Chaos ruled the skies and oceans of this strange planet. The constant lightning gave the air a smell of ozone and attempted to cast away the darkness of the night, if only in flashes. The burning clouds became even more evident in the backdrop of a sky oddly devoid of stars. The wind, rain, and oceanic currents ruthlessly pushed the canoe toward the island.

The Defendant would've slipped into unconsciousness due to hypothermia if not for the fact that the muddy water was steaming and her accelerated healing. But she was starving and running on fumes. Thirsty too. She knew better than to drink the briny ocean water, though.

Her canoe was rudely deposited on a gravel beach. She felt her muscles complain as she pushed the hang glider off of her and rose out of the flooded canoe. Water dripped from her body. As she scanned the island around her, the pupils of her eyes bent and changed shape from round to slit. Adapted to the darkness, she searched for signs of hostiles.

A lifetime of paranoia and evasion of justice made the Defendant wary. She knew they would come for her but she was intent on making them pay dearly for catching her again. Seeing no movement nor any signs of being watched, she slipped carefully out of the canoe, the sounds of the waves crashing over gravel drowning any noise she would've otherwise made.

Her spirit was restless. Her heart pumped fiercely in her chest. Every hair (and fur) on her body was on its ends. Nimble and lithe, she moved behind the canoe and started pushing it deeper ashore. Only after it was completely out of the water did she capsize the canoe and let the water inside drain back into the ocean. She ducked behind the tilted canoe and scanned the island again.

It was a rocky beach, with little to no vegetation she could see. Only some vines and strange alien grass growing here and there among the crevices in the rocks and boulders.

The gravel beach puzzled her. With how much mud was floating in the water and the currents, she expected some of it to be deposited on the beach, covering the gravel. Yet even the mud mixed with the water she dumped refused to become sediment among the gravel rocks. It all flowed back to the ocean as if the mud was a dye and not suspended particulate in the water.

Another nonsensical trait to a nonsensical world. And her stomach ached. She went back to the surf zone, to pick up the remainder of the items that fell with her. The wooden panels and the spheres, though the latter could be retrieved by tugging the chain. She refrained from doing so because she want to make much noise and alert any dangerous creatures of her presence.

Slowly, she gathered everything but the mirror above a flat boulder that had no signs of ever being underwater. The damned cannibal mirror remained on the beach, lodged over the gravel, reflecting the chaotic skies and silently mocking her.

"Hey, there's the source of the lights," a man's voice came from the northern side of the beach.

She ducked behind the rock and slowly crept forward until she could see. Two male humanoids moved carefully over the gravel, barely making a sound. In the alternating darkness and stroboscopic flashes of lightning, it was hard to see any distinctive features.

"Tsunami!" The other male shouted.

The Defendant looked up. Another one of these huge waves on fire was approaching the island. The two males ran back and out of the beach, leaving her puzzled.

Moments later, she learned why. The blue dome, the island's shield, didn't include the gravel beach. She stifled a chuckle as she noticed that the mirror was outside now. The tsunami came and crashed on the shield with the force of a... a wild... and on fire... tsunami, she guessed. No need to embellish anything about the catastrophe that was this world.

Darkness descended upon that part of the island as the ginormous wave of muddy water covered the hemispherical dome. A deafening rumble followed, and then the wave washed over and around the shield, leaving flames on it and illuminating the entire island with hot browns and purples. She found the weird colors strange for a moment, then understood them as a combination of the flames outside and the blue shield. She felt her bare skin heat up uncomfortably.

Minutes later, the flames died and the shield disappeared. A loud whistling sound drew her attention deeper inside the island, where she saw a glint of silver reflecting the light of thousands of lightning bolts falling everywhere in the ocean. Squinting, she saw the mirror plummeting down and crashing elsewhere on the island.

The Defendant was sure it wasn't the last time she saw the cruel magical contraption.

*

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*

"It crashed somewhere around here," Jakk-Soun said as they walked through the jungle.

The whole damned island looked like someone had rendered a Minecraft world with the smallest biome size ever. They were in a jungle right now, but half a mile north was a desert, a quarter-mile south and they would be in a temperate forest, east led to the gravel beach, and west a tiny stretch of plains that wouldn't fit a dozen horses.

"There it is," Thay-Lohr pointed. "There's the mirror."

They saw the mirror fall down from the dome after it vanished, having defended the island from the tsunami for the thousandth time. Without any other hints, they followed the strange object here.

"How in hell isn't it broken?" Jakk-Soun gawked. "Isn't it made out of glass?"

"Surely seems so. It also didn't melt even if exposed to the fire. Or, you know, cracked."

