The MirrorWorld Anthology Read online

She burns elderflower under their bed.

  But she can’t keep her away.

  Now he sees her in the water.

  In every dew drop.

  In the buckets he fills for the cattle in the morning.

  In the puddles the rain fills on the road in front of their house.

  The moonlight and the spider webs.

  They wrap his heart with a sweetness he has never known.

  Once his wife was beautiful too.

  She wore flowers in her hair when he first met her.

  Now her hands are rough from work, and her skin has withered in the sun.

  He walks into the woods to sit by a pond and stare at the face that smiles back at him.

  The reeds whisper...

  Come.

  Come to me.

  He stumbles through the woods.

  Come to me.

  A valley...

  There are unicorns grazing.

  They lift their heads, but let him pass.

  The valley smells of wild roses.

  He has forgotten his name. He has forgotten his own face.

  There is only hers before him.

  His heart has the shape of her face.

  He reaches a lake.

  It is coated in lilies.

  They cover his skin with petals as he walks into the water.

  She is on that island that drifts on the waves like a promise.

  He knows it.

  She.

  No hunger ever felt like this.

  No pain ever hurt like this.

  He barely makes it to the shore.

  The reeds whisper his name.

  Is it his name?

  He doesn’t know anymore.

  There are moth webs in the trees.

  They cling to his wet clothes as he searches for her.

  The longing burns like fever in his flesh.

  He trembles with desire.

  And there she is.

  Even more beautiful than in his dreams.

  Her moths are swarming all around him.

  And he is lost.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mortal men...

  The lake offers us their faces

  The lake that gave birth to us

  Their allure is as fleeting as a flower’s scent

  But their love feeds our emptiness — at least for a while

  We do not choose the most handsome ones

  We seek a shadow in their eyes

  A shell that wants to be broken

  A mind that longs to be drowned

  A man who knows our hunger

  To make the world feel whole again

  We never lose ourselves in them for long

  But they give in so completely that in the end nothing is left of them

  We begin to smell the staleness of death in their flesh

  Then we send them away

  And wait for another face

  To feed the hunger for a fleeting while

  ~ ~ ~

  A few months later his eldest son finds him wandering around aimlessly near their village.

  He barely remembers his son’s name.

  He stands by the well.

  Stares into the water for hours.

  “I can’t see her,” he murmurs.

  Over and over again.

  They find him drowned in the bottom of the well a week later.

  ~ ~ ~

  They lose themselves so completely that in the end nothing is left of them

  How the Tailor Came

  to the Hungry Forest

  Once upon a time, there lived a tailor in Vena who had become a master in his trade. His garments were so beautiful that the famous tailors of Lotheraine secretly copied his designs, until every nobleman and woman promenading down the boulevards of Loutis wore them.

  The Emperor of Austry and the King of Albion commissioned him to make clothes for them and their families. The tailor could not have been happier. He bought proper shoes for his children, and wrapped his beautiful wife in satin and brocade dresses embroidered with gold.

  His wife however was troubled. “My love,” she said, “don’t you see how our neighbors look at us? Even our friends behold me with envious glances. Our children have become strangers to their friends. They can only look on, afraid to soil their precious clothing, as the other children play in the streets.”

  She pleaded with him. But the tailor was embarrassed by his family’s plain clothes, and he hated to see his wife’s beauty fade against the golden splendor of the Emperor’s daughters. “You will do as I say!” he demanded. “These are the most beautiful clothes I have ever sewn!”

  Afraid to shame him, they obeyed.

  Soon, rumor spread that the tailor’s wife was dressed more beautifully than the Emperor’s daughters. The Emperor was furious. How could a humble tailor show such disrespect? He had the tailor’s family thrown into the dungeons. Then he ordered the tailor to make new clothes — more beautiful than those he’d made for his own family.

  The tailor tried, but he’d poured all his passion into his family’s clothes. The needle wouldn’t obey him anymore.

