiral stairs which were lightless even at the sun’s height and I tripped, catching myself painfully on hard stone. I finally thought to use my magelight, putting an amber pall over the stone corridor. My companion apologized for my misfortune, but his cat eyes seemed to have no need for the additional light.

I arrived breathlessly at the door to my supposed home and dismissed the Sergeant with genuine gratitude. He seemed reluctant to leave me in my condition, but did so at my insistence. I waited until the padded echo of his footsteps faded into the darkness.

The amber-lit wooden door before me had dried bone white from decades spent withering in Dune’s air. It was mechanically unlocked, but running my fingertips over the dimpled iron handle I could feel the charge of an enchanted seal, likely a trap as well, the static charge of it raising the hairs on my arm.

Swallowing, I clenched the handle and thumbed down the release. As I suspected, it responded to me as its master, swinging open of its own force.

Sheer curtains billowed half heartedly in a breeze from the balcony, casting the room the color of red stained glass as unfiltered glimpses of sunlit cityscape beyond winked out from between them. The smell of dusty cloth, a low table surrounded by pillow seats, strewn with pages of half written notes pinned under bezoars, and mirrors — the mirrors were everywhere and of every era and kind: Bosmer sheet glass in stitched hide-frame hung on the walls, square imperial wrought mirrors tesselating the ceiling, a standing mirror facing me was framed in gold with the figures of naked women dancing down its arches, their flowing hair inlaid with rubies and amethysts. I winced at my emaciated face staring back at me from within. I hated mirrors, and none more than the single covered one which I knew best. It hung completely obscured under a midnight black shroud on the far wall, but still I knew it. The Miser’s Mirror.

I entered, and the padded tips of my toes poked through the sock fronts so that I felt the cold of the stone. Pacing around the table I peered into a dark and silent bedchamber. An overwhelming silence.

I shut the door before seating myself on a cushion and leafing through the papers strewn about. Petitions for visitation to various courts of the Elsweyr, oaths of loyalty received, and a few bald bribe offers to tribal chiefs to serve the Mane of Dune over his rival. They were all of course already signed by the hand of Berry Longfellow.

I made use of the lavatory, poured myself a glass of water in the kitchen, and went to the balcony to wait. The dry wind felt more familiar to my cheeks. Below, earthen rooftops glared back at me in the afternoon sun, the many neighborhoods of Dune formed like the cells of a halved citrus and converged towards the sunken bazaar at the city's center.

It was probably only a half hour until I saw him approach by way of the bazaar, down the main road rather than the winding byways I had stumbled down. A man in a cloud blue robe leading a party of twenty sabre-tooths, half of which were mounted by bipedal Khajiit lancers. They marched ever closer, but never so much that I could make out his face until finally they were obscured by the bird waste covered palace below as they reached the gate.

I could only imagine the conversation happening at the gatehouse at that moment. I finished my water and considered fleeing again — perhaps it was not too late to pocket a few rubies from that golden mirror, sneak out, and after offloading the stones for a tidy profit in the bazaar, book passage home to Anticlere and forget the whole thing. I could take a new name, and surely there would be some rural enchanter desperate enough to take me on as an apprentice. I'd no sooner thought this than cursed myself for cowardice before sitting cross-legged in the manner of a sage at his table and waited.

When the door sprang open he was alone and lingered back a few steps like a child regretting some prank, now summoned by a parent.

He was, of course, me. But he was clean shaven and had a softness to his unburnt cheeks which if I'd ever possessed had been lost in the weeks prior, and there was something terribly sad in his red rimmed eyes. We only stared at one another for a moment, neither of us completely shocked and yet unable to bridge the gap. He stepped in, right silk slippered foot first, before pressing the door shut with a click.