- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

What is this place? It’s inside the mirrors, but what does that mean?

Inkume looks around himself at the old forest he’s inside of, that memory of the wolf-goddess' past playing out again and again as if it were a video on repeat. But it’s disjointed, and pieces of it run out of sequence, as if the various memories of those days were all from different videos colliding together into one chaotic jumble. It’s like he’s stuck in a collage of loops that are intersecting with each other.

Mirrors float all around the area, looking like windows back into the castle. He can see adventurers and monsters moving on the other side of some of them, whereas others simply stare into blank darkness.

Reaching out, he tries to touch a person next to himself. But his hand goes right through them, as if they were a ghost. The image shimmers and then resumes its routine.

This here must be an image of the past, of the reign of the last Vampire Lord some thousand odd years ago. What he just saw must be what happened back then to the wolf goddess’ village.

Feeling his way around through the illusion, he suddenly stops, freezing as a pair of blazingly red eyes glare straight into his from an inch away. Inkume’s body tenses up, jolting back an inch as he stands face to face with the old Vampire Lord. His arm shoots out trying to grab the man by the collar of an outfit nearly the same as his own, but Inkume’s hand just passes through the front of his illusory body.

The two of them stare into each other's eyes for a moment Inkume is almost convinced is real.

— But then the other Vampire Lord just turns and walks away, the mirage of his leaving repeating itself. A doll on his arm leans against his shoulder.

It was just a coincidence of bad positioning, is all. He’s not really there. Inkume’s fingers unclench.

That guy looks like he was a real asshole. It’s no wonder everyone is all fucked up in the head about him possibly having reincarnated.

Inkume makes a mental note to himself to give Snatch and probably also Fi-Fi a hug when he gets back.

An explosion comes from nearby, over the distance. Debris and rubble fly into the air over the trees.

Making a beeline for it, Inkume breaks through the bushes, noticing that their texture and feel are wrong. They don’t feel like plants, but he can’t quite describe what it is that he’s touching. The sensation, the pressure — it all doesn’t fit what in his head bushes ought to feel like.

His boot doesn’t make contact with solid ground and instead touches a mirror that is lying flat on the grass.

He yelps, falling through it as if it were a hole.

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A second later, he flops out somewhere inside the castle, recognizing the space as being the moldy mirror down in the basement. There’s a sound of fighting coming from the boiler room. A group of adventurers is there.

A confused sorceress turns around, hearing something, but before she can see him, he’s slipped back into the mirror.

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Inkume dusts himself off.

Having shortcuts around the castle is nice, but this isn’t the time to worry about that. He climbs through the bush, finding himself standing somewhere else entirely now.

The scenery of the forest is gone, and instead he’s now in a space that he recognizes as being his very own throne room — except it’s mirrored. Everything is essentially backward and slanted at an angle that takes him a second to process, until he finds in his memory the image of the mirror sitting in his real throne room down by the door — at a slight tilt.

This space is a reflection of that room, viewed from the distorted angle.

But everything else is black.

There, where the mirror can’t see, there aren’t any walls or fake projections — there’s just emptiness. It’s like someone built a stone floor and two or three walls in the middle of a void.

It seems that this ‘Inverted Domain’ is exactly that. It’s a mirrored alternate reality that consists of a mixture of memories and mirrored reflections from reality, but it’s limited in its scale and scope. There are gaps in many places where the mirrors in the real castle ‘can’t see’. This dimension seems to be compensating those blind corners. It’s making things up to try and fit in anything into the emptiness that it somehow senses should be full, but it’s like it doesn’t know with what.

The walls of the throne room that are missing, because they are out of the real mirror’s line of sight, are instead replaced with lines of trees, suits of armor that are pinned sideways and spread eagle, skulls, and bed linens. An entire segment behind the mirror is literally just a nonsensical waterfall that crashes into the void instead of a line of solid bricks. It looks like a game running off of corrupted data.

It’s as if the dimension ‘knows’ that a room needs four walls, but it doesn’t understand that the missing walls should be made from bricks like the parts it can see. So it instead just fills the gaps with anything. It does this with the floors, with the ceiling — even the furniture. A long, thin table along the wall seems normal in its beautifully crafted regalia, except for the one leg that is out of sight of the mirror in the real throne room. Instead, this fake table has a stack of hollow faces as one of its four legs holding it aloft at a slant.

“It’s your fault, you know,” says a voice from the end of the room.

