Chapter 55: The Reflecting Pool

Miro felt the pool tug at him, a thousand sharp frozen fingers prodding his skin and then in an instant, he was swallowed whole, the sensation spilling over his face and into his eyes and he wanted to scream but it flooded into his mouth and then he was falling through an endless void. As he plummeted towards the unseen bottom, the cold bite of the shattered mirror sluiced off him and warmth returned to his body.

He could open his eyes again and found himself staring up into at a bright morning sky, so blue he knew it couldn’t have been anywhere near the Lowlands or the Shattered Sea. He managed to flip himself over in order to face the ground which was mercifully not rushing towards him. He wasn’t actually falling at that moment, but rather floating, as if suspended in water, above a city the likes of which he’d never seen. It seemed to him even more grand than Utha, with a river that flowed through it, and a massive sheer mountain biting into one of its sides. He knew then where he was. Not by the white palace with its blue domes, but by the line of smoke that rose from the square at its entrance, the throngs of people, small as ants, scurrying around it, and the faintest sound of their agitated shouts that rose to greet him.

He didn’t need to see any more, didn’t need to recognize the specific figures in the crowd below – one of them with a wailing infant in her stiff arms.

“Maybe even at the cost of her own life,” Hima’s voice echoed faintly from somewhere up ahead and when he looked up, the mountain behind the palace sundered in two and then rushed towards him, sweeping aside the rest of the landscape until he was speeding through the newly created pass between the two cleaved halves. The air here grew thick with snow and bitter cold winds lashed the white flakes almost parallel to the ground.

Through watering eyes Miro could see nothing but mountains, folded endlessly over each other and covered with a moving sea of snow. Then, against all odds, a cloaked figure moved below, shielding its hooded face with one arm and in another carrying some kind of wrapped-up bundle.

And just like that, the snow cleared, and the mountains were gone, and in their place were luscious green fields, and what could have been the same figure walking down a dusty road carrying a similar bundle. And then he realized that this landscape was familiar to him – the potato fields outside their farm – and the bundle must have been him in the arms of Sierra.

For a moment, the picture in front of him became distorted like shattered grass – the path to the farmhouse broken into several pieces that were all misaligned, and then it broke apart completely and Miro was standing on the front porch of the house he grew up in. He had his thick arms outstretched, hands resting on the posts holding up the roof of the porch as he blocked Sierra’s way inside, and then Miro realized that he was now occupying the body of Bondook.

“You are the sum of all these separate journeys,” Peteri’s voice whispered into his ear at the same time that Sierra, holding the sleeping baby that was Miro, said, “There is no one for him there. No one that can keep him safe in the same way I can.”

“He won’t be able to replace Agust, no matter how much you try,” Miro said in Bondook’s voice, a name that was only as familiar as a dream that had been forgotten.

“No, and I wouldn’t want to.” Sierra did not appear to be hurt by this accusation, but rather, her expression was resolute, the same one she had whenever Miro would tell her stories of the boys who teased him. “But when he grows up, he might finish the fight he started.”

As if thrust through the wrong end of a spyglass, Sierra suddenly grew distant and murky, separated from Miro by a transparent barrier that then spun upon a mad carousel of shops, stalls and passersby until it all slowed down and Miro recognized himself in the eight-year-old playing between rows in a garden in the middle of a town square. He had nearly forgotten that day, the only time Sierra had taken him into this town, the biggest he’d ever seen at the time. There she was then, he could see her through a shopkeeper’s window. She was as he remembered her, sad grey eyes that stood in stark contrast against her light brown skin, a long-sleeve shirt that she’d wear even on the hottest of summer days.

But she was not the one he was there to see. Rather, it was the man, the funny man in the wide-brimmed hat and a shawl over his shoulders, the one who looked nothing like the kind of man who would enjoy a game of hide-and-seek with a child but who wanted to do nothing but that afternoon. He smiled at Miro a dirty-toothed smile and beckoned him to find him behind the pedestal of a statue. Miro had known better than to wonder off with strangers but this was a harmless game where he kept his distance, though without realizing it, the game was steadily luring him away from the store Sierra was in.

Even now, watching the scene unfold again, Miro did not notice Sierra until she was already there, giving the man with the hat a hearty hug and then helping him take a seat on one of the garden benches before grabbing Miro’s hand and leading him away from the town never to return again. A darkness settled over the scene, now that the two of them were gone, as if it had turned overcast, though the dim sun could still be seen hanging overhead. Miro took a few steps towards the man as the other townsfolk moved in a slowed way about them, as if underwater. As he got closer, he could see that the man’s eyes were open, and that blood seeped from the corner of his mouth and from his slumped posture Miro knew that the stranger was dead.

