Page 156 of Mountain of Mirrors and Starlight
The boat stopped moving on one side, making it drift. Aislinn had stopped paddling. “Caer?”
He tore his gaze away from the water. “It’s nothing,” he promised.
But even as he spoke, he knew that was a lie. There was something there. More than something—and whispers of old memories twitched at his ears as they rowed across the lake. The laughter of other children in the courtyard of Afelcarreg. His mother singing. Her screaming for him.
And, inexplicably, a voice that sounded like Aislinn’s, calling out words he didn’t think he’d ever heard her speak.
“He will be all that you want and more. So much more .”
The island grew closer. Before long, the boat reached the shore. They filed out one by one, Caer resisting the urge to hold his hand out to Aislinn. He stopped himself just in time.
They trudged up to the Mirror.
Beau was the first to notice something was wrong. “Wait,” he said, increasing his speed. He jogged up the steps.
Aislinn frowned. “What is it?”
“It’s… it’s not there.”
“What?”
“The Mirror. It’s—it’s empty.”
To prove it, he plunged his fist into the centre.
Caer’s stomach dropped. Nothing happened. There was no glass to shatter.
“It’s just a frame.”
Minerva came up behind him. “It’s been smashed? Taken?”
Beau shook his head. “I don’t think so…” he said, running his finger over the empty frame. Unlike everything else in the room, there was no shine or shimmer to it. It was entirely, endlessly black, incapable of holding light. “There would be shards, glassy residue… something. This is almost like… like it was never there to begin with.”
“A decoy?” Minerva suggested.
“Why wouldn’t you make your decoy more mirror-like?” Aislinn pointed out. “Would take longer to realise it wasn’t real. Especially if you were a non-magic using dwarf.”
“Good point.”
Caer’s eyes slid out across the lake, now calm and still again, black as tar, smooth as—
“Glass.”
Aislinn came up to his shoulder. “What?”
“It’s the Mirror,” he said. “The lake—it’s the Mirror.”
Minerva made a sound of protest, but Aislinn and Beau went very still and very quiet.
“You can feel it too, can’t you?” he whispered.
Aislinn nodded. Beau turned back to the Mirror, to the short plinth it was resting on. He took out a handkerchief and rubbed away at the dirt. A few, faint pictures appeared in the stone, showing the dwarves delivering the Mirror down into the deep and enlisting the help of a team of fae sorcerers to change it from glass into water, dispelling its power.
A whole team of sorcerers.
“Does it say what the Mirror does?” Caer asked, almost afraid of the answer.
Beau shook his head. “Only that people had used it for evil, and that both fae and dwarves deemed it too dangerous.”
