A/N: Well, it took three years and a continent change, but I'm back. Bear in mind I have NOT watched the second season and I probably won't ever at this rate; I'm more interested in my version of events, where Caleb's mom WASN'T revealed to be a major second-arc villain (dude, what.)
Beautiful Collision
"Parting Glass"
He stood at the end of a shallow valley, the town laid out neatly before him, a glittering sea of transparency lit by the brilliant flame-tinted glow of approaching sunset. Two columns stood sentry at the entrance proper to the village, studded with enormous hollow crystals of clear and opaque blue glass, like fanciful twin towers made of rock candy—that remarkably, seemed untouched by the destruction that blighted the town beyond it.
There were buildings. Gleaming towers with punctured panels and gaping holes in their sides, jagged and crumbling spires, the sparse metal framework underneath bare, sagging, exposed to the elements. Solariums and pavilions with cracked domes and caving-in roofs, the northern wind whistling softly through the yawning fractures in their front doors, closed steadfastly to the surrounding environment. If one looked long and close enough, through the inner strata of protective glass layered like an onion, one could barely make out the few scant remnants of lives no longer lived here. A brocade shawl hanging from the back of a chair; a child's abandoned game of marbles in the middle of a floor, still waiting for some adult to trip on them.
Caleb found himself at an utter loss for words as he tried to take it all in. This was not the first such abandoned settlement he'd encountered, but it was easily the most remarkable. If it were this awe-inspiring in its current state of decay, he could only imagine what a sight it might have been at the peak of its grandeur.
It was also, quite simply, the creepiest such town he had ever seen. The silent towns of Meridian—that was, the ones who had been afforded the dignity to remain standing, instead of being razed and burnt to the ground by Phobos's army—always had a certain otherworldly air to them, as if the souls who had since evacuated had never quite left. But there was something different about the glass village…a presence here that one didn't feel in the coarser farming or smithing towns. Some sort of foreign energy, that made the skin prickle, the spine tingle, that set the senses on edge. Something he recognized, from being in the presence of…
Magic?
Caleb stood motionless between the blue crystal columns, the breeze whipping his hair back into his eyes as he stared down the dirt road that led into the heart of the village, paved with the shards of what had no doubt once been carefully sculpted foliage, as the broken glass tree trunks lining the route attested. Then it's just like Mom said…they grind a little magic in with the sand. He smiled slightly at the memory, willfully ignoring the pang of a dull ache that accompanied it. Huh, and I thought that was just a dumb story to keep me quiet and out of trouble, like the one about the Bogeyman of Buttermarsh who shaved kids' heads in the middle of the night.
He was startled out of his reverie by a sudden insistent tugging on his pant leg. "What Caleb looking for here?" Blunk questioned, craning his nonexistent neck to peer up at his rebel friend. "Remember, Blunk claim monopoly on sparkly market. No resale." He jabbed at Caleb's pocket, where he'd tucked away the tiny frog earlier.
"Don't worry, Blunk," Caleb said, rolling his eyes, though the half-smile remained. "I'm not going into the souvenir business. I'm more interested in…mirrors."
"Mirror? Blunk have mirror right here. Nice price," the passling insisted as he pulled the pewter hand-mirror from his bag, waving it as he scrambled after Caleb, now striding purposefully toward the town. "Ten—no, fifteen percent off! Special bargain, rebel leader only! No fake discount!"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a big mirror," Caleb said vaguely, though a very specific image dwelled in his mind. A looking-glass set in bronze, longer than his six-year-old self was tall, a coquettish siren perched at the top of the frame amidst sculpted rolling waves. After his mother's death, he'd found himself staring into it more and more, hoping against common sense that the magic she so fervently believed it contained might somehow bring her back, or at least give him one more glimpse of her warm green eyes, the skin around them crinkling like tissue paper as she laughed.
It hadn't. It had done nothing but dutifully reflect his own sullen face back at him until the night it was destroyed, the glimmering fragments left to the flames—and in the midst of the chaos that followed, the memory of it had been purged from Caleb's mind. Whatever greater purpose it might have served was a buried secret now, known only to the one who had forged it.