  After three tortuous days there came a knock at the door. It was one of the guards who had arrested his family.

  The tailor stood in stunned silence as the guard informed him, with great regret, that his family had been slain in the dungeons.

  They had been killed for their clothes.

  The tailor didn’t speak for a long time. Then he told the guard he would need to measure the Emperor’s family for their new dresses.

  The Emperor’s wife and daughters came the very next day — from their country palace where they spent their summers — directly to the tailor’s workshop.

  A week later, a magnificent coat was delivered to the palace. The Emperor was overjoyed. Such finely tailored leather! Such ornate embroidery! He put on the coat and basked in its elegance. He would once again be the unrivaled image of regal grandeur befitting his status.

  But then he froze....

  He turned pale. Transfixed by a detail on the leather sleeve. It was a birthmark. One he knew all too well. From his wife’s naked shoulder.

  He ordered his cavaliers to speed to his summer palace. But his wife and daughters were nowhere to be found.

  The tailor’s workshop was also found empty — the floor covered in blood.

  A few weeks later, a coach was attacked in the Hungry Forest. The travelers’ bodies were never found.

  Shortly thereafter, the Emperor received a beautiful new set of hunting clothes.

  Soon, woodsmen began telling stories of trees that wore clothes made of human skin. And the coal burners working in the forest, who had once feared only the howling of wolves, now trembled at the clip-clap of scissors.

  The Yearning

  She should have known.

  She should have seen. The features still so soft, the face just the bud of a flower. But the boy had been unusually tall for his age. And he had thrown stones at the cat who carried her secrets in its fur.

  She should have known.

  Every Dark Witch feared it, more than pain or death, more than the withering of their skin that occurred from eating too old a child.

  It only entered their hearts when they tasted the flesh of a child that was too young.

  They called it the Yearning.

  She felt it three nights after she had eaten the boy’s heart.

  The Yearning sang and wept and screamed in her flesh. It made her fingers shake and every inch of her body hurt as if a child was peeling off her skin with its little fingers.

  Two weeks
of it. Then she gave in.

  She picked one of the men who worked at the factory they had built at the edge of the forest. It was so easy to seduce them. She just wore a bit of youth and beauty on her skin.

  She felt the child moving five months later. The forbidden fruit, growing in her womb, changing her body as if the Yearning had been a potion, or a comb drawn through her hair — not to give her feathers, but another heart, another lung, limbs that moved in her body, fingers that touched her from inside.

  She gave birth to it in the darkest depth of night, all alone, as none of the other witches could ever know. The pain was as sharp as if the child were being cut out of her body with the same knives she had used for killing them.

  It was a girl.

  Hair as pale as the moonlight she’d been born under. Eyes as blue as the sky by day. She held her. Felt her heart beat against her own — the heart that had grown in her womb. The small fingers touched her skin, the tiny mouth searched for her breast, and all her dark magic was lost....

  ... All the knowledge she had gained with her sinister trade. Everything she had learned by eating their hearts, so pure still, so young… it all faded, and she learned to fear the night again, because she had to protect her daughter from it.

  She left the house that smelled of gingerbread, cinnamon and nightshade, and moved to a village where no one had ever seen her face.

  She told them the father had died in an accident at the factory.

  Of course they believed her. It had happened to other husbands, and she had still enough magic to make them believe whatever she wanted them to.

  And the child grew. It found words and songs. Made her forget with every smile what she had been, what she had done to understand and use the darkness in the world.

  But every shadow reminded her, every night. And sleep fled her, for she feared the hunger would return. She knew it would. It couldn’t die once it had been woken. It could never vanish once it had been fed. If only the days wouldn’t taste so sweet.

  Just another year, she said to herself. Just one more. And another. And another.

  She worked as a seamstress. But she hated to touch the scissors, for they reminded her of her former trade. She brewed potions to erase the memories, but they were shadows living in the dark.

