"Dutha-what now?"

"Dùthaich nan dìochuimhne. Land of the Forgotten, if you want it in english. Some of the meaning is lost, though."

"Alright, alright. Let's dial it back a notch," I said, and noticed that my arms were growing cold. I was coming down from the adrenaline, I guessed. What did I have to do again? Lie down and be calm, hopefully. I can do that. Alright.

"You said something about a forest, earlier?" I asked from the sandy ground, a deep exhaustion slowly threatening to overtake me.

"Yes. We need to find a place of power. I will know when I see it."

"Why exactly?" God, was I tired. How the hell did I not notice until now?

"Because that's where the borders overlap."

"That makes sense, how are we going to find something like that?" The adrenaline from earlier left me, and I felt my eyelids growing heavy. We'd been through quite the ordeal.

"Let's discuss it tomorrow. You look like you're about to drop like a stone."

I held up my hand in a thumbs-up.

I was fast asleep before it hit the sand.

***

I was awoken by the sound of something repeatedly hitting stone. clack, clack, clack.

Groggily, I wrenched my still too tired eyes open, and propped myself up on both arms, not quite sitting up, but not lying down either. The fire had burned out during the night, as it tends to do, the mirror shard was leaning on a tiny rock, but i couldn't see what my reflection was doing within.

My eyes followed the noise, and I saw Raven apparently striking a nearby rock with her beak. No, correction, she held something and was striking it to the rock.

"What've you got there, birdy?"

Raven looked up, most likely annoyed by my impromptu nickname, and I saw that she was holding a walnut. Guess that answers that.

As I stood up and shook off some of the sand clinging to me, I began to recall the previous day's happenings. What a wild ride that was. It seems I'd seriously underestimated mister shadow, and his temper tantrum over my country's capital was ...humbling, to say the least. Not to mention whatever the fuck that thing in the water was.

My thoughts were drawn to it. What had it been made of? Just ice? how would it animate? I suppose the next time I met, I could ask while surren... Hold on. I knew this feeling. I'm sure the snake knows the answer to this feeling, I should be seeking it... Wait, no, I shouldn't...

The remaining rational part of my mind rebelled against the foreign thoughts centered on the snake.

"Mirror! Something's wrong!" I shouted almost reflexively, only to regret it a moment after.

Why did I say that? Did I want the mirror-ghost to know about this? Wouldn't it be better just to pretend... No, I just had to... I had to stop, no...

"Amy, listen to me! Focus on my voice!" Came a response, as though spoken through the mist. I was already falling.

The shout was no use, because inside my head, two ideas were waging war. One was the right decision, to follow the mirror-ghost's plan, and escape. The other one was the right decision, to seek out the snake and do as it said. both were right, and the paradox was driving me to the brink of madness.

Outside, my body had already collapsed. Had I any senses left there, I'd have noticed that I was seizing, random neurons being triggered by the heated battle for my free will.

Whenever The Serpent struck, it attempted to undermine my self-confidence, only to be rebuffed by Myself, the remaining part of my mind. I threw memories at it, fallacies, paradoxes, but I was inexperienced. My mind was not made for this kind of battle. It lashed out in a devestating blow, the fact that I was nothing without The Serpent to guide me.

Myself countered the attack with a logical deduction, that following the snake would lead to death, only to realize that The Serpent did not at all care about death. It was a singular focus, and I couldn't find an angle of attack. I pulled out memories, which confused it, until it found me again.

It struck out at the exposed memory shielding me from its attention, and it shattered into a thousand, glittering shards, which splashed against my face, dissipating. The glittering of the shards evoked another memory - the sound of breaking glass, picking up a shard; a face, my face, staring back at me, smiling.

I winced in pain on the outside, just as my reflection vanished from the mirror shard - only to reappear beside me in the same instant, staring down The Serpent.

The snake lashed out with one of its many, many claws, and cut me square across the face. Someone that was once me shrieked in pain, holding her face, and The Serpent raised its claws once again, intent on delivering the killing blow.

However, in truth, The human was never the main weapon. Too weak, to inexperienced - It was merely a distraction.

From behind the serpent, a second figure emerged, and latched itself firmly to its back. The figure raised both hands, and drove them into the serpent's head. It began to thrash around, shattering some memories, knocking a few loose thoughts away, and the human could only watch as the other figure ripped her hand free of the beast, holding something undefinable, but brightly glowing, in it.

She loosened a cry of victory, the serpent dispersed into glowing motes of light, and the human was overcome by blackness.

***

For the second time that day, I awoke. This time however, it had not been restful. In a flash, my consciousness returned to my body - alongside the memories I'd retained from the "fight". Recalling them was difficult, as though I was trying to imagine nothing, or a new color, or a sense I didn't have. I did remember a few choice facts, however. The strange thoughts, they were a something. It had wanted something else, but I couldn't remember what it was. I also knew that our fight had destroyed a lot, but I didn't know what.

"You're awake."

The voice came unbidden, like it'd been whispered into my ear. I looked around frantically, until I saw the mirror - which was empty. I reached over, touching the surface - nothing. It was cold, it was hard, and it reflected nothing of myself.

"Where are you?" I tentatively asked into the air.

"I am inside. There is some damage."

Damage? Oh right, the memories.

"Can you repair it?"

"Not completely. Some of it is lost forever; some I will only be able to reconstruct partially, only factual, or emotive. I'm sorry."

"What happened?"

"I was a fool," The voice sounded sorrowful. "I assumed the impossible without checking. It led to harm."

"You saved me," I remembered. A face, reflected inside a shard of memory.

"Yes, but it was still my fault," the voice lamented. I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't respond.