Were there still other such pieces of glass here, left whole and untouched by the ravages of time or the blunt force of a Lurden's mace, that might still hold some arcane power?
Finding them would change nothing, he knew. They wouldn't bring Crystalgard back. They wouldn't bring his mother back. But his burning curiosity was almost as unbearable as that alien sensation that caused the gooseflesh to raise on the back of his neck. He needed to know, not for some sense of absolution or finality for a decaying village that Meridian had long ago turned its back on, but for himself. A selfish motivator, perhaps. But it wasn't as though he had any other more pressing commitments at the moment.
His hand closed over the green-glass amphibian in his pocket. I wonder what secrets you're hiding?
"Blunk," he called over his shoulder to the passling. "I'm going to have a look around. Don't wait up."
Blunk, who was busy cleaning up the remnants of a crumbling garden of glass orchids, didn't bother to look up from his handiwork, only acknowledging the last words he heard from Caleb with a wave.
The largest building in Crystalgard happened to be the one at the very edge of the village, at the furthest distance from the rock-candy columns that marked the entrance. It was wholly opaque, the glass black as darkest obsidian with a corkscrew spire at the top that resembled some kind of crustacean's shell. Caleb observed it silently from a distance. He was assuredly no expert on supernatural energies, but this place crackled with a presence much different than the one that permeated the rest of the town. One that bordered on sinister.
He took a cautious step, then another, towards the thick black-glass slabs that made up the doorway, but halted in surprise once he'd gotten close enough to see the crude lettering chiseled into its surface. STAY AWAY. There was some sort of crusty substance smeared over the last word.
He scratched at the tail of the Y with a fingernail. The substance flaked off into brownish-red bits as he rubbed his fingertips together. Blood? What the…
Caleb backed up. He wasn't altogether sure he wanted to see what dark secrets lingered within the walls of this tower, especially not when he was unarmed and undefended by the Guardians. He turned to leave—then nearly tripped over something lying in the scrubby grass nearby.
It was a large, heavy disk of pewter, comparable in size to the manhole covers that studded the streets back on Earth. There was an intricate relief pattern around its circumference of symbols depicting the different phases of the moon. In the middle was a raised depiction of a woman asleep on a dais, flowing hair trailing down her back as the sun rose in the sky behind her. Caleb bent over to lift the thing, his brow furrowing as his fingers curled under the edges and touched something…smooth.
A mirror! He held it at arm's length, regarding his reflection. The glass was slightly cloudy, but there were no rust spots or cracks marring the surface. The frame was patterned on this side, too…no, wait. Those were letters, not symbols. He squinted at the worn-smooth words around the edge. "The day shall never break, nor the dreamer ever wake," he mumbled as he turned the mirror slightly.
Suddenly, a high-pitched humming noise split the still air. Blinding electric-pink light spilled forth from the edges of the glass. Caleb nearly dropped the mirror in his astonishment. He gaped, openmouthed, as the glass suddenly turned fluid and rippled. He steadied the mirror, heaving it up into the crook of one arm, then tentatively reached toward it with his free hand.
His fingertips brushed the cool, mercury-like surface…and disappeared.
Before it could occur to Caleb that this was wholly not normal and perhaps somewhere he ought not to be sticking his fingers, his hand vanished up to the wrist, and then the elbow. Alarmed, he tried to pull it out—and found he couldn't. The mirror was trying to swallow him. His heartbeat kicked furiously into overdrive as he struggled with the pewter frame, throwing it to the ground and diving along with it. His other elbow hit the surface and skidded before that arm plunged through, too. He could feel nothing at all in his arms—or where his arms had been.
"Help…help!" he tried to scream, but it came out as more of a wheeze.
This was it. Caleb, legendary rebel and Meridian folk hero, was about to be eaten alive by a mirror, and there was no one around to help. No Blunk. No Guardians. No Will.
"Will," he gasped, his mind awash with flashes of red, before his head went under.