Metal clanks and crashes. The wolf-goddess is standing there, hunched over and surrounded by a heap of destroyed hollow armors that she has been fighting. More of them pour in through the floating mirrors, all around the room, and she dives straight toward them, never making progress toward his own inverted throne where that girl is sitting.

He can see her now clearly through the shards of scrap metal and torn fabric that fly through the air as the breathless wolf goddess fights off the monsters. She’s dressed in clothes like he’s never seen before, but that his mind tells him are of a very old and forgotten style from centuries ago — like a princess. Her ochre eyes are large and bright, but matte as if they were painted on her face rather than actual, dewy, wet things. Her hair is straight, thin, and white, with a length that reaches the small of her back. But the white seems not like a natural color and more like the result of the fading away of something that was once much more vivid. Her skin is the same — peeled away in color — like a painted porcelain plate that had lost its vivid hues over generations of light damage. She looks human from a distance, but upon closer inspection, she isn’t. There are clear gaps where her joints are on her neck and wrists, and her movements are stiff.

She’s a doll, a wooden puppet.

“The Master died because of you,” says the puppet girl, and flicks a finger through the air.

All of the destroyed metal armor on the ground starts to rattle and recollect, the pieces rolling and rejoining as the killed monsters begin to reassemble themselves. The wolf goddess looks around herself, wiping her mouth, but clearly running out of stamina.

Inkume steps forward. “Enough!” calls the Vampire Lord out into the fighting chamber, his voice echoing and then vanishing as the black, empty gaps in the walls and floor swallow his words.

The puppet turns her head toward him, her time-dulled, painted glass eyes rolling over to look at him.

“Mind your business, impostor,” says the doll coldly. “You’re next.”

She flicks a finger.

The room rumbles, and walls emerge all around him — walls made up out of broken, ripped clothes and old, damp books, of misaligned bricks, and destroyed furniture — and cut him off.

Inkume looks around himself and then dives into a mirror.

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He pops out in the attic, next to a few mannequins.

They turn their heads to look at him curiously, watching as their master runs past them and then dives into a new mirror down the way.

“Did I smell the Master?!” asks an excited voice, a few glowing eyes peering out of the darkness as the spiders immediately approach eagerly from the darkness and look around for the Vampire Lord.

One of them holds up a freshly knitted pair of spider's silk socks.

The mannequins shrug.

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Inkume dives out of the other side of the mirror, falling from a great distance as he emerges from a pool of glass high, high up in the air. Spiraling down over the throne room where power and bodies are being broken in all directions from the center destructive force that is the wolf-goddess. It looks like a whirlpool from up here.

A wayward helmet flies his way, the rest of the armor following after.

[Midnight Monster] You have turned into a rat!

Inkume’s black paws run over the flying armor — at first, he thinks. But then he falls immediately through the armor — as if it weren’t actually real. It’s like he’s falling through a ghost.

But how can that be? The wolf goddess is fighting them.

In a panic, free-falling, he changes again.

[Midnight Monster] You have turned into a bat!

Gliding down, the Vampire Lord lands amidst the chaos, turning back into a man. His cloak flutters behind him like a veil that covers the wolf.

“I said, enough,” orders the Vampire Lord, his ruby eyes shining up toward the odd doll.

Inkume has used: [Ink-You-Me]

A black jettison of inky fog blasts out in all directions at once, the hollow armors stumbling and falling back as a tar-like slick blasts out over them at once, disorienting them. Many of them stumble and slip on the ground, clattering together.

He pushes one back.

— This time, his hand touches it.

How? What is this?

Besides their varying physicality, these are his monsters, aren’t they? Why aren’t they listening to him?

Inkume looks at the doll that glares his way.

“You don’t have power here,” she says plainly and lovelessly. “You don’t have power anywhere,” explains the doll. She wants to narrow her eyes but can’t. They seem to be stuck, so she reaches up with a free hand and pushes her own eyelids down. “I’ve been watching you for weeks now. I know what you are,” says the thing.

The mirrors.

Inkume’s mind plays back all the weird and not Vampire Lordy things he’s done when he thought he was out of sight of Snatch and the others, but the mirrors… they’ve always been around the castle — everywhere. Whether in his crypt, in the bath, or in the basement — there are mirrors all around at all times. If this thing, this doll, lives here, then she’s been watching him since the start.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She knows about Enfangled.