A few minutes later, I felt something click in my mind, like when you remember the name of a song that's been in your mind for the entire day. I remembered that I knew something, an image.

My arm, holding a paper. I was looking down at the paper. However, I did not remember what was written on the paper. In time, I deduced it was my acceptance letter to medical school, but only when I examined the edges of the hole it had left. The original memory was gone, destroyed after serving as a shield from The Serpent. Most of the other damaged memories were like that, too.

I settled in to eat something, and random thoughts kept popping into my mind, reminding me of things I knew. Some were images like the letter, some sounds, some simple statements of fact - the last one was surprisingly alien to think about, simply the gist of a sentence, describing some event on my life.

I went fishing with my father on that day, I remembered. No accompanying image, no emotion, simply that statement.

When I finished my late breakfast and glanced toward the mirror opposite me, I saw that my own face had returned to it.

"Done, then?" I asked between bites. In truth, I didn't really understand what exactly she had been doing, or how she even got there, but I decided to let those questions rest.

"Yes. It was a small remnant, almost starved. Most of the damage was superficial, but some of the memories ...they were unrecoverable. I'm sorry."

"No need to be sorry. You saved me. Without you, I'd be a willing slave to that snake."

"Like so many others," mumbled my reflection in the mirror, almost too quiet to hear.

I decided not to inquire.

***

"Hurry up, I can feel it!"

I was currently walking along a freshly tarred road, the air above the black asphalt shimmering in the heat. There was a bird on my shoulder, adorned with black feathers. Its talons were gripped onto a strap, from which hung my shoulder bag. The bag was in contrast to another, much larger duffle bag strapped to my back, which was uncomfortably heavy and filled with food and water. In my left hand, I held a shard of glass, one side silver, the other side showing a window into a world containing my face. My right hand was gripped onto a long, wooden staff, banded in steel.

It was also very, very hot. The lack of clouds meant the sun could burn down with prejudice, heating the street and myself to unhealthy temperatures.

Our destination was a forest spanning the entire horizon, as revealed by my reflection babbling incoherently about 'resonances' and 'significant vectors', something which would previously have given me a headache, and not the "I don't understand this" kind, but the "You are not allowed to know this" kind.

Interestingly though, since I'd broken The Serpent's compulsion on the lake, the pain was gone. Entirely.

We'd discovered this when my reflection slipped up, and let loose a statement of fact about the shadow demon. I didn't, and still don't know what it was, because halfway through her sentence, she simply stopped talking.

Or at least, that's what I thought. When I realized I didn't hear my footsteps anymore, I turned to speak to her, only to realize I couldn't hear my own voice either.

I'd been turned deaf.

After a brief panic, lessened up on its own after a few minutes, but the message was clear - If the pain couldn't stop me from pursuing forbidden knowledge, then I would be rendered unable to pursue it.

I eventually managed to explain this to her, but it was a very vague endeavor. Whatever was censoring knowledge really didn't want me to percieve what it saw as "forbidden".

Even now, I was struggling to listen to my reflection talk about meaningless things which went over my head, as it seemed like her voice was being drowned out by my footfalls, or the wind, or the chirping of insects, despite being magnitudes louder than any of those.

We'd left the city's outskirts ages ago, and the shadow demon hadn't turned up since. Not that I wanted it to, indeed, there were few things I wanted less, but I was still wondering where it was. It seemed silly after its display of power, but I was expecting it in every dark corner, or cast shadow. Very unnerving.

Through gestures and vague statements, my mirror image eventually managed to make me realize that it had to recover from its rampage. Probably. To circumvent the new censor, I had to realize the information seemingly randomly from 'already known' information, and even then, it was as though I was trying to remember a dream. After trying in vain to commit the piece of knowledge to memory, I wrote it down, only to promptly develop a massive blind spot in my vision, which appeared to follow the page in my notebook I'd written in.

Eventually, I figured out that I could write down information which would lead me to the realisation anew, but I had to be very vague.

It was frustrating.

***

The forest was a welcome reprieve from the boiling stone of the street. My feet hurt from walking and my back hurt from carrying, and we decided to take a rest on the side of the road, covered in shade by the forest's canopy, even though it seemed to be slightly yellow. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

My reflection fiddled with something or other, her own duffle bag filled with fundamentally different things. Turns out, she'd taken everything I'd left behind on the boat. It was strange, seeing her interact with things that didn't really exist, but I was slowly getting used to mirror-weirdness while she was around.

Currently, she was fiddling with her apparent main thing - a large tripod, upon which was a cobbled-together mess of electronics, wires sticking out everywhere, and topped by a shard of glass.

Clipping in a wire, she leaned back, shielded her face, and flipped a switch.

Then, the mirror shard became a torch.

Luckily, I'd been looking passively at it while eating, and managed to bring up my arm just in time. When I lowered it after maybe half a minute, I didn't want to chance blindness, I saw my mirror image holding a small paintbrush and a canister of red printer ink, but what she was doing to the tripod-mounted abomination was strategically obscured by her body.

"You could have warned me," I said accusingly in the direction of the mirror.

"Covered your eyes, didn't you? No harm done then," she waved the cartridge of ink dismissively in my general direction, torso still obscuring what her other hand was doing.

I rolled my eyes, trying to be unbothered by another apparent piece of unknowable knowledge while finishing my lunch.

With my last bite, I moved to stand up and throw away the can, only for a shout of "That's done it!" to interrupt my musings.

When I looked back at myself in the mirror, I was standing beside the tripod, whose shard of glass was emitting a faint light. No, wait. a faint lance of light.

Huh.