The sixth day dawned. Henry got up and got dressed. It had been unseasonably cold, and he’d been told it would be colder in the Mirror Realm, so Morgause had included a navy blue coat and purple scarf in the outfit she brought him.
When Henry bent to tie his shoes (he’d insisted on practical running shoes over anything else), he noticed that his reflection was wearing a red coat. As he watched, it got up and left the room. “Guess it worked,” he muttered.
He stood up. The mirror in front of him swung open. His aunt stood in the doorway and beckoned. “It seems we are ever in sync. Come. A light breakfast, then off we go.”
Breakfast was unremarkable, just oatmeal with fresh fruit and cream. Ruby kept looking at him with watery eyes. “I'll be fine,” he said. She just nodded sadly.
Aunt Morgause led Henry to the observatory, really the copula at the top of her house. The dome-shaped ceiling was painted with an elaborate map of the constellations as they appeared in real time, letting one see the stars even by day. At night, its enchantments made it turn fully clear, except for the lines drawn between stars. In the center of the room was a mirror, its frame inscribed with complex sigils. Henry could barely read them, though he understood the ones for Travel, Mirror, and Dream.
“All is ready,” she said. “There is nothing you have to do besides go.” She handed him a small backpack. “There’s a change of clothes, your spare glasses, a water bottle, Ruby’s book,” she peered at Ruby, and she shrank back, embarrassed. “Be careful not to read it where people can see. All text will be mirrored. Seeing it clearly might make one of the mirror folk become aware.”
Henry nodded and slung the backpack over his back. “A backpack can get lost, so the essentials are all here,” said Morguase, and she handed him an old leather belt. Henry recognized it as his father’s. He’d never seen it before, but he knew it both from context and from history. The man had been an adventurer, and this was an old gunbelt, though the holster had been modified to be a sheath for his knife; somehow Morgause got the measurements perfectly right. There was a tasteful silver concho on the buckle, shaped like a sunburst, with a turquoise cabochon in the center. It had a built-in pocket and bullet loops, though these were fitted with glass vials. “The components for the return ritual,” said Morgause.
Henry held the belt for a moment of reverence. “What about not standing out?”
“It’s important for a boy to have a token from his father when he comes of age,” said Morgause. “I thought this was the most appropriate time. What’s more, my counterpart will have thought to give your double his father’s belt too.”
Henry nodded, taking off his plain black belt and replacing it with this one. The weight of it was comfortable. He tried to admire it in the mirror, but his reflection was gone, and it would be until he finished his quest. Henry replaced his plain belt with his father’s gunbelt and slid the knife into the sheathe.
“Go on then, if you’re ready,” said Morguase. “We’ll leave in a moment.”
Henry nodded, feeling braver. “Thank you Auntie.” He looked at Ruby, trembling with anxiety. “I’ll be back soon, Ruby.”
She nodded quickly, not meeting his gaze. Neither she nor her mother said anything else. Henry stepped up to the mirror. He saw Morgause and Ruby watching him, then they turned to go and went down the stairs. Ruby closed the big door behind her. He stared at the inverted constellations painted on the doors reflection. The sun was shining right through him, and the rays reflected onto his clothes, so for a moment he fancied he was glowing. Then he stepped through.
The glass felt like water as Henry slid through it, though when he emerged on the other side, he wasn’t wet.
The observatory was empty, just like the one back home. The mirror he’d just walked through was gone. In its place was the big telescope that usually occupied its place. Everything seemed a little off. Of course it was all flipped wrongways, but beyond that there was a subtle green cast to everything.1 He’d seen the effect during his seclusion in the mirror chamber; the farther out the infinite recursion went, the more green it looked. He paced around the observatory carefully, taking a moment to admire the flipped view of the city. The most overwhelming thing really was that the Golden Gate was on the wrong side.