Heavy breathing comes from behind him. He’d think it was Snatch if it wasn’t for the hand clutching his back. He looks over his shoulder. It’s the wolf, and she’s just about done. She’s keeled over, her other hand on her knee as she tries to stay upright, panting for air. He can feel her heart absolutely hammering through the skin of her wrist. It feels like it’s about to rip straight out of her chest at the rate its going.

The doll points at him. “You’re nothing like my Master!” she yells, her extended hand dangling loosely as the ball-joint its attached to has become loose over the years. “He was strong and loyal! You’re… you’re just…” She grits her teeth, hissing beneath her breath.

Ah. He gets it now.

The doll has been living in the mirrors all of this time, still stuck in her obsession about the old Vampire Lord, of whom she appears to have been the favorite, given what he saw in the flashback memory just before. Now she’s been observing him and finding him lacking compared to the old Vampire Lord.

As for the wolf, the doll probably thinks that if the wolf had agreed to join them back one thousand years ago, things would have ended differently.

Inkume shrugs and scratches his cheek. “Can’t have been that great, since he’s dead and all,” replies Inkume plainly. “Plus, nobody liked him.”

“— You’re just a disgusting lecher!” she accuses, pointing a finger straight toward his heart.

…Huh?

In an instant, every theory he just made flies out of the window.

A hundred suits of armor lunge at once.

His first response is to throw himself around backward, grabbing his cloak. Inkume throws the black fabric over the wolf-goddess, throwing her through the portal inside of it and into his treasury at the last second before a hundred spears and knives collapse over him.

The last thing she sees before vanishing back to the castle is his silhouette fading behind an avalanche of black metal.

You have added: [Wolf-Goddess] to your castle’s treasury!

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- [The Doll] -

She watches, her fingers gripping the throne’s armrests as she leans forward and looks at the heap of metal that crushes down over him. Her shoulders twitch, her chest rattling as she starts to laugh.

It’s better to have no Vampire Lord than to have one who would pretend to be greater than her true Master. This… disgusting man, this impostor — she’s been watching him this entire time as he abused the power of the castle to collect playthings at best. He’s wasting the gift of the darkest lords of this world in order to create what she can best identify as a harem.

He has no intention of completing the ritual to bring about the Night that Never Ends. He has no desire to do anything but indulge in his depravity. She’s sure of it. From the very first moment he appeared in this castle and immediately found himself an elven plaything, to him corralling the traitor-mutt goddess of all things to one of her own mirrors to seduce her like he’s done with the rest. The fact that he would even associate with that disgusting three-fingered ghost, let alone have her sit on his lap like the old Master would let her do.

DISGUSTING.

— She won’t stand for it.

This is wrong; this is a befoulment of everything she knows.

The old Master wasn’t with her for long, but he was strong. He listened to her; he needed her. This other man… this waste of the title — it’s better if he’s dead forever.

So it’s a good thing that he bought the illusion. Otherwise she would have had a problem.

Laughing to herself, the doll leans back on her throne and waits for the castle to start to fade away, now that the Master is dead.

Maybe it will take a thousand years more, but a new one will come to them again — one who is more worthy of her adoration and, as such, the title of Vampire Lord. If she can’t be the favorite, if she can’t be the first one found and treasured — like the old Master did — then there is no point to this place existing.

Nothing happens.

She wants to blink but can’t, so instead uses her hands to force her eyelids closed and open again. A second later, she swipes her hand out.

The mountain of hollow armors and weapons begins to pull apart, and as they disperse, they reveal something beneath them. There isn’t a punctured, mangled, bleeding corpse that she needs to stake to finish off.

There’s nothing.

He’s gone.

“What…?” mutters the doll, getting up. Her rattling joints creak and clatter as she ‘walks’, like a marionette held aloft by strings held by an awkward hand. Where did he go?

“I am the lord of this castle,” says a voice from the darkness all around her. Her eyes shift, her head snapping to try and find its source. “Everything in here is mine,” he explains.

A shape re-manifests at the end of the throne room as he reappears — at least she thinks.

“Get him!” screams the doll, pointing. The armors turn, all of them marching at once as they rattle his way.

But the man doesn’t reform as a person. Instead, a black speck — the size of a fly at best — changes and regrows into something she’s never seen before. It’s like a wolf in size, but its shape is something more sleek and agile. Her eyes only have a second to adapt to it before it launches straight toward her, dancing through the falling axes and swords of her illusory soldiers like a weaving shadow.

She lets out a sharp scream, casting out a hand. A wall emerges between her and it, made up out of remnants from all around the castle.

The doll steps back, looking around herself.