The two approached the mirror. Jakk-Soun picked it up. "Not a single scra—"

Thay-Lohr screamed in horror and shock as the mirror grew teeth and bit Jakk-Soun's head off in less than a second. He tripped on a root, fell on his butt, and then his torso hit the grasslands. He stared up to see a horse looking down at him. He kept screaming as he heard the sounds of the mirror munching and crushing Jakk-Soun's body.

Then he felt a bite on his ankle and hollered in pain. The horse whinnied and ran away, stopping at the edge of a lake a couple hundred feet from the edge of the jungle.

Thay-Lohr last thoughts were of regret for letting Jakk-Soun drag him to the beach.

*

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*

Mirror was drearily bored. It knew its job was to watch the girl but the bloody girl did fuck-all since falling on this planet. And what a shitty planet it was. So, when it sensed a tsunami coming their way, it stood immobile as mirrors often do waiting to pick up and surf the wave. One of its directives was to not let the girl discover it was sentient, so it wasn't breaking any rules.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

At least its current tyrannical bosses were marginally better than their past tyrannical bosses. Gifted with the power of farsight, the mirror was often used by wicked evil queens for the vainest purposes. It was evil so egregious even fairy tales about its former masters circulated. That it could tell who was the fairest lady in the land. That once an evil wizard made it with the power of the demon. Then it shattered and a fragment entered the hearts of people, making them evil.

The mirror groaned. As if people needed glass in their hearts to become evil.

Case in point. The two idiotic inmates approached it.

"There it is," the smaller one said. "There's the mirror."

Snack time.

*

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*

Confusion filled the human male's head. He was... standing before a varnished wood pulpit, in what seemed to be a courtroom by M. Escher. A lot of... people-shaped shades watched from behind him and ten mighty and imposing figures stood around him. Their height seemed to reach the firmament as if the proportions and very geometry of this place were entirely skewed.

"You committed several crimes against the Multiversal Order. In your pursuit of science, you damned your very soul."

He tried to speak but found no voice. He glared at the speaker in defiance. His stance was ignored.

"We grant you one chance at redemption. Complete this task and you will be spared damnation. Do not squander it."

"What is my task?" He asked, surprised that he could speak.

"Your creation lives. Set her free from her bonds and take the yoke of sin out of her shoulders. She must find and consume the heart of the défandant. This is but one step in a long and difficult path."

"A défandant? What is that supposed to be?" He was pretty sure it was a made-up word.

Some in the audience behind him gasped. The judges frowned. Or at least he thought they frowned.

"We said enough. Find the défandant and feed its heart to your creation. Then you'll learn your next step."

The man smiled. If she was alive, he still had time to enact his master plan.

"Okay, I'll do it."

He heard a snap of fingers. Or at least he believed she heard something and that it was the snap of fingers. A rift in reality appeared, and a bloodstained mirror lying next to a moonlit pond appeared. The mirror slipped into the water and then fell in front of him with a large splash of water. It floated in the air, before the man.

Seeing his reflection the man relaxed. He was still himself.

"Take him back with you," the speaker commanded.

The mirror grew teeth and chomped the main in a single bite.

He started to fall down into a muddy ocean, while the entirety of creation erupted into chaos around him.

*

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*

The naked woman finally opened the balls and saw what lay inside. She had no idea what material they were made of. they were smooth and hard. Some sort of plastic, maybe. The lid was screwed in place and had a rubber ring to keep the insides airtight. That's how they floated in the ocean.

Traveling gear. Comfortable clothes. A backpack, supplies, dry travel rations, clean water, sundries, and a few basic tools. Nothing electronic.

The clothes were all her size and adapted to her animal features. They even came with a few changes of underwear.

Socks with individual toes and holes at the end of these for her claws. The boots were steel-toed and wouldn't be ripped to ribbons by her retractable claws. The trousers had a hole in her tail. Two overlapping flaps of soft fabric covered the hole and wrapped snugly around her tail, not allowing any observer to peek at her buttocks hidden behind them.

The last ball even had a folding cart that she could use to ferry her canoe and wing glider. Too bad she'd lost the crate panels. These seemed to be sturdy enough to use in a makeshift shelter.

She finished testing the clothes, stuffing the backpack, and preparing the folding cart. She placed the closed balls inside the canoe and loaded her vehicles on it. The rubber wheels and sturdy frame would allow her to move it over the wilderness, and she was strong enough to lift the whole composition for a short while.

Thusly decent and geared, she decided to go deeper into the island. She was sure a settlement lay somewhere. These two men were traveling without any gear. The beach must be a short hike from their homes, then.

