Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
With trembling hands, Mercy wields Kastiel’s power. Bright, glittering blue flashes across the sky like lightning. Then it forms into a globe around her. The mirror responds to her will, her imagination, painting it into being. Words tumble from her lips, but I can’t hear them.
More and more, I see her pull power from the mirror, like drawing strings from a ball of yarn.
In fact, the closer I watch her, the more I realize that she’s practically drunk with it.
It’s almost as if she’s seduced, like she can’t stop, while all around her, the realm takes shape—mountains, a great castle, glittering sand and sea…
But then she glances back at Kastiel, there within the mirror, and her eyes go wide.
He’s flickering in and out like a star.
Kastiel, she cries. What is happening?
Except he’s no longer speaking, his eyes falling shut, his skin leached of color. Then he begins to float away into the void of whatever lies beyond.
“I thought I was only borrowing from an endless well of power,” Moranya narrates.
“I didn’t understand that I was draining it—and in turn, draining the last of his soul.
The two were linked. It was his life force.
When I realized what was happening, I halted immediately, except in doing so, the mirror cracked.
“I tried desperately to pull him out, to fix what I had done and free him. But it was too late. To make matters worse, the realm I had built was unfinished. I had failed—or so I thought.
“Left alone with a cracked mirror and a mountain of grief, I tried everything I could to repair the mirror, all to no avail. Inside, however, Kastiel—unresponsive as he was, as if comatose—regained his color. I could still feel power in the mirror, but I was afraid that drawing more would harm him. So I left the mirror alone for months, hoping that with time, Kastiel would be healed. That he would wake and tell me how to fix the mirror. I would free him, beg for his help to finish what I had started. But months passed, then years, and he never woke.”
On the glass, seasons change outside Mercy’s window, and all the while she sleeps with the mirror in her hands, pulled tight against her heart. In fact, I rarely see her leave her bed. She slumbers the days away, depressed, until someone finally confronts her—a man blurred to me in the vision.
“Then Miridran was attacked,” she tells me. “A rebel faction that had escaped us during the war. Though we quelled it quickly, the attack was brutal. So many died that day, even more on their deathbed. I had to do something. I picked up the mirror and summoned the realm I had made.
“The mirror still responded easily to my will; I knew I could command his power as if it were my own. And I did so—carefully, slowly. I learned that I could pull slivers of power from it over periods of time without draining Kastiel too much, waiting until he revitalized to draw more. Though I couldn’t summon enough to finish the realm, I could draw souls into it.
I could sustain the realm so long as I was gentle and sparing with what I took.
But to maintain the realm, to usher souls into my lair, I had to leave my world behind and give myself to the new one entirely.
I abandoned my identity to become the Fate of Morta—ushering in the soul of every mortal who died—and in turn, the realm imprisoned me the way I had imprisoned Kastiel. ”
She paces to a table, where she gathers a small, handheld mirror, holding it out so I can see. It’s the same mirror, but cracked in the same way, several shards missing.
An unfinished realm. The voids behind the doors.
The air that seemed ripped in places, black threads fraying.
It was never meant to be this way. It was an accident.
More so—“The children. Where are they? And my stepmother. Her codex was missing,” I say, my heart picking up speed. “And so were others—”
“They are safe.” For the first time, she moves, striding toward an open window.
She stretches out her arm, and to my surprise, a strand of the aurora comes as if to her beck and call, lassoing around her fingers.
“As it turns out, the purest of souls—children included—were too perfect for my imperfect realm. I could not bring them fully into being, though I tried. They have remained like this, floating above the realm, imprisoned the way my beloved is. My only consolation is that they are at peace, while he is trapped in slumber, with me constantly pulling on his power. If only I could repair the mirror, I could release him. And he, in turn, could help me complete my realm.”
“Yet you said Kastiel never understood the necessity of such a realm.”
“Because we ran out of time. He would have come to understand.”
“And this is why you wanted Anton,” I say. “You needed him to repair the mirror.”
The large mirror takes me back, a younger version of Anton coalescing in its surface.
He is about sixteen, facing Moranya for the first time.
And when he doesn’t take her hand, she summons his codex, laying her palm flat across its cover.
This is how she does it, I realize. Threads of images and sounds rise from the codex to spiral around her, and all the while, her eyes are closed yet fluttering, as if absorbing it all.
When she opens them, her pupils are bright as if holding the stars themselves.
“He was such a curious thing,” Moranya muses from beside me.
“So fascinated with my story, for one. And he had such a brilliant mind. I knew he was the one I needed. I had to convince him to help me. But simply reading his life through the codex wasn’t enough for me to decipher how I might persuade him.
You can glean much that way, but it pales in comparison with witnessing someone firsthand. ”
The same way she chose to observe Eremis, despite having his life at her fingertips.
“A codex is meant to transcribe decisions and impacts, but it can never really capture the essence of someone.”
“Perhaps that is why your system of judgment is so flawed,” I can’t help but say.
She doesn’t take offense. “One reason, yes. The codices were made of my desire to preserve life. They serve to highlight the moments that make a person who they are. But they can never be the sum of who a soul is in the present.”
Again the scene in the mirror shifts to Anton in his workshop, bent over a table with scattered fragments of glass laid out in a rough pattern.
He fits some pieces together, rearranging others.
“He was a talented glassworker, like his forefathers. And each time he died, I spent more time with him. He would stay a few minutes longer before I sent him back. We became friends, and he might be the only mortal to ever look at me—in my true form—like I was a friend, rather than a monster of death.”
Because that’s what so many have called her throughout history, ever since. Queen Mercy—a hero turned villain. She became the face that ushered in death.
“The day came that I finally trusted him with my tale. Thinking the shards of the mirror were lost to time, I asked him to take my hand. To stay with me here—to help me try to restore the mirror. You have seen my workshop. I have tried every combination of minerals here to repair the cracks, but nothing works. If anyone can find a way, though, it would be him. I explained that only with the mirror restored could we bring Kastiel back and rectify my mistakes.”
“Was that what the ritual was for? Your attempts to repair the mirror?” I ask. The reason Anton wouldn’t let us return to Ansa until she was finished?
“You must be referring to my communion with the mirror. Every night, I must carefully withdraw enough power to sustain the realm for the next day. It is a lengthy process.”
“Anton knew all this,” I say, biting my lip. “But he didn’t help?”
“He was convinced that setting Kastiel free could spell doom for us all. He thought repairing the mirror would set Kastiel loose—a Kastiel eager for revenge, with all his powers intact and me no longer able to use them. I tried to convince Anton that Kastiel would not seek revenge, that I could convince him to help. That love would temper Kastiel yet again. But Anton deemed it too dangerous a risk.”