— A black shape launches out from a mirror, having weaved in and out through her portals to bypass her barrier.

She lifts her arm, trying to stop it. But she’s too slow. The doll flies back down, sliding across the throne room floor as heavy, black paws press down on her shoulders and bring her to a stop. Razor claws cut through her dress and sink down into the wood of her body beneath its feet.

A sharp-faced monster leers over her, its eyes glowing with ruby red. Its features are angled, its teeth long and sharp, and they bear down over her from close.

“When I say ‘enough’,” says the man’s voice from inside the beast, whose jagged maw presses closer to her as she kicks and tries to claw herself away. Her wooden legs rattle, striking limply against the stone floors as his heavy weight pins her down. “— Then it’s enough,” he says into her ear.

How did he get out away from the soldiers? It’s impossible. Unless…

The terrified doll stares, her body rattling.

— Unless he figured it out — the illusion.

Her eyes look around the area, staring at the mirrors. She didn’t even notice, but they’re all covered up from the other sides. The glass is obscured; there’s nothing to reflect. Even the one he just came through himself has been covered up behind him.

Everything in here isn’t real in the same way that something is outside of the mirror domain. Rather, everything in here is just a reflection. Like the broken throne room they’re inside of, part of it is a perfect recreation, but the parts that the mirrors can’t see she has to improvise herself.

That goes for the soldiers too.

The only thing that’s real inside of the mirror domain is what is actually reflected. Everything else is just a fake projection. She was so busy being angry that she didn’t notice the mirrors being obscured, making her soldiers less and less real by the second. By the time they had piled onto him, they weren’t reflections of the real things anymore — they were just fakes.

But how?

If he’s in here, then who…?

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- [Vampire Lord Inkume] -

It’s a good thing he’s starting to learn that most of this new life is pretty flexible. Inkume hates to say it, but he learned something watching the old Vampire Lord use his same abilities, but in a much different manner.

[Midnight Monster] You have turned into a Panther cat!

Panthers are cats, and cat rhymes with ‘bat’. That makes it fair game as a transformation, even if panthers probably don’t exist in this world.

Is that some rule-bending, spirit-of-the-law-breaking bullshit?

— Yes. Yes, it is.

But what good is being the Vampire Lord if you can’t bend a few things here and there? He’s evil, after all. Allegedly.

“Kill me,” says the trembling doll, glaring at him as his fangs run near to its thin, wooden neck. “Coward. Rat!” she curses at him. “You filthy faking impostor,” swears the doll, her wooden fists hitting the side of his head as she strikes him.

— Her left hand disconnects from the impact, her palm falling off of the old ball joint it had only been loosely attached to.

Her large, painted glass eyes stare at him. “You’re not worthy of being called the 'Vampire Lord'. You’re just, ugh — I hate you!”

The Vampire Lord stares at the doll that continues to hit him, now with her handless wrist. He looks up toward the mirrors.

This is over.

His massive, razor claws retract back into his midnight black paws as he gets off of her and starts to slink away.

“What? Afraid of me? Coward! I’ll kill you!” she calls out, trying to get up again as he shakes himself out and then turns back into a man, rising up over on his two feet to stand there with crossed arms. “Come on! Bite me!” she yells, picking up her lost hand and throwing it at him. It strikes his chest and falls down to the ground.

This one is too weird for him.

One, because she’s crazy, and he’s learned at this point from experience not to stick his teeth in crazy. Two, because she looks like a raging brat and he’s an ethical Vampire. Three, because she doesn’t have any blood, so what exactly is he supposed to do here?

He’ll let more experienced minds handle this one. It saves him from looking like a creep.

“The real Master wouldn’t let me get away with attacking him!” she yells after him, almost sounding angry at the fact that he’s turning away to leave.

Inkume looks back over his shoulder down at her as she kneels there, almost crawling after him like a jointless zombie with a confusing anger visible behind her glassy eyes. “That man died alone,” he says coldly. “As he deserved.” He narrows his eyes.

“He was a ten times better man than you are!” she yells at him with venom.

“…Then why didn’t you die with him?” asks the Vampire Lord dryly, compassion overcoming his expression again as he looks at the strange, wretched, time-forgotten thing. The anger is clear on her expression, but there don't seem to come any words from her to match it. He shrugs and turns to walk away, leaving this to someone else. “If he was really strong, he would have had someone to help him.” And without looking back at her, he walks toward a mirror that is uncovered from the other side. The wolf-goddess stands there, pulling an old sheet off of the glass that she had covered up from the castle side of the mirror.