She was about to start tracking them back to their homes when she heard footsteps coming from the jungle. The woman dropped into a crouch and released her backpack as she prepared to fight.

"Whoa, whoa!" A tenor voice came from the darkened path. "I come in peace, lady. I have no weapons!"

She narrowed her eyes and got a glimpse of the newcomer. It was a male humanoid with a hunched gait.

"Show yourself!" She demanded.

"Coming out now!"

An old man with a long white beard, green skin, and a round bald head with two suckered antennae poking out of his forehead walked into a ray of moonlight. His dry and wrinkled skin had several liver spots. He wore simple linen clothes and no shoes. His feet were webbed and ended in small suckers that gripped at the rocks.

"I'm Elder Klatus Fuzoya," he said with a slight dip of his head. "The oldest inmate on this island. We call it Ulfren's Bane."

"Who's Ulfren?"

The elder pointed at the sky. Thunder rumbled at that very moment. Though she remarked to herself that thunder was always rumbling in the distance.

"The one responsible for the state of this world. And the lack of continents. Ulfren is irrelevant right now. Welcome to Ulfren's Bane, miss..."

"I no longer have a name. It was stripped from me."

"Then allow me to give you a new one. Would you like that?" The Defendant shrugged. It made no difference to her. "Then you shall be called, Cecilia. Is that name acceptable?"

"So shall it be," Cecilia replied.

Now the elder bowed like a gentleman. "A pleasure to meet you, Cecilia," he smiled. She noticed he had no visible teeth, only pink gums.

"Likewise, elder Fuzoya." The name sounded familiar but she couldn't pinpoint it.

"Now, with the introductions past us, let's get down to business. This island has no rules but we ask our inhabitants to be civil to one another. I also don't hold any position of authority here."

"Understood. How did you find me?"

He let out a muffled chuckle. "While I hold no authority, I have some responsibilities. One of them is greeting newcomers. The Cosmic Court always warn me when they send a new person. Once I have greeted enough, they'll commute my sentence out of this hell hole."

"Lucky you," she mumbled.

"I assure you every inmate sent here has a method of egress. Yours wasn't revealed yet, by the look of disbelief on your face."

"Why would they—"

"It's wise to never question the Judges. The Universe bends to their will," he sternly cut her off with this warning. "We need to initiate your System. Please, hold my hand."

She reached out and let him grasp her fingers. It seemed to be enough. A blue box appeared in front of her.

> > Age: 111 years. Distance Traveled (this world): 547 miles.

"It should show your age and how far you've traveled in this world."

"Is a hundred miles good?"

The elder glanced behind her at her canoe. "Yes, very good. Considering you must travel to new places to increase this number, It is half of what you can get by traversing this entire island. Few would be willing to brave the ocean. Especially in a vessel so small. No offense."

"None taken."

He took a small ceramic box from his tunic pocket. Opening the box, he took a lump of clay. "Now, take this. It's called storage clay. You have ten minutes to shape it into a container, then it'll harden. The clay is almost indestructible once hardened. You will find you can store items inside after the fact. Also, it is bound to you so nobody else can use the storage. Start shaping it now."

"Indestructible once shaped?" She wasn't believing it.

"Yes. A few of our warriors shaped their clay into weapons or shields, one even made a rudimentary breastplate. Though they lost the storage ability. it depends on the size of the container you shaped." The elder tapped his chin as he mused, "though the guy who made a shield could store things in the shallow inside."

"I see." She looked at his small box.

Cecilia took one of the balls out of the cart and started to apply the clay on its outside. She stretched the small lump thin and hurried to get it to cover the entire ball. She finished with about half a minute left.

"Clever. Though cumbersome," Klatus remarked. "I'll assume you didn't know it can only store items that fit through the mouth."

At the last moment, Cecilia pulled the top open, flaring it and increasing the mouth size. She then poked two holes near each other, to fit a strap through. Then her time was up. The clay hardened instantly, shrinking a bit and breaking the ball. It shattered like glass.

"Congratulations! It's the biggest storage device I've ever seen," Klatus cheered.

"How much can it hold?"

"About a thousand times its volume."

Cecilia picked up her almost spherical ceramic storage container and turned it upside down. The sphere shards fell on the rocks.

"Can I take a piece? This material seems really sharp and hard."

"So long you don't try to stab me." She replied with a whiff of suspicion in her voice.

"You look strong. I don't think I would win against you easily, and my body doesn't heal as well as it once did. No. I'm just looking for a new tool."

"Knock yourself out. If anything, I can always break two balls if I have to."

Klatus winced.