  There was a woman two houses down the road. She wore the pain of an empty womb on her face. The witch had seen many women like her. They also knew about the Yearning.

  They had come to her for help, even though they despised her for how she had earned her power, and she had sent them home with herbs, roots, and darker potions.

  But to this woman she would give more.

  She sat by her daughter’s bed all night. It was the night of her fifth birthday. She held the small hand and cried until the pale moonlight hair was wet from her tears. It was such a long night.

  She slipped a letter under the woman’s door two houses down. Then she walked into the woods until she stood in front of the house that smelled of gingerbread, cinnamon and nightshade. She saw her old power like soot on its walls. She heard laughter and screams. She remembered the knife and the oven. And a tiny mouth finding her breast. The comb still lay in front of the mirror that had shown her face on so many days. She could see it all in its glass. The Yearning and the hunger. So she took the comb and drew it through her hair.

  Then she threw the comb into the well and waited for the feathers to grow. They spread fast, until they covered her with darkness, and she flew into the forest and lost herself amongst its trees.

  There is a girl with moonlight hair in a small village near the Hungry Forest. Her mother loves her very much. She never told her that she didn’t give birth to her, nor showed her the letter she one morning found on her doorstep. Sometimes a crow lands on the roof of the house. It sits there for hours and watches the girl. The woman doesn’t chase the bird away.

  One for the Other

  Once upon a time in Albion...

  ... there lived a poor farmer named Tom who barely could make a living from the stony fields he had inherited from his father.

  But he was young and strong, and while he was plowing the stubborn earth he dreamt of a better life, filled with glory and brave deeds, and a new adventure awaiting him every single morning.

  Tom liked to tell his younger sister the stories he dreamt up. Anna was only seventeen, and he loved her more than anyone and anything else in the world. Their parents had died when they were young, and for all these years he had been both brother and father to her.

  Anna dreamt up stories as well, but they were quite different from Tom’s — they were all about princes, romance, and a dozen children. And as much as Tom loved his sister, he secretly thought that he would get awfully bored if he ever married a woman who dreamt only of these things.

  Anna worked for a seamstress in Goldsmouth. Once a week she went there to pick up the fabrics she had to embroider with flowers and gold thread, for the seamstress’s rich clients.

  It was a long way to Goldsmouth. Tom had forbidden Anna to go alone. But it was the time of the harvest. Tom had to work from dusk till dawn. And his sister felt bad asking him to accompany her.

  So she didn’t.

  When Tom returned from the fields late that evening the house was empty. He looked in the stable…

  … he went to the well…

  … but he couldn’t find his sister anywhere.

  He ran through the night, down every path and country road she might have taken, but could find no trace of her...

  … until he came to a crossing….

  ~ ~ ~

  Her basket lay by the side of the road — the velvet and silk inside covered in mud…

  Deep footprints led away from the road — so deep that Tom could see them even in the dark. The light from the two moons cast the water that filled them with silver and rust.

  Tom sat on the muddy ground and felt his heart throbbing like a fresh wound. There was only one creature that left such footprints.

  A Waterman had stolen his sister and dragged her to his pond, to keep her as his prisoner until she died.

  How could he ever hope to save her?

  A Waterman was almost as strong as an Ogre. And Tom would never be able to dive down to his underwater cave.

  There were men who hunted them professionally.

  But they charged fees he couldn’t earn in an entire year!

  Tom sat at the crossing all night, his sister’s basket by his side. When the first pale light of dawn touched the mud-stained velvet he knew what he had to do.

  He went home and cooked a brew from the pale yellow flowers his father had taught him about when he was a boy. Then he grabbed his knife and some rope and walked to the forest that stretched for miles behind his fields.

  The King’s daughters came there to catch birds. They were always surrounded by servants and soldiers, but the youngest princess often rode off on her own. Tom had watched them many times, as his sister had asked him to describe their dresses to her.