I know what the assassin's ominous words portend: that the mirrormage has us in the palm of her hand, and she's about to make a fist.

It begins immediately: a slow crescendo of mounting dread. The first sign is a ripple in the lightsmith's power.

"What?" Jaden asks. "What is it?"

He must have read my face. "Nothing, probably."

He gives me one of those expressions unique to devoted pessimists: his eyes become sulky and knowing, but beneath that, they're deeply satisfied. It's a look that says: 'Oh, I bet this is going to be bad, but when it is bad, I'll look back on this moment, and I'll take exquisite pleasure in being proven right by my own suffering.'

I return his look with one that says, 'I won't bet against you.'

In the night air, there's an insidious feeling. A prickling like the beginnings of sweat; a taste like static electricity; and a sense of subtle motion, though the breeze has fallen still as death.

I've heard of this feeling. Years ago, I spent a night scavenging with a vagrant who'd been struck by lightning. He told me that just before it strikes, you can feel it coming.

In your teeth.

And that the air changes. Your mouth tastes of iron. Your every hair rises like the hackles of a terrified beast.

Tonight, it's not in my teeth, but my eyes.

"The wards," Jaden hisses, urgent.

"I'll check." I take a running leap, and slam down on the parapet above the gate. The wards are invisible when not in use, but I can sense their wariness, their disquiet, rising. I call to Jaden, "Undamaged."

The moon is shining brightly now, and the street is empty of everything but light. The hush seems thick enough to choke on, like the silence of a warlocks' library in the long hours after dark.

Each heartbeat becomes charged with preciousness. Because, I sense it: these are the final minutes before...

And there's nothing I can do. Nowhere to take cover, nothing to prepare. So I spread my hands in the dark air, narrow my eyes, and relish the night.

How eerie and thrilling this is. The silent air is as still and hard as glass. Yet overhead, gale-force winds are ripping stormclouds to shreds amid fireworks and lightning blasts.

Above, such heavenly violence. Below, such ominous tranquility. In that contradiction, there is awe. I begin tingling with a mysterious crescendo of emotion, an excitement, a mystique, a swelling wave of terror.

When great spells detonate, every living thing can feel it, because every living thing is magical.

Sensing a shockwave of magic is like being underwater when a boulder hits the surface. It's a passing quiver, a change in pressure. If the boulder is house-sized, or mountain-sized, or continent-sized, I might be spun around, or hurled, or even killed.

On the world of my birth, where nuclear fission had been discovered but spellcraft had not, the magic-sense of humans was vestigial and unused. But it was there, and I'm relieved that it was, because now, my nature as an outworlder doesn't handicap me. When something magical happens, I know it.

My innards lurch against my chest. I sense that something vast is falling overhead. But I see nothing.

An invisible spell? Jaden did warn me that they were subtle, these mirrormages. I let my eyes slide shut. If I want any warning of what kind of spell is about to befall us, I have to concentrate more precisely on my magic-sense.

What I feel is not a boulder, not a mountain, it's like… it's like…

It's like I'm drifting down a river. I'm aboard a ship. Then all of a sudden, the deck begins to tilt. I stagger to the fore to find out what's wrong, and see, below the prow, a whole world sliding into view—a world not of water, but of air, full of jungles and hills and clouds far below, and then I realize that I'm teetering over the brink of a waterfall.

The feeling at that moment—that's what I'm feeling now. A stomach-flipping jolt.

The sky makes a huge popping noise, like ice cracking.

In the courtyard behind me, Jaden whispers, and the silence is so deep that I can hear him like he's standing by my ear. "… Gods…"

Leftward, along the wall, I see something moving. Creeping masses of cracks are spidering across the cityscape and reaching up into the sky—thousand of silvery little fissures, splitting the stars, fracturing the moon. They move as silently as assassins, becoming a web vaster than the whole of the heavens. It's like the world has been snagged in the net of a gigantic spider, a black widow large enough to consume us all.

One more breath.

Then everything shatters.

Instead of the city and the sky, I see myself, wide-eyed, staring back at me from a hundred meters down the wall. I spin to look the other way, and see myself there too.

