image [https://i.imgur.com/pMZm76y.png]

As thrilling as my progress was in getting His Perfection to agree to send an ambassador (although there remained a great debate to identify a candidate) I was not satisfied with that single avenue to success. I had, through the long nights and nearly napless days, dedicated myself to a cover-to-cover reading of Eophicles' Treatise on Lunar Causality.

By candlelight each night I'd reread his treatise in the hopes it could shed some light on ways I could prepare the ambassador to propose peace based on how it had been achieved in the past when there had been multiple Manes. A part of me feared also that there would be a place for the Miser's Mirror, that engine of chaos, in forestalling an all-out war.

This was fostered in part by a revelation from the book. It was related that Eophicles had once led a faction of priests in propitiation of the ur-daedra Hermaes Mora for assistance in solving the mystery of the twin manes — begged his pity for those who could not see, who did not know the path to knowledge. This ritual took place on a high mesa. They shaved their bodies and fasted, silence broken only for self-flagellation and similar abasements for three days and nights until the eye of the demon of knowledge made itself known by a small rain cloud that shaded the shaved mer and catmen.

Sweet rain from a single cloud fell on them which they cast their heads back, open mouthed, to receive it upon their tongues. As the storm cloud cleared away and the dirt dried, a lone pool remained on the ground — a perfect reflective sphere, a pitying tear from Hermaeus Mora.

Eophicles recited how on his return to Senchal he struck the tear flat with a malachite tipped hammer until it was flattened into a small mirror with which he could divine the unknowable — and see all the permutations of how a person could be seen.

I was both shocked and reassured to see this. Somehow it all made sense.

Otherwise it was fruitless. Every time the story just droned in about Eophicles’ meandering journeys across Elsweyr to test the Manes, this way and that, without any conclusive evidence. And the third time I finished the tome I hurled the damn thing onto my bed in a black rage. I quaffed the last of the brandy I had been nursing and nearly scolded the inanimate thing. As I stood over it, for the first time in a long time, I remembered my promise to the bookseller to fill those final empty pages. It wasn’t that I hadn’t asked around. His Perfection, Aiera, even the gray furred scribes all had no memory or record of Eophicles. It seems he had made less of an impression on Elsweyr than it had on him.

I went so far as to take up a quill, flip through dog‐eared pages until an expanse of bare yellow lay on the bed before me. I thought of a few cheeky conclusions I could jot down to meet my obligation, something to the effect of 'And then it all went to shit'.

But something stayed my hand. This book was a priceless artifact after all. Perhaps there was some method to write on the book without truly marking it so as to preserve its historic value. I paced my room and contemplated this for a moment, for there were means both magickal and chemical I knew for this purpose. I debated and fussed over their various applications until it struck me that Eophicles might have done the inverse — written the conclusion in a way obscured to the unlearned eye.

I tried a charm for clarity on the spot (I kept a dry-grass fetish in my desk drawer for that very purpose), only for the pages to lay before me idle as lutescent flower petals. A prayer of true-sight, an incantation of ink incandesce, and spell of letters all were cast onto the inert tome to no effect.

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Frustrated but undeterred, I took the stairs to my deviator brother's apartment to rant about the possible meanings hidden within. He folded up whatever he'd been writing. "What does the book matter?"

“It matters because he solved the very problems we face, supposedly, and yet there’s no record of him. Doesn’t that interest you?”

“Perhaps his existence was only relevant in the world as it was where you were originated? We don’t fully understand the consequences of Strangering the world.”

“So the last lines could have unwritten themselves? That seems a bit of an elaborate contrivance.”

“The world’s an elaborate place.”

I wasn't convinced, but he roused himself anyway to assist as a kindness to me. We tried everything to scry meaning from the book: sprinkled the pages with dirt (which would rouse nirnroot sap ink to a blue glow), he held the book wide over me as I laid back on his carpet in case the text was gravity bound (another common wizard trick for private writings), and even spoke to the book as friends, cajoling it to share its characters — all to no avail. My brother and I, who were both indoctrinated into magickal orders and had at one time studied secret texts for a living, were uniquely qualified for the task yet failed anyway.

As we attempted a dry scry by suspending the treatise by string over a low brimmed bowl of ink (a bibliomantically advanced technique by which an enchanted book might summon ink back into itself), another idea struck me — one unique to my brother’s theory.

“Could we read the pages in the mirror.”

“We’ve already tried that.”

“No, I mean with the Miser’s Mirror.”

My brother hunched. "Trust me, you don't want to look into it again…"

"Just a quick glance. What if it is manifested in a world I perceived before, it may appear yet again to me."

"It's possible… but I don't think it's safe for us to both look at the mirror together. Since we are repetitions of a person believed missing by the god’s order it’s possible that if both, or perhaps either of us were to be fully reflected — that is observed by the astrological order — we may be vaporized to bring about a Stranger Singularity."

I swallowed. "I know. Well then just off of reflected light, or even just a quick glance at its reflection through an intermediate mirror to see if any text appears. You can stay out of sight for a moment."

He agreed, stepping into the hall. I wrenched the Miser's Mirror off its wall hooks, careful not to disturb the clasps which secured its black shroud. It was heavier than I remembered, heavy for a grown man in a way it never had seemed so as a child. I wondered what I would see if I stared directly into it; a translucent copy of my deviator perhaps.

I took the book down and set the ink aside on the table. From my brother's ceiling I cracked off a small wrought iron hand mirror that I could hold in my left hand towards my face, while in my right hand angled the Miser's Mirror at a forty-five degree angle towards the open page.

I released the shroud clasps and blackness light as windblown sand fell over my wrist. Heatless sweat dewed my brow as I angled my left hand mirror until the reflection went past the gilded ouroboros rim and into the heart of the Miser's Mirror. In it I saw a reflection of a reflection, there lay pristine white pages, unmarked, the fingers and quill tip of someone else's hand hovered over them. My heart skipped, my eyes moving of their own will away from the mirror to see the empty room that surrounded me.

I forced myself back into that mirror. The hand tapped, and then pulled away, leaving the page bare. I swallowed and stared on, but was about to lay the mirror down when the whiteness shifted, a crease forming on one side, or was it a shadow? The crease crept up and over, rounding itself until it began to tremble forward, the outline of a face forcing itself through not paper — what I looked at was no longer paper — but the mirror itself.

I slammed both mirrors faceward into the table. The iron wrought one hit with a clap and rewarded me with the clinking chimes of shattered glass falling onto the tile tabletop when I inspected. The other mirror I dared not inspect, I knew that at a metaphysical level it could not — would not be allowed to be — so easily dispatched. I faced the damned mirror towards the night dark balcony as I replaced the black veil and secured the clasps once more.

I found my deviator brother still waiting for me in the hall. His face was pale but he waited for me to speak.

"Nothing."

His shoulders dropped like a puppet whose strings had been snipped free. "Good… it may just be time locked, you know. Visible under certain stars or by dawn's light, something hokey like that."

"I'll try that,” I said, not entirely sure I would.