He heard a sound at the door. He considered jumping off the roof for a moment, but before he could even dismiss the idea, the door opened and Ruby stepped out onto the observatory. He wondered why she’d come back up, but he remembered another detail of his preparation; sometimes the reflections of magical folk moved around out of sync with them. Almost never in the mirrors themselves, but certainly when the caster was not looking in the mirror. He hadn’t expected that to be the case with Ruby, as she was the ultimate mortal, but here was the proof. He hoped Morgause would remember that and get herself and Ruby to a mirror soon.
For now, the other Ruby looked at him, brow furrowed, and said “⸮Ɉʇɘl υoγ ɈʜϱυoʜɈ I”
Henry cleared his throat. “.ƨɘƨƨɒlϱ γm Ɉoϱɿoʇ I” he said, straightening his glasses. He’d spent weeks learning to speak English in reverse. It was hell on the brain so he wasn’t going to do it anymore than he needed to.
Reversed Ruby crossed her arms and replied with, “.ƨɘƨƨɒlϱ ɿυoγ ϱniɿɒɘw ɘɿ'υoY”
Henry smirked. “⸮I Ɉ'nbib ,mɘʜɈ bnυoʇ I ,llɘW” He walked past her, mussing her hair. “.ɘɿɒɔ ɘʞɒT .won ϱnioϱ γllɒɘɿ m'I”
She hugged him as he passed. “.ɘγઘ”
“.ɘγઘ” He gave her another pat, then extricated himself. It was encouraging to see a friendly face so soon, but the longer he spent here the higher the chances that something would go badly. If she touched his belt with another hug, for example, she may discover his magic from another plane. He made his way down the stairs. Ruby didn’t follow. She liked to be in the observatory during the day, taking in the fresh air without actually having to leave the house.
That gave him free reign to go into the other Henry’s room. It was just like his back home. There was a bookshelf, a dresser, and a wardrobe with a mirror. It all matched with Morgause’s colonial taste that the whole rest of the house was decorated in. He peeked into the mirror out of morbid curiosity. There was his room. His real room, or so he surmised from the lack of green tint on the image. He still had no reflection. He touched the glass. Nothing. He cast a brief spell of silence for Ruby's sake, assuming she wasn’t fixed in place by her double’s gaze, and got to searching.
He searched the room up and down. Morgause had told him the token would look exactly like he expected it to, and that it would be in the place he was most likely to hide something important. He knew what it would look like; a knife, just like the one he’d already made for himself. He could almost see the mirror token, a copy of his weapon but all silver, polished to a glassy sheen.
But he couldn’t find it. The damned thing was that he never hid anything. He had no idea where he would hide something. He had no secrets from his Aunt or from Ruby. He checked the places teenagers often hid things in books or in movies. Under the mattress, behind the bookshelf, in his underwear drawer. Nothing.
He crept to the window, looking out at the city again. The realization hit him. He wouldn’t have hidden the token. He would have taken it with him wherever he went. “Shit,” he muttered. Henry opened the window and jumped.
It wasn’t very far to fall, and Henry knew how to avoid hurting himself from a jump. In movies they would roll, but he didn’t have to. His affinity for earth was particularly attuned to changing the properties of earthy substances. At the moment when he hit the ground, it became bouncy and soft. He bounced to feet and took off running. He praised himself for his choice of shoes.
He reached the garden wall and leapt at it, and the stone became soft as clay, letting him dig his fingers and toes in deep. He climbed it easily. The finger and toeholds healed themselves as he went. There was no reason to leave the wall disfigured, even if the place would be reset eventually.
Henry got to the street and jogged along at a good pace. The Reveur house was up in the hills overlooking the water, not too far from El Camino Real. He got turned around once or twice because of the mirroring, but it wasn’t so bad. He’d jogged this route hundreds of times before. Now he just had to keep going instead of stopping when he hit the highway.
And so he did, keeping to the left of the bicycle lane. God damn it was weird to run north and have the cliff face on his left. Still, it was a straight shot to the bridge from here. Morgause had set him up on a bus tour of the Redwood Empire, but they were going to be at the rest area on the other side of the bridge for an hour. He could make it.