And then he tumbled. Weightless. Into the abyss, into nothingness.
Into bushes.
"Ow!"
He rubbed indignantly at a now sore spot on his arm as he uprighted himself and looked around—and found that to be of little use, since it was almost pitch-black. It had been early afternoon in Meridian, the sun blazing high overhead—so where was he now? Had he lost time going through the mirror? Ended up on the other side of the world?
All questions that prickled irritably in his mind, but were second to the most pressing matter of getting out of here, wherever here is. Reasoning that the mirror had been one half of a portal, he figured there must be a conjoining half around here somewhere that would lead him back to Crystalgard. He fumbled around in the scratchy undergrowth, but after twenty minutes of overturning nothing but twigs and rocks, it appeared that this would be somewhat more challenging than finding another mirror lying on the ground.
Caleb's eyes had adjusted slightly to the darkness by then, and he was able to make out a ragged path beyond the bushes, a path that led…towards light? He squinted. There was a faint glow in the distance, almost too faint for the naked eye, like the aura around a dying ember.
He proceeded on foot with caution, his navigation skills hindered by the fact that the winding footpath was only about half a shade lighter than the foliage around it, occasionally slowing up his progress in the form of a gnarled root or tree branch and provoking a muttered curse each time. With every step he gained closer to the source of the light. He'd suspected it was fire—torches lighting the outside of a dwelling. What he saw made him halt in his tracks.
It was fire of a sort, but not the organic kind produced with flint and tinder. They were ghostlights—glowing orbs, sentient entities, that hovered a few feet off the ground in ranks three deep. Floating sentries that guarded the diminutive stone fortress just beyond. Caleb was baffled. Everything about this whole scenario was deeply off—this starless, impenetrable blackness, this castle in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by orbs of wizard's fire. Reachable only by a bespelled mirror. His mind sputtered possible explanations by the second, most of which he didn't wish to entertain. He wished for the Guardians, instead.
"Will," he said to the girl who wasn't there. "You have no idea how much I need you right now."
He hadn't realized he'd said it aloud until the orbs flickered, twitched—and in a dizzying blur of heat and sparks, rushed toward him, encircling him in a blazing barricade. He nearly toppled over backwards in surprise. So they really were sentries. He thought he'd dealt with all manner of perilous petrolmen before, but he'd never tried to reason with ghostlights before. Still, first time for everything, right?
"Look," he said, eyes darting from orb to orb as they rotated around him. "I'm not trying to break in. Believe me, I have no interest in hanging around here. I'm just looking for someone who can help."
He heard the groan of heavy wood against stone and blinked, trying to clear the incendiary haze from his eyes in order to focus. The door to the fortress slowly opened, and he could make out a silhouette in the doorway. The shape raised one arm, and the fireballs scattered, returning in a fiery flash to their previous positions. Caleb rubbed his eyes and squinted harder at the figure. A woman.
"That's enough," she said. "That's no way to treat our guest."
The paleness of her skin contrasted sharply with the dark velvet of her dress—a contrast made all the more odd by the fact that the collar appeared to extend all the way up the lower half of her face, concealing her mouth and most of her nose. Dark hair coiled tightly on either side of her head. Dark eyes, glittering like hard obsidian set into marble. There was nothing trustworthy there—but at the same time, Caleb had no one else to turn to.
Just stay on your guard.
"I'm Lady Dalle," the woman said. "Do come inside. I've been expecting you."
He didn't have to bother asking what she meant by that, because it became apparent shortly after he stepped into the gleaming, torch-lit foyer. The long hallway that yawned before him was lined with tall mirrors in gilded frames. At first glance, the glass was a curious shade of black, as if it had been smeared with soot, but as he stepped closer to one he saw a slight twitch and realized it was a tree branch, waving in the wind. The mirrors provided a view of the path he'd taken to get here. They were similar, he thought, to the Earth inventions called surveillance cameras, which he'd learned were unfortunately everywhere the one time he and Cornelia had gotten, er, carried away in a department store changing room, only to interrupted by a brusque knock and a bark of "Get a room, you kids!"