I, Jaden, the whole castle, and the entire fortress of the enemy have all been trapped between two parallel mirrors—mirrors as vast as lakes, mirrors as vast as oceans, mirrors so colossal that the two fortresses seem like grains of dust pressed between the pages of a book.

I crane my neck to stare upward, searching for a glimpse of the open sky. But the mirrors seem to go up and up forever. In their vastness, they appear to be the sky—a diseased and cursed twilight: dim, silvery, and seething with vague, uneasy shapes.

The only glimpse of the real sky is a chink no thicker than a straight black hair, a hair strung with stars like pearls. Never have the stars seemed so tiny and distant, so hopelessly beyond my reach.

"Archmage," I murmur. My limbs hang limp, almost numb. "Please tell me we're up against an archmage…" My voice drops to a whisper, "and not a god."

The ship on the waterfall teeters, lurches, falls. The spellwork's not over.

All around me, the night air grows heavy with pressure, squeezing my head and chest like a giant's fist. My ears pop. The light becomes as hot and red as a bloody sunset, because every single thread of the lightsmith's wards has burst to life. They form a vast translucent sphere around the entire castle, trillions upon trillions of red-gold hairs, singing and snapping like the strings of harps, straining themselves beyond their strength.

Through their transparent colors, I see a siege spell crashing over us, sliding and vibrating everywhere against the surface of the wards. The assault is so turbulent, so all-encompassing, that it looks as if the whole castle is snow globe hurled into a storm-wracked sea. Beyond the wrack, I can see almost nothing—only a glimpse of our beleaguered sphere of wards being reflected endlessly between the two mirrors, one sphere of wards after another glowing like beads on an endless necklace, reflections of reflections of reflections marching on into infinity.

In a voice of madness, Jaden calls to the sky, "Ha-ha, You're wasting so much power!"

I find myself laughing in my excitement. This is so bad. I call out, "You're overestimating us! We appreciate the flattery!"

"That's right, we're not that strong!" Jaden adds. "So you can go easier if you want, just a suggestion!"

The surface of the wards begins shimmering and chiming with tiny impacts, like hailstones.

It's still not over?

I hear glass crackling. The wards are breaking something out there, but fragments are piercing through. Jagged splinters filter down through the shining air, as black as pupils.

I eye them with infinite suspicion. They have an eerie way of moving, similar to raindrops sliding on a window: first they pause, quivering, and then they leap to high speeds and streak along, absorbing two or three of their fellows, and growing larger from them, devouring them, reassembling themselves.

I see. It seems, then, that there's finally something for me to kill.

I roll my shoulders and thumb my saber a centimeter out of its sheath. Even just a centimeter is enough to change the lighting of the entire sphere from red-gold to gold-white.

Let's see if they can reassemble themselves after a dose of saberlight straight through the core.

The black shards have been congregating around the keep. Now they begin to seep inside, like poisons entering a bloodstream. I feel my lip curl, my nose wrinkling in disgust. I have seen the castle of the lightsmith violated only once before. I am not easy to shock. But I was conquered by rage, and I became as wild and thoughtless as the victim of a possessing god.

Three of the shards streak toward Jaden, murderously fast.

I am there.

Water explodes from my landing place. My saber rings free from its sheath.

They all scatter like vampires or snakes, slithering away from the light. By the time the spray from my landing has pattered down, every enemy has fled into the shelter of the castle, infesting it.

My breath escapes in a rasp through grinding teeth. I crouch to spring at the castle, but first, I sheathe my saber. That way, the enemy won't flee until I'm in range to slash them down.

"—ait," Jaden says. It's the sluggish end of a word he began half a second ago.

I straighten and fix him with an impatient glare. "Yes?"

"You're going to charge them without knowing what they can do? A thousand of them?"

"Whatever they do, they'll do it better if I give them time to reassemble." And this conversation is giving them time.

"Okay," he nods. "Then go."

I flash him a smile for making his answer so quick. Then I turn to charge...

But he's right, isn't he?

I can't slash apart a thousand of them in three or four seconds. I'll run out of power, and then I'll have to fight at human speed.

I sigh, forcing myself to relax into a slower mindset. "Thank you, Jaden," I mutter. "Let's do it your way."