Henry was in good shape, but he’d never run this far for this long before. He stopped and took deep gulping breaths, opening up his coat to let the sea air whisk away his body heat.
He was a little over halfway across the bridge. He took out his water bottle and gulped down a good portion, then checked his watch. Plenty of time left. He leaned against the railing and tilted his head back to rest, letting it dangle over the edge. The Scholomance floated in the air above, bobbling slightly in the wind. He’d half expected it not to be there at all, since the mirror folk had no magic of their own. He wondered how it was that magical things had a reflection here, then. Perhaps it was all an illusion, or a dream. It was the Dreamlands, after all. It didn’t have to make sense.
He took another chug of water, being careful not to finish it. He considered buttoning up his coat, as the ocean breeze was starting to cut through his layers, but he knew he’d just get hot again. He then considered dropping the coat, but it was a nice coat, and it concealed his gunbelt better than the shirt would alone. It might not give him away as a visitor from another realm, but the sight of a huge knife might set off people for more mundane reasons.
Henry took another drink, put away his water bottle, and did some stretches. When he was ready to run again—
“Hey.” A voice. His own voice. He spun around. There he was, his double, in a red coat. The other Henry held his chromed knife in his hand. It looked just like how Henry imagined, and the tip of the blade was pointed at Henry.
“I could have stuck you,” said the reflection, just as Henry swore, “but I wanted to look you in the eye first.” As he spoke, his skin rippled, morphing into a mess of reflective shards before returning to normal. He was a doppelganger now, already.
“You know, I didn’t expect you to talk,” said Henry, taking a step back.
The doppelganger took a step forward. “I’m like an evil inversion of you, remember?” he said. “That doesn’t make me an animal. It just makes me a sadist.”
“Aunt Morgause said her doppelganger acted like that,” said Henry. He gripped the railing tight.
“Wonder what that says about her?” said the doppelganger.
“So what’s the plan now?” Henry asked. “Maybe we can come to an arrangement.”
“The plan is I kill you, take your powers, then go back to your world in your place. I’ll kill your auntie and your cousin, steal their power, and then no one will be able to stand against me. Then I’ll live a good long life without fear of being reset, and now and then I’ll kill someone else again, just to feel something,” said the doppelganger. “The arrangement, if there is one, is that you’ll just give up and expose your neck.”
“Well, that’s not an unintelligent plan, but it lacks creativity,” said Henry. “You just want to live comfortably? Where’s your ambition?” The railing creaked as he began to mold it.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The doppelganger snorted. “Where’s yours?” he asked. “Or do you just want what your aunt tells you to want?” His skin rippled again.
“As much as I’d love to examine that, I think we should—” Henry ripped a footlong length of railing free and slammed it against the doppelganger’s face. Mirror shards went flying out into the street. The doppelganger looked back at him, a long hole torn across his face. Inside he was hollow and reflective. Slowly he began to heal.
A woman walking a baby carriage stopped and pointed at them, screaming. Her scream distorted as it went on until she sounded like a bodysnatcher, and her face started to ripple and become reflective. Shit. “Well, it’s been fun,” said Henry, then he sent a pulse of power through the piece of metal in his hands. It flew the short distance into the doppelganger’s chest, impaling him with a metallic screech. More and more people were watching, screaming, transforming. As the doppelganger tried to tear the metal free, Henry went for the knife.
As soon as Henry touched the doppelganger, he flinched back in pain. His skin was like burning needles. He looked down at his hands and saw that he’d seared off some of his fingerprints.
The doppelganger looked at him with a smirk on his partially reformed face. “You can’t touch me.” The color was returning to his hand, spreading from where Henry had touched him.
Two people had transformed fully into doppelgangers and they were sprinting across the bridge at the two boys. They had less control over their form than Henry’s doppelganger did, looking more like naked humanoid shapes made of rippling, molten silver. The closest one came at Henry like a jumping spider. Henry stomped his foot and sent a pulse of magic into the sigil stitched into his shoe heel; a spike of hot asphalt shot up from the ground, impaling her through the head.
