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A quote: “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.” ~~ Oscar Wilde
I’ll start with a story …
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“So?”
She grinned as she slapped down the paperwork, “Easy peasy!”
Old story, big bank gobbles up small local bank. She had backdoor connections about outstanding notes.
Wham, bam, foreclosure, ma’am!
“I even watched the sheriff evict that old crone.”
Days later they pulled up to the old farm drooling over the fortune to be made in shiplap and barn siding. Inside they went room by room cataloging antiques and junk. In the attic she gasped with delight when she uncovered the old mirror.
The sheriff came a week later, finding their rental car, the house unlocked, but not them.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
[Note: this is my 200th Friday Fiction story! Thanks for reading and special thanks to all those who have contributed to the series.]
Lewis says: She was just so cute, so sweet, so helpless, and needed him so much! He couldn’t believe she wanted an old boy like him, rough around the edges, worked all his teen years, now working his butt off at the mill to make a go of it. He was so lonesome and saw other guys busy building a future with girls not half as cute as she was. She took him on in a heartbeat, he even had a house of his own that would be hers. She hired a housekeeper the week after the wedding.
It didn’t take a genius in sawmill boots to figure out that cute, sweet, helpless, needy bride was exactly that, needy and helpless! Would he be stuck with this forever?
Could she pick him up in her new car after the mill closed, wearing those sweet new high heels he bought her yesterday? They’d do the town on a Friday night!
“That should do it'” he said as he saw her drive in while straightening up from the boardwalk to the office. It went right over the river and those two boards just wouldn’t stay in place, he’d fixed them time after time and everybody knew it!
“Almost ready, honey, come on over and sit a while so I can change out of my boots.”
Cameron says: I walked into the attic and came to a quick halt. “It’s the mirror, isn’t it?”
The man nodded. “I’d heard it was some kind of magic thing but that’s all.”
“How did it get cracked?” My fingers touched the cold surface and confirmed what I had figured out.
“My son threw a rock at it. Said that there was something called Mister Rabbit coming through.” He looked over at my expression. “What’s so funny?”
“He caught a powerful demon between two worlds. I’ll take the mirror and your son is going to be my apprentice when he turns eight.”
Paul Northcutt says: The pain exploded that morning as I sipped the morning’s first coffee. It sat in the center of my chest demanding, in a growing voice, my total attention. Awaiting the arrival of the EMT’s, I shuffled outside and prayed “God, if today is the day you call me home, thank you for the blessings you have provided over a lifetime.” As the florescent ceiling lights slid past on my way to surgery, I realized that an earlier prayer asking for God to help me live a healthier lifestyle had been answered: not as punishment, but as a precious gift.
Navig8r says: “Don’t mess with the antique dollhouse” Grandma commanded. We couldn’t move it, and it didn’t open so we could put dolls inside, so compliance wasn’t difficult. Years later, I was in the attic around dusk when the lights came on. Peeking through the windows, I saw the tiny figures moving inside.
“It’s time for you to know” said my aging mother. “Those are pixies. They came through the mirror. They’ll be your responsibility soon.”
“It’s broken now. Are they stranded?”
“Yes, but it was the only way to stop the monsters that were hunting them in their own dimension.”
I’d always been curious about the old mirror in Grandma’s attic, alongside the old dollhouse and other things our ancestors had brought with them from the world we’d fled. Glimpsed from afar, the mirror looked like the rune-mirrors people used to communicate across distances, detect the Old Marks for navigation, and do other magic stuff. As I grew older and found ways to get a better look at it, I noticed the differences: not just the cracks running across the glass, but also the symbols engraved in the frame. While they resembled the Old Ixilon runes I was learning in school, they were not the same. Think the difference between the Latin and Greek alphabets.
As I moved on to more advanced studies, including the Old Ixilon language and their magic, I began to understand the similarities and differences. That mirror was the same basic kind of devising, using the same fundamental principles, but it was not made by the people we thought of as the Old Ixilons. Instead, these symbols were the runic alphabet of their ancient enemy, against whom they’d fought a war that wiped out both civilizations. A war so terrible it took eight millennia for this world to recover enough to welcome our ancestors as refugees from an equally terrible war on the far side of the worldgate.
This mirror had been designed to control such worldgates — but not to repopulate the land. Instead, this one was to enable the Enemy Across the Water to flee to a bolthole outside space and time where they could hide, watching, waiting for the world they’d fled to become a worthwhile conquest once again.
Which left one major question — had it been broken to keep them from returning, or to prevent anyone from following them to exact vengeance for their deeds?
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