"What?" He looks startled. "No, no, you were right. I was just setting up so I could say 'I told you so' when you come back in eighteen pieces. We have to hurry!" He sloshes toward the front steps of the keep. "Who knows what they could be doing in there?"

Since I prefer myself in fewer than eighteen pieces, I stay in my slowest mode, merely keeping pace with Jaden. I ask, "Any idea what they are?"

"No, and that worries me."

"Some kind of magical creature?"

"Some kind of mirror," he says.

"But they reflect nothing."

"Yes, perhaps they reflect Nothing, that's an idea." Seeing my raised eyebrow, he explains, "Magic mirrors often reflect symmetries beyond the ones we know."

A shiver trickles down my spine. It's not fear. It's the mystique of magic. This quivery thrill is an outworlder feeling. The natives never seem to get it. To them, magic is just another one of those ordinary-extraordinary things—like irises or language or the sun—things that anyone would admit are fantastical if they stopped to think about it, but they never do.

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I glance over at Jaden. In the fiery light, his expression shows nothing but focus and fear. No curiosity, no excitement. To him, our battle tonight is intense, but essentially mundane. He's numb to the spectacular.

I wonder—what if there had never been a sun? And what if, one pitch-black morning after a billion centuries of darkness, a new sun had suddenly risen, climbing over the horizon and painting the heavens blue, the clouds pink, the world brown. How would we feel, seeing all that for the first time? Wouldn't we be in awe of it, forever and ever?

That's how magic is to me. Its mysteries go straight to my nerves, and I will never, ever get used to it. The simplest hex can set my spine atingle. And compared to the simplest hex, these black mirrors are a thousand times more fascinating. In fact, everything that the mirrormage has done is spellbinding to me. Even on the walltop, when I was watching her magic close in around me like a destroying fist, my fear and anger were far outmatched by exhilaration.

At the castle steps, I lead the way up and reach for the door handles. But a flicker of motion makes me pause. Close by my head, there's a tiny jag of darkness caught in a ray of wardlight, rotating slowly and lazily, like a black crescent hanging from a wind chime.

I step back and put a hand on my saberhilt.

"What is it?" Jaden asks...

Then he sees. "Yaugh! Quickly—"

I silence him with a jerk of my head. "Look," I murmur, "It's caught in the wardlight. That's strange. At this distance, the wards are quite feeble." I give Jaden a sly look. "That means this little splinter is extremely weak. Our chance to learn something, no?"

"What do you want me to do, dissect it?"

"Good idea." I draw a dagger and toss it to him.

He whisper-groans, rolling his eyes with unnatural levels of skill. He does it so beautifully, so fluidly, like a man who has more experience rolling his eyes than blinking them. He must have made a fearsome adolescent.

At that moment, the shard stops rotating. It's facing me.

Crack!

Pain spikes my chest—I charge draw cut!

My saber blasts through the black crescent—except it's not black anymore. It's the color of flesh and blood. Real blood showers the castle doors and falls amid the mirror-fragments, pattering among tinkling glass.

My hand jumps to my stinging chest. There's a wound there. It's exactly the size and shape of the thing I just destroyed.

"It… it bit me!"

Jaden gapes at the tiny pit in my sternum, then recovers himself and scoffs. "Bit you? Don't be ridiculous. It merely reflected you."

"Well it reflected me right into its stomach!"

"Into its alternate universe, you mean." He says it as though it's obvious. "You know how mirrors work."

I feel my brow move like an inchworm. "I thought I did, until you said that. Isn't a mirror just a surface that reflects light?"

"... What?" Jaden grimaces and laughs at the same time. Then he sees that I'm not joking, and he looks at me like I've drunk a potion of insanity. "I don't... What? No, look, I mean—yes. Mirrors do do that. It's just... that's like saying guillotines are for clipping nails."

With a shrug, I turn and grab the door handles. My muscles are all itching to charge inside and purge every one of those fascinating intruders, to obliterate them for daring to violate the closest thing I have to a home. But my odds will be better if I learn something first.

And there's that tingling in my spine…

I spin back to Jaden. "Alright, I'm interested," I sheathe my saber. "What is a mirror?"