“Hey!” she yells after him. “You can’t just leave!” argues the doll.

He lifts a hand. “I told you. I own this place,” says the Vampire Lord, a ruby light flashing in his eyes as he steps through the mirror. “I can do whatever I want.”

Inkume reaches out, his hand rubbing the side of a face that appears out of the darkness. Snatch — appearing from the other side of the mirror — smiles, schmoozing against his open palm with the side of her face. He leans over, talking into her ear. The sweaty ghost nods, smiling. “Yes, Master! I love you!”

"Take it easy, Snatch," replies Inkume, the ghost laughing to herself with her jackal's wheeze with the greed in her eyes evident as she looks across the room.

“So what? You’re not even going to do anything about it?” asks the doll, the master of the castle not bothering to respond as he steps out through the mirror. The wolf goddess helps him step out through the other side of the portal. The doll crawls forward after him. “I’ll come after you! This isn’t over!” she yells, screaming.

“I’m not good with kids,” sighs Inkume, rubbing his face as he takes the strong hand, helping him out through the glass. “Thousand year old ones or not.”

“Same here. I just used to ignore them all the time, but somehow it just made them like me more,” explains the wolf-goddess as he looks her over. She seems fine.

Inkume takes the cloth from the woman and shakes it out, getting the dust off. His eyes look into the mirror one last time, seeing Snatch sitting on the mirrored throne inside of the other dimension with the broken doll laid down over her legs. The ghost's hand is up in the air, about to strike down on her lifted dress.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” yells the doll back at the ghost, who has a century’s worth of discipline and maybe a little revenge to get out.

Inkume covers the mirror back up, only hearing a loud thwacking and a sharp cry that implies the horrific fate of those who would defy the Vampire Lord’s dark will.

Many adventurers all around the castle stop their hunts, listening to the sudden wailing to come that they think is from some tormented spirit that haunts this place. In a way, they’re right — it is.

Listening to the striking sound coming like clockwork, Inkume and the wolf goddess walk down the castle corridor together. “So, what was your name anyway?” he asks again, looking at her.

“It’s better you don’t know,” she replies dryly, looking at him, walking with crossed arms. “You tell anyone what you saw; I’ll rip your throat out,” she warns.

Inkume shakes his head. “Everyone is always so angry,” he says, clutching his face. He looks out through the gaps in his fingers toward her. “Come on. You owe me one.”

She glares at him and then closes her eyes, lifting her nose. “Fine,” she snaps, almost annoyed. “But if you tell anyone -” she starts, warning him.

“- I got it, I got it,” replies the Vampire Lord jokingly as he cuts her off. “Scary wolf,” he says, lifting his hands to his mouth to make a pair of fangs with his fingers.

— There’s a dry crack and a cry that comes out as they walk past another mirror.

Her face budges, trying to force something out. But it looks like its stuck in her throat, like she was trying to spit out a broken tooth that was still connected at the root but dangling freely. She mutters something.

“What?” he asks, having not heard it.

The wolf goddess glares at him. “Bark!” she barks.

Inkume tilts his head, confused as to why she’s making dog noises now. The mood is really weird tonight.

Seeing that he isn’t responding, she almost seems to get angrier. “What?” he asks.

“I said it’s ‘Bark’!” yells the wolf-goddess, lunging out angrily to shove him away. She stops, freezing. His hand has already reached around her, having grabbed her tail by its tip. The wolf goddess tsks, looking away in anger. “My name is Bark,” she explains. “If you laugh, I’ll kill you,” reaffirms the woman, just to make sure that he understands she’s serious.

He’s hardly one to laugh about names, considering how he ended up here to begin with himself as Inkume.

“…How in the world?” starts the Vampire Lord, sparing her dignity by not even cracking a smirk.

“The village children,” explains the matriarchal wolf goddess, lowering her arms again. He lets go of her tail again, and the two of them keep walking. “They thought it was cute,” she explains. “It stuck from there.”

Inkume and the wolf goddess Bark walk down the dark corridor together.

“It is,” he replies reassuringly after a moment, his hand reaching behind her back and resting on her shoulder.

“…Shut up,” snarls the wolf goddess, her eyes locked straight ahead as the two of them vanish into the darkness of the night. But she leans her head back an inch, placing it on his side for a moment as they walk together, his hand still laid over her.

There’s another dull thwack that comes from a nearby mirror.