He turned away from the glass to find Lady Dalle watching him with an air of amusement in her onyx eyes. "I so seldom receive visitors anymore. This just gives me a little advance notice." Her voice was curiously unmuffled by the swath of aubergine velvet that covered her mouth. It was smooth and mellifluous, the perfect voice for bedtime stories. It reminded him, vaguely, of his mother's.
There were a million things he wanted to ask, but for some reason he blurted out the most obvious question of all.
"You're from Crystalgard, aren't you?"
Lady Dalle's eyes darkened for a moment. "Yes," she said quietly. "That was my home, where I learned my trade. I left before it was destroyed."
Caleb turned from her to the seemingly endless corridor of looking-glasses and back again. "You forged all these mirrors yourself?"
"I did." Her eyes crinkled at the corners, and again, Caleb thought involuntarily of his mother. It was so strange how one's eyes seemed so much more expressive when you couldn't see the shape their mouth was taking. "I was an apprentice to the mirror master, Bevelious, since childhood. Most people—those who don't know the complexities of glass—never look at a mirror for what it is. They only look to see themselves. He was the one who taught me that mirrors can have so much more purpose than a receptacle for one's vanity. Depending on what the maker has in mind, each one can have its own distinct identity."
"Grinding magic in with the sand," he almost whispered to himself.
"So you've heard that old adage?" Lady Dalle laughed, high and tinkling as crystal, and for some reason it was enough for Caleb to momentarily forget that he didn't trust her.
"My mother—she had a mirror from Crystalgard, when I was a child. A bronze frame, with a siren at the top. She's the one who said that to me. I'd look and look, and I'd never see anything out of the ordinary. I don't know if she really knew what it did, or if she was teasing me, but then it was too late to—" Caleb cut himself off. What on earth had provoked that? He hadn't talked about his mother to anyone, not even Cornelia. He'd kept her memory so closely guarded all these years, like some precious jewel never taken off his person or shown to another soul, and here it was on display to a strange woma—no, a witch in a castle in the middle of who knows where, all because the corners of her eyes had crinkled just so.
He had the uncomfortable feeling she could somehow follow his thoughts, but if she did possess such a power, she was careful not to let on.
"A bronze siren," Lady Dalle mused. "Well, I don't recall that particular model offhand, but I've forged literally hundreds of mirrors since I learned the art. They don't all show the world outside, or the desire of one's heart, or one's future. Most are more subtle variations on the standard looking glass—because, after all, that's what people buy it for. But they don't always tell the truth. Some take off ten pounds, some ten years. Some add them. Conversely, some are brutally honest—they reflect a person's true self back at them, and it's not always what that person wants to see."
Caleb eyed her closely, wondering what her reflection would look like in such a mirror. Then something else occurred to him, and he felt like kicking himself for not thinking of it sooner.
"What about mirrors…as a form of transportation?" he ventured.
Lady Dalle quirked one eyebrow at him. "Portal mirrors," she said. "But you're referring to one in particular."
He was more convinced than ever that she could read his mind. "The one that brought me here," he said. "You made it, didn't you?"
"Yes. I called it Daybreaker." She fixed him with the mischievious gaze of a child, and he recoiled inwardly. "That was my greatest achievement in mirrormaking—the greatest, if I might be so lofty, because of the magic involved." Her voice was more dreamlike than smug.
Caleb didn't have the patience for self-congratulatory musings at the moment. "Lady Dalle," he said. "Your mirror brought me here, and I need to get back."
She paused, regarding him for a long moment with those glittering eyes. "I'll explain everything," she said, "under the condition that you sit down and have dinner with me. I don't often get to entertain anymore, let alone talk to another human being. You'll humor a lonely old woman for an hour or two, won't you?"
I don't have much of a choice, do I? But he only said, with a moment's hesitation, "Of course."
"Of course," she echoed. "This way, Caleb." She set off with a purpose down the corridor, her unseen heels clicking on the floor, the soft whish of her velvet train whisking over cold marble in her wake. Caleb didn't move.
He had never told her his name.