"Just what it looks like."

I twitch with impatience. This is going to take a while, isn't it? "Explain yourself, Jaden. Pretend I'm an outworlder, because I am one, remember?"

"But surely your world had mirrors?"

I fold my arms—a threat-display of stubbornness. "Humor me. Now."

He gives up with another magnificent eye-roll. "I'm probably about to say a lot that you already know, but you asked for it. Obviously, a mirror is just a line of symmetry between two worlds. Wherever our world is identical to another, there Fate will place a mirror. It's an act of divine whimsy. If you gaze into one for long enough, you'll eventually discover tiny asymmetries, such as misplaced grains of dust."

"Oh, is that all?" I say, as an alternative to having a stroke. Sometimes I miss Earth. My brain is attempting to pop out ten or twelve rational objections at once. It feels like it's knotting itself into a pretzel inside my skull. But, on the other hand, this is exactly what I like about this world. It makes all those terrible years after the jump worth it.

Jaden opens his mouth again, no doubt on the verge of blasting me with another world-shattering assertion of the impossible. Before he can strike, I say, "Wait, wait, wait. So... so for example, when I shine a beam of light into a mirror, it shines back at me because..."

"Because the 'you' on the other side did the same thing, yes."

"But you said that a mirror also reflects light?"

"That's true."

"Wait. No. When I look in a mirror, what I'm seeing has to be one thing or the other." My voice slows. "Surely it can't be both reflected light and an alternate universe."

Jaden frowns, "Why not?"

Yes, there are times when I miss Earth, the land where logic roams. Yet I find myself fizzing inside, like I'm fighting the assassin. On Earth, true contradictions did not exist. Not like here. Here, even the motions of the sun and moon are geometrically impossible. The world is pure paradox, an offense against reason, forever at war with its own self, its own physics, and its own laws of magic.

Which is not to say that I shouldn't try to make sense of it. I should. In fact, I should try even harder than I would on Earth. Because here, whenever one piece of the system falls into paradox, I might live or die depending on whether I understand how everything else will respond.

So I ask Jaden, "You mean I could just walk through a mirror into an alternate world?"

"Didn't you try, when you were a kid?"

"You run into the mirror."

"You run into yourself,"

"But it feels like glass, not skin."

"Maybe on your world it did."

"Then, if I look into a mirror... if I touch it... I'll be making eye-contact with… with…"

Jaden seems to be taking sadistic glee in the look on my face. "Your alternate self, yes. And if the two of you manage to act out-of-synchrony, then you can walk into the other universe as easily as passing through a door."

"You're implying that there are thousands of clones exactly like me, and thousands of universes exactly like this one?"

"No, the symmetry is only local. If you walked through, you would see that everything is different just beyond the mirror's view. Your alternate selves also behave asymmetrically whenever they're not facing you. They're quite individual, or so I hear."

He adds, as if it explains everything, "It is a matter of fate."

The terrible thing is, that actually does explain everything. Just not to my satisfaction.

I say, "Doesn't that imply that everything we do in front of a mirror is fated? That we have no free will?"

"Why would it?"

"Because fate already knows what I'm going to choose."

"If I predict what you're going to choose, does that mean you have no free will?"

Pretzels pretzels pretzels. I try a different tack. "What about dirty mirrors? If there's no glass, shouldn't the grime just fall to the ground?"

"I didn't say there's no glass. Of course there's glass."

He starts to say something else, but I lift a finger for mercy. Too many questions are ricocheting inside my head. What about pupils? They're mirrors. What about things which are only partially reflective? What if I tell my mirror self, 'Let's both step left'?

I would like to purge the castle sometime this century, so I set these questions aside, and just concentrate on calming myself, which I do by focusing on my senses. I see the steps, and the glass shards, and the blood that stains them. It's my blood, I realize. Blood that the mirror ate from me.

"Alright," I say slowly, bringing the topic back to the enemies at hand. "So that chunk of my sternum... was teleported into the mirror."

"So it seems… maybe…" he snaps his fingers. "You've heard of mirrors of keeping?"

"Sure. El uses them to capture rare lights."

