Forty-two mirrors later...
That was quite a statement, for a floor littered with hundreds of shards, yet the room was no less oppressive. The remaining mirrors seemed (to Kay) to swell with evil as their compatriots dimmed, knowing the cost paid for each other dimming.
Kay had little need to sleep and none to eat, beyond the thought that the latter would have been a nice distraction from the puzzle. His eyes hurt from scouring its patterns and lines, his back and legs hurt from being crouched on the floor, and from constantly getting up and down to pace, piece in hand, to place it. It was good that this room was large, because it composed his entire world.
A world he'd gone over twice now, trying to fit this piece. Kay tossed it to the floor and walked over to the door, sitting down and letting his head thunk back against it. He'd been over the room twice, scooting it around the room until the piece fit, jostling all the other pieces on the off chance something would click. But it had to be with intent. The pieces knew, somehow, that the orientation was off, that he didn't care, and so nothing happened.
He fixed his gaze on the door, deliberately not looking at the guilt-soaked figures staring back at him from in the mirrors. On went the glasses and with them, some pristine sense of detachment from his situation. Not much of one, but he could pretend. He lurched off the ground and headed over to work on opening the door, one of the few tasks in the room that didn't require vision.
Kay had taken up the habit of using body heat to melt the weld until his fingers were too cold to be of any use, then he had either gone back to the puzzle. This time, he had thought of using a piece of ice as leverage and was working at it.
The blindness was an aid and a detriment: he didn't realized the ice had cut his hands until he took the glasses off.
Wrapping his socks (they weren't keeping out the cold) around his hands, he continued etching ice into ice. It cut a little into the weld and he began whispering to it. He could feel the change if he paused, pressed it with his thumb.
"A little more, a little more…"
No cold though. No cold at all.
"Maybe it's cause you're dead, old man," he muttered to himself. The sound of his own voice unnerved him; it just laid there. Like a dead thing, like something so old it didn't bear remembering, like memories of the end of Fabletown. Those were confined to rubble, a fearsome voice, and he remembered dying.
–not the bits that came after, though; the working bits, the building of something. It was too bizarre to remember being a zombie and Kay blocked it as much as he could. But blocking what little he remembered of Fabletown meant he shoved everything in the back of his mind and with it, who he was and what he was doing here.
"Strange, clever Kay," he told himself. "The blind man. Kay, and the Snow Queen, and Ger—and Kay. I know Bigby, and Frau, and Beast, and Cinderella, and Mowgli, and Snow."
The little mantra of names and identities was fruitless; when he tried to sleep, he saw the puzzle lines and nothing but them in his mind. He took off the glasses now, checking the door again, and saw there had formed another layer of—
"Lumi, this isn't playing fair!"
Ice. Thickening with the newly-exposed gap, layering itself, undoing all he managed to achieve. He swore, and those words fell flat too. No reverberation, even; dead things in a dead room where nothing—he pounded it with his fist once, expecting nothing, and was surprised to find that the ice cracked.
Putting all his weight against the door, feet sliding slowly on the slick floor, he pushed at the door with slow, aching movements. It swung—
And he stepped out into a hallway that was so cold it took his breath away. The drop in temperature chilled his lungs, sending him into a fit of coughing, and he stumbled on with one hand on the wall. Operating without sight was nothing new and in his ears roared the sound of wind, high and distant, blowing somewhere in the castle.
"Good, now just… leave…"
But when he stopped coughing and could peer at his surroundings, the hallway revealed none of its secrets. It wasn't bigger than one could explore in a day, but it was a palace. It could take hours to find a way out if he was buried deep in its chambers and he had no doubt that Lumi had done just that. At least there weren't mirrors here. Placing a hand on the wall, he moved down the hall, turning down none of the inviting chambers. All had doors and he didn't have time to figure out their locks. Once she found out he was gone (and she would), she would come after him, so he moved fast.
The hall kept three leagues in front of him as he moved on, ice-covered wall rippling with formations under his fingers. The cold, shocking at first, had quickly numbed his fingers and though he could still feel it, it had lessened. The distant wind moaned on. Did the woman live here, dealing with that racket constantly? It rose and fell like an airy tide; only at one point did he feel its blast directly and it didn't pause, sweeping down the hall with some purpose in mind.
It took him a moment after that to realize someone had spoken.
"Does she know you're here?" someone asked. Kay turned and sought the voice, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground for an indication of shoes. You could learn a lot from shoes and they showed you nothing of past sin. Unless they were covered in blood, but you'd see that anyway. There were no shoes in the immediate vicinity.
"Where are you?" Kay asked, turning about.
"The doorway," the voice replied and Kay looked to the nearest one. There, traced only in the faintest of outlines, was a pair of shoes. They had no filled color, merely hollow contours delineating where the body ended. Kay looked up without hesitation into the eyes of a former hero. The man's hair looked like it had been exceptionally fair to start with – now it was a transparent shadow. His face still had enough shade and light to look human but… little else. Murders—justified or unjustified, the man had been deceived before—floated like specters over his head but they were not half so bad as looking on the deeds of the living. On the whole, this man had not been evil.
"You're a ghost," Kay said.
"Jack the adventurer, actually. The younger. And does my mother know you're here?"
"Yes, I think. She and I have an old arrangement where I come here and provide specialized services." The lie came quick; trust did not. "Does she know you're here?"
'Jack' rested a hand on the hilt of his weapon. "I think that's something to keep quiet. Were you looking for her?"
"No, just the way out."
The adventurer tilted his head a little to the side, skeptical. "You're sure you can leave here?"
"Yes. Why?" Of this one thing, Kay felt absolutely certain; it threw him off to have it questioned. If people were going to approach him and ask difficult questions, he wanted his cane back. Jack was still looking funny at him.
"No… reason. The exit is back the way you came, big door..." Jack began walking back that way, passing cleanly through doors and walls, not seeming to notice that he was striding down the wall. Perhaps he was doing it for dramatic effect. Kay trailed along, watching the floor. Eventually, the shoes stopped.
"Really, I don't see how you could've missed it," Jack said. He had stopped at a section of wall. Kay looked at it, then at the opposite side.
"No door." A thread of memory: seek and you shall find. Seeking, but not finding. And Jack was looking at him strangely again.
"Even I can find it." He tapped the wall as if tapping a seam. "Right here. I'd push it open but touching things and me don't get along. Shove. Right here."
Kay approached the wall and, feeling foolish, gave it a shove. A wave of cold – stepping into that blast of wind all over again – and he stumbled into the mirror room. The shock of it alone was enough to make him cringe: all those Kay's, dark-clad and sin-ridden. And reflected in the ceiling, a hundred elegant women in white, hair tinted blue with the whiteness. She stepped coolly past him and, without so much as a glance in his direction, traced the outline of the door with her finger. Ice grew around it until the door was indistinguishable from the wall. It flattened then, indistinguishable as from the other side, and Kay knew it was gone- permanently.
"Hello, Kay."