Through the Mirror

[Mist Gul]

"Stop."

Mist halted cold as he faced his own likeness. He took a step back. It was a mirror. It reflected a ghoul back to him, ashen skin, dead eyed, blackened blood running from his mouth, nostrils, his eyes, the very runes cut into his skin.

"What are you doing? Let me go," Mist whispered in a cold tone. He was trying to track Amaris down from the point where Michelle's minions had taken her from the riverside. But he had been diverted to the small chamber to face an ancient and gilded mirror. And his master.

"No."

"I have to get her back. I have to get Amaris back. I know what she's trying to do. She's trying to break down my daughter, me, all of us, to not be able to speak against her own evil," Mist snapped.

"Possible, but stupid. You're not made to be stupid, Mist."

"Why not, I'm often enough surrounded by morons, arrogant assholes, simpering idiots who can barely string together a neurosis let alone a decent psychosis."

"You're not made to be stupid."

"I'm made to be cunning and vicious and heartless and cold, I'm made to destroy lives, I'm made to kill with the discerning care of a machine. I can't even piously burble about how I knew it was all so wrong and I walked away on my own from the abyss."

"You can help bring your daughter back. But after that, my dear kitten, it is time for you to return."

Mist finally ticked his gaze aside to his master, taking Hraefn's tall form in. He was glorious against the filth staining the once golden elf. Mist looked back at himself in the mirror once more, and sagged, lowering his head.