The second one crawled over her, slashing at Henry with their hands. Henry ducked back, preparing a spell to kill it—
His doppelganger stabbed the other one in the head with his token. Instantly, its body melted into the blade, and from there up his doppelganger’s arm. He was absorbing the dead one, like a small bead of mercury getting sucked into a larger one. He dispatched the first one and absorbed it too. Henry ducked behind the column he’d made, scratched a quick sigil on it, then touched it with his palm. It flashed amber and the pillar exploded outward from his hand. His doppelganger was pelted with hot stones that tore through his body like bullets. He let out a noise like an air raid siren as Henry sketched another circle on the ground with his foot. Hands of asphalt surged out of the bridge and wrapped around his doppelganger’s arms, ankles, and neck.
There was no touching the creature, so Henry trusted his wards to hold for a few moments as he took stock. He saw that more random citizens were transforming from watching the spectacle and winced. He ran up past the damaged railing, put his hands around one of the suspender cables and poured magic into it. He twisted the wires tighter and tighter, just like when he’d forged his knife. It snapped in two places, and the bridge shook.
He took his new metal bar, some three feet in length, and turned, just in time to be set upon by another doppelganger. Henry slashed through its face and it fell, writhing, to the ground. Another one approached from above, crawling along the big cable. He stooped and picked up a chunk of asphalt, whispered a spell to it, then hurled it at the doppelganger. It flew straight, digging into its dreamsilver flesh before exploding. It fell off the bridge in three smoking chunks.
Henry walked back to his own doppelganger, only to see that he had changed, sprouting four additional arms, unbound by any spell. He was flailing and fighting like some kind of awful spider. Henry filled his bar with magic and brought it down on the doppelganger’s hand, the one holding the token. The hand shattered—
As did the token. He felt a stab of fear for a moment as he thought he’d fucked it all up, only for another hand to come flying at him. He raised his bar and blocked it, but another one came from the right, then another from the left. He blocked them all, until one came from below, grabbing at the bar itself. Henry and the doppelganger fought over it. He was stronger than Henry, but in an awkward position, and his arms lacked leverage, so Henry was sure he could wrench the bar free—
Another arm whistled for his face. Henry dropped the bar and raised his arms, catching the blow on his right hand. Pain exploded in his palm. The mirror-bright tip of the doppelganger’s token burst through to the back of his hand, splattering blood on his face. Henry knew it wasn’t a clean cut at all; he could feel the splintered bones in his hand, more keenly aware of the hole that had been punched than the pain itself.
Then the pain hit and he fell to his knees, screaming. He could feel his magic draining through the wound, his lifeforce, his color. His hand was going white before his eyes, and even his blood was turning grey as it bubbled out of him.
Another doppelganger leaped onto his shoulders. He and the new creature rolled away from his doppelganger as they wrestled. He could feel it burning him too, feel it feeding off him, but it wasn’t nearly as intense. This creature was not the reflection of a practitioner, and it wasn’t himself, it wasn’t the doppelganger meant to kill him. It just knew instinctively that it had to eat someone real or it would die. He pushed its head away from him with his wounded hand and pulsed magic into the doppelganger. It exploded effortlessly. They were made of metal after all. He should be able to tear them all asunder.
