Of a Mirror and its Pieces
Once upon a time, there was a young man who dealt in magic, and many were wary of him. He did not understand why, but when he tried to look in his mother's old mirror, he had no reflection. This upset the man, so he went about creating a new mirror.
This was no ordinary mirror, however, for he had put much of his magic into its creation. In this mirror, every fault in the reflected image was magnified, and every virtue diminished to the point of invisibility. When he held the mirror to reflect the forest around his home, he saw the dead leaves and the rotting wood of the old trees, and the bloody carcasses that predators had left behind, but none of the birds or the flowers. When he turned the mirror upon one of the loveliest girls in the village, he saw not her charm and grace but the mole on her neck, which seemed to take over a goodly portion of her face.
But when he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw only himself, with his red hair and his blue eyes, and with longer, pointed teeth.
The man was confused, but let it pass. If his flaw was being who he was, then there was nothing to be done. "That is not a fault of mine," he said to himself, "But a fault of the world."
Then he began to wonder what the other faults of the world were. "If I fly the mirror up high enough into the sky," he wondered, "Would it reflect the whole world? I shall try it and see." And try he did. With his magic, he gave himself the wings of a raven, and flew up as far as he could go, and further.
He had started not long after sunset, but he flew through the night, and when the sun came up it burned at his skin and set his feathered wings alight with a white fire. Howling in pain, he lost his grip on the mirror, and it fell to the Earth and shattered into more pieces than anyone could imagine.
When the young man discovered this, he was saddened, for he knew that he had unleashed a great evil on the world. Some of the pieces of his mirror may have been too small to see, but they each had within them all the power that the whole mirror had. So if a splinter found its way into the glass of a windowpane, through that glass one would see only the ugly parts of the landscape, and never ones friends. If a piece was made into spectacles, the person looking though them would see the same ugliness that had been reflected in the mirror. The man felt his heart ache for these people.
But worse were the smallest grains of the mirror, which were taken up on the wind and blown all around the world. Some of these pieces blew into the eyes of men and stayed, and thereafter these people could see only the evil and twisted ways of the world, and turned bitter and cruel. Other bits flew into men's hearts, and the moment that happened even the most loving heart was frozen into a lump of ice.
The man wept for these poor people, who had come to evil by his doing, and he could only hope for their sake that the world was not as flawed as he had once wondered.