Spieler ran his fingers over the artfully shaped frame. The lilies were so lifelike that insects often came to settle on their petals. They’d never found a silversmith quite as talented. Volund. He’d met with a very sad end. This world had not at all agreed with him.
The glass between these perfect silver flowers showed Spieler’s true guise. The mirrors only allowed you to pass in that form. A huge disadvantage, and they’d tried in vain to change that. The others had also insisted that he give his face to Seventeen. A childish attempt to punish him for having pushed through with his idea. At least Sixteen had gotten Krieger’s face. A shame that they’d lost both of them, but Spieler had always thought the probability of the Mirrorlings surviving the mission was vanishingly small.
Eight centuries. Eight centuries in the wrong world.
He lifted his hand.
This world had been good to him.
More than you could say about the other one. In this moment, which he’d yearned for so painfully long, everything seemed to wash up behind the mirror’s glass: defeats, old foes, the backwardness, the terror of those last days...
No, Spieler.
He pressed his hand on the glass.
Home...
He kept his eyes closed for a moment, listened to his own breathing, sensed the changed room surrounding him, its width and depth. He didn’t like the smell. The air smelled of lost time, of defeat, and of a past so long forgotten it had lost all its flavor. And it smelled of the Fairies’ elements, of water and earth.
Spieler opened his eyes, and what he saw was familiar, made strange by too many years of absence. The most painful aspect of exile was how home became a dream, cleansed of all that was bad. One never returned to the dream one had nurtured over centuries, but to a reality that would always look shabby compared to the romanticized memories. The silver pillars, the balconies, the chandeliers, the glass floor—how dusty, how old-fashioned. Yesterday. Was there a more merciless word?
His steps echoed through the empty hall.
He’d once been so proud of this palace. Touching. Now it struggled to compare with the glass towers that could touch the sky.
Spieler stopped. He touched his forehead.
What was that?
The skin above his left eyebrow was rough. His fingers felt a bark-like scab. No, this wasn’t a scab.
He pulled his mirror eye from his pocket. But there she was. Her beautiful body was already crumbling into petals. Come on, show me her sisters. There. The lake. Wilting trees, the water clouded by dying lilies. No sign of life. Was their curse dying more slowly than their bodies? Yes. That had to be it.
Spieler put the medallion back in his waistcoat pocket—the clothes of the other world were another thing he’d gotten too used to—and stared at his right hand. Small spots of bark were forming on it.
“No!”
Spieler said it aloud, in his empty palace that smelled of their elements, of water, of the earth, so stuffy, so heavy, so alone with his rage and all the immortal disappointment.
Some remnant... Was it possible? That something remained?
He touched his face, his neck... Nothing. Not yet. Stay calm. The curse is broken, Spieler, or you’d already be a tree.
But something must have survived. What if that final spark had found a keeper? One of their dead lovers, those human weaklings who’d found them so irresistible.
He again reached for the medallion, but it just kept showing him the decaying body and the images he’d seen before.
No.
No!
He would not go back.
He would find it. Whatever it was, whatever remained.
He would make new creatures, better ones. Immortal, untiring, more terrible than anything that had hunted in this world before.
Oh, he didn’t like himself when he lost his patience.