Henry pushed himself to his feet, almost entirely powered by rage. His bar was lying on the ground, discarded. His doppelganger was melting around the asphalt hands, staring at his shattered hand with wonder. Henry drew his knife, scratching spells into the metal. The pattern rippled and warped like heat haze, the sigils crawling like spiders. The blade glowed red, then orange hot, and he drove it into the doppelganger’s head—
Well, that was the intention. It dodged at the last second, taking the hit in the shoulder. Henry pulsed power down the length of the blade, and the doppelganger’s flesh exploded around it, leaving a gaping hole. Henry pulled back and the doppelganger collapsed, panting. It sounded like a wind chime in a storm. Henry could see metallic veins and bones inside its wound.2
“I’m taking this,” Henry muttered, stooping to take the token with his wounded hand. His fingers wouldn’t open or close. He could hardly feel it. He looked at the wound, dumbfounded. The broken tip of the mirror token was still there, lodged in his bone. His hand twitched and the pain hit him again. Henry screamed through clenched teeth, tears trickling from his eyes.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the doppelganger muttered, rising to its feet. He looked weirdly stretched, spread thin from his struggles against Henry’s wards. His expression was just as pained as Henry’s, and his eyes were leaking dreamsilver droplets. “I’m the one getting out of here, not you—”
The metallic screech of a car burning rubber tore through the air as the doppelganger of a taxi driver charged them at max speed. Henry threw himself to the side. His doppelganger didn’t manage it. The taxi hit what was left of the railing, tilted upright, then fell over the edge.
A silvery hand snaked through the air, on an arm as thin as a strip of bubblegum, slamming into Henry’s chest with a meaty slap. It burned him through his shirt and its clawed fingers dug into his skin. Then the doppelganger’s arm snapped taut, pulling Henry over the edge with him.
Henry was half dead by the time he hit the water, but he knew a fall from this height would be enough to kill anyone. He put his wounded hand on the doppelganger’s wrist and frantically carved sigil after sigil with his nail, even as the doppelganger’s consuming touch ate at his finger. The hand crystalized and crumbled into sand, sand Henry could control.
When he hit the water, Henry was shrouded in a barrier of the softest sand he could imagine. The water tore it away in an instant. Pain exploded once again in his hand and the wound reopened. Colors bloomed around him; silver from the sand, red from the blood, and all the colors of the rainbow from the broken vials of reagents on his belt. Henry would have cried. Now he was stuck here until the return spell activated in six days. Could he even make it that long?
The doppelganger swam toward him from the depths. “You aren’t dead?” Henry muttered, or rather, he tried to before his mouth filled with salt water and a lot of other things. He sent a pulse of magic into the water around him, willing the reagents to do something. There was no way the ritual could work now, but maybe—
In a flash of light, Henry disappeared. The doppelganger passed through a cloud of bubbles, scything claws grasping at nothing.
Henry’s landing was softer than anything he’d been expecting. He landed on a cloud, saltwater slowly pooling around him. It wriggled and twisted like smoke, but it was as solid as cotton. He pushed himself up to a sit, wincing at the pain in his hand. He lifted it up. It was in bad shape, white to the wrist, with the wound turning mottled black and silver. The piece of the mirror token appeared to have deformed, creating a plug. He wanted to pull it out, but he knew it would just hurt like hell and spurt blood, and then he would die.
With his good hand, he groped for cloud and pulled up a handful. It didn’t just feel like cotton; it was dry too. He wrapped it around the wound, groaning and crying out as he did. Tears hadn’t stopped flowing from his eyes since the bridge. Part of him was ashamed to be crying, but no one could shame him for something they hadn’t seen. And truthfully, he was barely aware of it. He tied off the improvised bandage with his teeth, then sealed it with a spell of minor healing. The earth element wasn’t the best for healing, but it would keep the bone from getting infected at least.
Was this good enough? A portion of the token? Surely it should be good enough. He couldn’t go back to the Mirror Realm and didn’t have the will to. But he had to move.
Henry stood up and felt dizzy. He pinwheeled his arms to keep from falling off the cloud. Once he regained his balance he looked around. He was surrounded by fluffy pink clouds forming cotton candy platforms that drifted here and there seemingly at random. Between the clouds hung huge bubbles, opaque but shimmering and pearlescent. In their depths he could see snatches of images that flickered and changed strangely, like a stop motion animation made of unrelated surrealist paintings. These were dreams, he knew. The dreams of people.
That meant this was the Land of Nod, the part of the Dreamlands that was closest to the material world, the place that dreaming people touched when they slept. He let out a breath he’d been holding. Nod had its own dangers, but it would be somewhat easier to crossover from here than anywhere else. The Hidden Rail went on tours through here, for Hecate’s sake. He just had to find the track.