"That's sensible. They're gateways to artificial planes of reality, which are made of pure void. And all voids hunger."

I touch the stinging spot on my chest. "So these things consume people by… suction. By pulling you into themselves. But they have to face you first."

"Yes… hungering mirrors," Jaden muses. "Now that we know their trick, it shouldn't be too difficult for us to avoid. And by us, I mean you. I will be busy. I have cowering to do."

I try out one of his eye-rolls.

Not too difficult, he says? He must be joking. It sounds like fighting guns.

But then, I always wondered how I'd do against guns.

"That's that, then," I say, grasping the door handles. "Let's go."

I fling the doors wide and stride into the vaulted entry hall.

This is the first time I've seen it dark. Only a few shafts of wardlight seep in through the distant windows. It's a sulky light, like the glow from a city being sacked.

My enemies are five deeper darknesses within the dark. This time, they do not flee.

This time, they're fully reassembled, five perfect panes of unblemished black, each one shaped like a vertical eye. Even knowing what they are, I find them delightful and mysterious, the way they glitter in the gloom.

Four of them hover near the center of the floor, rotating silently. The support pillars around them are gouged. I feel the floor quivering softly as something collapses far away. They are destroying my home.

Fury rises in me like bile. I can taste it. This castle is a part of El. Seeing these gashes is like seeing gashes on El's face. The very sight of them is a dagger in my red-hot heart.

I am already charging.

I strike with speed, saberlight, and thunder—I strike like lightning.

Two seconds. One breath. It's over.

First, my footsteps make a staccato burst like machine gun fire. My enemies start to turn, but they're as slow as forgiveness.

I storm in among them. The thunder of my wind sets their panes shimmering like lakes beneath a storm, just before the lightning strikes. My saber, sheathed until this moment, leaps out—a thunderbolt in my hand. The hall is not dark anymore.

Four thrusts. Four bolts. Four shattering explosions. It's as fast as a single blow, one four-pronged shock of lightning.

The mirrors blast apart in the searing glare, exploding into a thousand kilograms of broken crystal.

Then the machine-gun crackle of my initial charge echoes back from the walls. My throat makes a wolf-rasp of victory.

Only one of the five voids is left, but the castle is still rumbling. There must be other hungering mirrors infesting it, deeper in, all begging to be obliterated.

The last survivor in this hall is the largest of the five, a horrific black gulf in my saberlight, big enough to swallow me whole.

And it's turning toward me rapidly, fifty meters away.

I coil to charge, but in that moment, two shocks hit at once:

First, in my saberlight, I see what the darkness hid: the floor is strewn with pieces of the lightsmith's hair. Little lengths, like the severed locks that flutter down—sickeningly—after the thunk of a headsman's axe.

But the second shock is even worse: the current of the lightsmith's power cuts off.

I choke and gasp like I've lost a limb.

Then the power trickles back into me, but only faintly, guttering like a dying fire. My saber fizzles down to the dimness of a bonfire, then a campfire, then a torch.

In the feeble light, the hungering mirror looks less like easy prey, and more like doom.

It finishes its rotation.

I hurl myself to one side and there's a CRACK like cannonfire.

For one flickering instant, the mirror is no longer black. Its silver face reflects swaths of my flying capes, and an expanse of the floor... and the blade of my saber.

Then it is black again. My raiment lightens as several capes get vanished into the void. A huge slice of the floor is simply gone. And where my saber was reflected in the mirror, the mirror cracks.

My immaculate saber gives a little pulse of light, mocking the enemy.

Or perhaps winking at me.

We can do this. El is trusting me to win on my own.

Jaden would say that if the lightsmith's power is weakening, it means that the lightsmith is weakening, being defeated, giving in. He would warn that the mirrormage is closing her fist around us. But even if he says that to my face, I won't allow myself to be angry. He just doesn't know the lightsmith like I do.

For me there is no doubt: when I find out what El has been doing with that power, I'll know it was the right decision.

I see the hairs on the floor mingling with fragments from my capes. Both were cut in the same clean, irresistible way.

That's when I realize it: somehow, a hungering mirror was here before, one large enough to swallow the lightsmith whole. This is how the El was captured.

Eaten by a mirror.