Stories

Fair - Chapter 18 A Painting in the Clouds

Lucille returned after dark, and to her shock, she found the new cave completely transformed: a console had been installed, as promised, but also furniture, personal accommodations and storage modules. She saw what looked like a kitchen towards the back of the cave and set down the basket of food on the table.
Mary wasn't there, and Lucille started to panic, prompting the one in the mirror to provide an explanation.
“There is an underground stream two caves down, Mary got bored and went to get some fresh water. We thought she would be more comfortable if the place looked more like home, do you think you could bring her favorite things from her room? We tried to offer her food, but she seems reluctant to eat it. Maybe it would be best if you brought her home cooked meals for a while, at least until she gets used to our fare.” He stopped for a second, to give Lucille a chance to reply, then, upon noticing the latter seemed at a loss for words, he asked. “How did things go with the Council?”

Fair - Chapter 17 The One in the Mirror

“Answer him, girl!” Mrs. Gentry prodded a very confused Mary, whose young heart oscillated between shame and terror. “Mary! Her name is Mary!” the lady clarified.
“Who are you?” the grumpy guy retorted bluntly, making Mrs. Gentry recoil with indignation.
“I believe it's untoward for you to address me, given that we're not related, nor have we been properly introduced,” she protested, ready to leave.
“Suit yourself!” the man cut her off. “I only care about the girl anyway.”
“Jim!” the other man protested. “Would it kill you to be nice?”
“She wasn't supposed to be involved in this to begin with!” Jim replied.
“Why don't you go finish what you were working on, I'll take it from here,” his friend recommended.
“Real nice! After all the time I spent slaving over this monitor,” Jim protested, but left.
“Hi, Mary,” the one in the mirror looked at the girl again. “I know how scary all of this must be for you, but I need you to stay with me for a while, so I can explain. You have no idea how excited we all are to have found you, we almost lost hope, we thought someone faked the rumors of your existence. Are there any more people like you in the village?”

Fair - Chapter 16 Blood Spell

“Now what!?” Mary thought.
“Oh, I knew it! I just knew it! It had to be!” Lucille couldn't contain her excitement, and all of a sudden she looked much younger, an echo from the care free days of her girlhood, when, much like her niece, she was willing to take on the world, no holds barred.
“Do you think we can order the mirror to do things?” Mary asked.
“Probably,” Lucille said thoughtfully, “if we knew how... Did you make any progress with understanding the language?” she turned towards her niece.
“Not really,” the girl confessed.
“No matter, we have time to figure out what we can, later, I'm late for the meeting, we'll talk when I come back.”

Fair - Chapter 15 The End Times

Lucille and Mary spent the following week trying to learn more about what the mirror could do. There was one aspect of this endeavor that none of them could shake: as exciting as it was to communicate with the magical object, the Que'd manuscript beckoned from the chest where it had been carefully stashed, wrapped in linen and strewn with lavender buds to ward off the moths.
Lucille couldn't let go of the thought that the truth remained hidden somewhere underneath that black water the playful symbols were floating on, the way sunken treasures sleep undisturbed in the depths of the ocean. From somewhere inside that dark water the ancient words of the Que'd called out to her, she could almost hear them, remember them from her childhood, although she would have chastised any person for lacking seriousness if they brought this up to her.

Fair - Chapter 14 Mirror in the Council Hall

“I think I speak for everybody when I say that bringing this curse into the Council Hall is a disrespectful and irresponsible act one hoped not to expect from a member of your standing!” Rosemary hissed at Lucille, who had just walked in, holding the object of contention.
“Naturally,” she thought, “who else would be the first to find out about the black mirror but our sweet Rosemary! On second thought, I wonder how she knew what I was holding?” 

Fair - Chapter 13 Black Mirror

Understanding the old language became increasingly challenging over time, and the hopes of making heads or tails of it diminished, even for Mary, who, despite the unfortunate circumstances of her birth was an unbridled optimist. She spent endless nights, risking her aunt's chastising, trying to decipher the meaning of the fragments they had translated, and it felt more and more like trying to mend an intricate tapestry after it had been torn to shreds, its big picture forever lost.
A puzzle with a million pieces, no two alike, without recognizable match lines, color themes or continuing patterns. As adept as she was at weaving together seemingly incompatible snippets into a cohesive flow, a skill she had mastered early in her childhood, she had to admit defeat after a while: what good does it do one to reconstitute something one can't possibly understand?

Fair - Chapter 12 Mirror Enchantments

The cave find became the focus of attention for the entire village. Their community hadn't had anything exciting to talk about since most of its members could remember, and the discovery of something both fascinating and inaccessible kept everybody on the edge of their seats with anticipation.
Public discussions about mirrors became so commonplace that even Mrs. Gentry gave up protesting eventually. “One can't squelch public curiosity, especially that of young people, it's a sad state of fact,” she thought, sighing with nostalgia for the good old days when even a mention of mirrors or reflections would immediately draw community shunning.

Fair - Chapter 11 - A Friend from the Past

“We're never going to figure this out,” Lucille said, dejected. “Not only don't I know most of the words' equivalents, but I don't understand their meaning, either. Even the short sentences I translated make absolutely no sense to me. What on earth is ‘meta property vr canonical content’? Why are we doing this?” she looked at Mary, exasperated. The girl, as always, donned a perplexed gaze.
The look in her niece's eyes helped Lucille remember that time allocation for this research had been recommended by the Circle, and as such, she didn't need to justify it to herself.

Fair - Chapter10 Content

The Circle meeting was quite boring, filled with organizational issues and the usual polite gossip. Lucille found it hard to pay attention to things she'd been hearing for decades, especially now when she was on pins and needles, filled with curiosity over the contents of the Que'd.
She was lost in thought, trying to make sense of the few words she managed to recall from her childhood, words that jumped at her from the ancient writing. For all intents and purposes, the text was as obscure as an abstract painting, and the fact that she couldn't read it saddened her.
Lucille tried to remember what her mother had taught her when she was a child, and was furious at herself for not having paid more attention at the time. She was only four or five and the puzzle of the ancient text seemed like a silly game, but she could still remember some of the nursery rhymes. For what it was worth, none of them seemed to have anything to do with the words she had managed to decipher.

Fair - Chapter 9 - A Walk at Dawn

'Great mercy, it's all here! Oh, girl, what have you uncovered!' Lucille thought, turning apprehensive eyes towards Mary, to see if her niece had any idea about the importance of her finding. It only took one glance to ascertain that Mary knew she was holding the long lost copy of the Que'd.
They looked at each other for a while, in a tacit understanding that any knowledge driven from the precious tome will never pass their lips. Finally Lucille decided to comment.
“What a strange thing, you know, with all of this resurgence of the legend of the Que'd, that somebody supposedly saw the old language in a cave not far from here! Why would somebody make up a story like that?” she asked, mostly rhetorically. The conversation continued unfolding naturally, in the third person, touching upon the subject lightly, without emotional involvement.