Henry sheathed his knife and took a few steps back, then sprinted for the edge of his cloud, leaping onto the next closest one. He wanted to get higher, to find a vantage point. Another cloud drifted by, and he jumped up onto it. Part of his training for this quest had been lucid dreaming. It was of minimal usage in the Mirror Realm, especially since he went there in body, but here in Nod he could choose to jump higher and see farther.
It seemed that there was no vantage point here, not really. The clouds went up and down forever, blue sky above and below. Henry could feel himself getting more and more worn out, but he could will the pain away here. It just passed like an increasing lack of energy.
He realized after a while that playing by the dream’s rules was a losing game. He sat on a cloud, legs crossed, and centered himself, imagining a peak. It took energy, but the cloud began to rise, and the others around it began to descend. He got higher and higher, looking out over the endless clouds and the dream marbles that floated between them.
With a true vantage, he could make out some proper landmarks here. The Golden Gate Bridge loomed large in the city’s self image, so in Nod a gigantic bridge towered over everything. There was a sun, hot and bright white, radiating rainbow colored beams. The moon shone full and bright, reflecting the sun’s rainbow light. It spun fast enough to see, going through all its phases in a minute. Nearer, but still far above, was a castle with seven towers made of rainbow light, a towering, heavenly place. Henry knew better than to be enamored by its glory, however. It was the castle of Ravana, the Demon King of Nightmares.
Far below, so far the distant clouds looked more blue than pink, he could see a golden line that snaked between the clouds as if they were islands. A pair of little red pillboxes raced along it. The old double-car trolleys of old San Francisco, kept alive by just one institution. The Hidden Rail.
He dove off the cloud, spreading his arms like wings. His coat flapped like a sail. He could feel the wind resistance straining his injured hand, and soon the cloud bandage was soaked through with black and silver blood. Henry didn’t care. He shot through the air like a diving falcon, leveling out over the track. The Hidden Rail got closer and closer. He could almost see faces in the window. He willed himself to accelerate. He could definitely see people in there now. He wondered if he should scream for help. Maybe they would slow down and let him board. But he was sure he could catch up at this rate, and besides, he was so tired he didn’t think he had the strength to shout—
Something slammed into his right side. A dozen grasping hands tore at his arm, and he howled in pain as he tumbled through the air. It was the doppelganger again. His red coat flapped behind him like a cape, but his body underneath had become a spindly, spiderish thing, with a dozen arms instead of legs. His head was still a copy of Henry’s, but there was a hideous gash of molten silver across the middle where he’d hit him before.
“You’re mine now!” The doppelganger shouted. “Your power is mine, your life is mine!” He tore at Henry’s clothes, throwing scraps out into the free air, trying to get at his skin. Henry fought back, but the doppelganger grabbed at his right hand and squeezed, and Henry lost his concentration and all the pain came shooting back at once. Another hand gouged at Henry’s face, but it was one of the doppelganger’s original limbs, still clad in his coat sleeve, so Henry grabbed it by the wrist without fear for his skin. He knew what he would do in the doppelganger’s place; absorb his own coat. Before he could though, Henry shouted a spell.
Earth was hard to work with. Sigils couldn’t be forged in the air with earthly energy, and verbal spells needed contact with the earth to work. It was a good thing then, that the doppelganger was made of metal.
The spell was meant for a type of flight, pushing the caster away from the ground. In this case, Henry and the doppelganger were hurled apart at speed, repelled by an equal force, like a mother separating two fighting toddlers. He saw his doppelganger fly into a dream marble hundreds of yards away—
And Henry fell into one too.
----------------------------------------
1. Henry was a little chagrined about that, as so much of his aunt’s magic was pink that he’d just assumed the Mirror Realm would be too.
2. Doppelgangers exist in a sort of quantum state, where they go from being made of flesh and blood one minute, to being made of silver and glass the next, from being hollow to having organs.