Total darkness descended on him there, leaving him to forget where was up and where was down until a single candleflame grew through the gloom and he was back at their farmhouse and their dinner table, Bondook and Sierra standing over it, and there was something in Bondook’s eyes that Miro had never seen before – fully-formed tears.

“What have you done?” Bondook was asking, his voice low.

“He needs them more than I do,” Sierra answered.

“But I need you, Sierra,” Bondook pleaded, jabbing himself repeatedly in the chest with two fingers. There was such a quivering desperation about him that Miro could not stand to be in the same space as this Bondook and stepped back, letting his guardians get swallowed by a darkness in which Hima’s voice again called out from above him “used whatever magic she had in her in order to protect you. Maybe even at the cost of her own life.”

“You have to, Bondook,” Miro heard Sierra say, though he could not see her, “You have to tell him everything.”

“I’ll be doing no such thing!” The force of Bondook’s barking voice chased away the darkness and revealed to Miro that he stood inside a floating sphere. It looked much like the doorway that he had entered – large jagged panes of glass floating before him and above him, playing back various scenes from his life.

Here was the bale of hay that Volod tried to drop on him. And here again the scene from the town square, Sierra locking the cloaked man in a deadly embrace. That particular piece was eclipsed by a moment far more recent – the mountain bandit’s sword coming down on Miro’s mana-cles and shattering them into pieces. As Miro turned around, the image of himself hanging in near-darkness from a loose root over a river floated by and revealed underneath his first encounter with Hima in the Deep End of the Bottle just before Bagsil and his crew would have made short work of him.

“Perhaps this is the cost you have to bear …” in this room, the sound of Hima’s voice was all around him, ringing off the glass “… for the powerful protection spell that she would have cast over you.” Then moving past him came their fight with the razorbacks, the arrows that narrowly missed his head, Miro grabbing onto the steps leading to Akaseeya’s temple just before the Shattered Sea would have carried him off, and finally, the burnt wooden sign falling on the rebel soldier’s head as she moved in for the kill.

It was the disembodied voice of Peteri that now whispered to him, “not your father’s path you should consider, but your mother’s”, as the scenes in the glass disappeared and the pieces stood still, dull and dim. He understood now what it all meant – each brush with death a stroke on the canvas that painted a clear picture.

“Do you get it now?”

Miro turned around to see that Hima was standing behind him, the same dark boots and purple cloak with the hood pulled over her head.

“If this is supposed to be the inside of my head, then how come you’re here?”

Hima shrugged, looking faintly bored. Whatever this apparition was, the impression was uncanny. “I don’t know, you tell me. But if I’m supposed to be the embodiment of your voice of reason then I think it makes perfect sense.”

“Perfect.”

This Hima stood in silence for a moment, then shook her head and asked, “So?”

“So …”

“So, do you understand now?”

“Yes,” he said, staring through Hima to try to see his mother’s face, but coming up with a blank. “My mother had given everything to me.” He could only conjure up the view that he saw above the capital city of Arkensk – somewhere one of those dots, one of the ones that weren’t moving, was the reason he was still here. “The magic that killed her had kept me alive all these years. All those brushes – it was my mother’s sacrifice that kept me safe.”

How does one thank a ghost and hope that somehow, somewhere, they know what you feel about them? The room grew a bit dimmer as Hima watched him think.

“What your mother gave you,” Hima said, “Is more like a protective bubble – your powers may have a hard time getting out, but danger has an equally hard time getting in.”

“I need my powers,” Miro said hoarsely.

“For me?”

“For starters, yes.”

His anger and frustration at seeing those words materialize any time his spells went awry prevented him from seeing them for what they were – a reminder that a part of his mother still remained with him, and if he wanted the debuff gone, he needed to let go of that small kernel of her as well.

The spherical room grew so dark that Hima’s face had fallen completely into shadow and the glass panes were darker than the sky above the Shattered Sea. The cracks between them had begun to heal.

“Before those walls turn solid,” Hima said, her form dissolving into the thickening darkness, “This is your chance … to decide what they’re going to reflect.”

Hima was gone now leaving Miro alone to watch the cracks around him continue to smooth over until they formed a solid sphere. It encased him in a darkness that was now nearly impenetrable and though he had hated those words – “Mother’s Blood” – he now longed for their yellow light, to hold on tightly to that last drop of blood and all that it connected him to.

“You are the sum of all these separate journeys,” Peteri’s voice said from within Miro’s own head before the darkness was suddenly banished. The room filled with a brilliance that hurt to look at and what was reflected all around him was himself; not his face, but rather, his true self that his own mortal eyes could hardly comprehend. “But the path you take is uniquely yours.”

The dome around him shattered and Miro was hit with a tidal wave of broken glass, throwing his body backwards and out of the gateway to fall onto hard floor of the tiled room back in the temple. The shards of mirror in the vertical pool still flowed in their chaotic patterns on the back wall, but they no longer reflected any part of him.