Windowmirror Chapter 1 ~ Celia Immortal

“Look into the mirror.  It tells the truth.”

“Is it a blessed mirror?”

“All mirrors are blessed, my Lady.”

“What do you mean?”

“All mirrors tell the truth, if you truly look.  Will you look?”

“I see myself.  That’s all.”

“It is good.  Mirrors tell you who and what you are, if you truly look.  There will come a time, my Lady, when you will not see yourself.”

“What will I see?”

“You will see what you have become.  But that time is long off.  Do not despair and turn away when it comes.  All visions pass, if you keep looking.”

For long years afterwards she dreamed those words, her first memory, her earliest sight.  Her nursemaid, an old woman in shawls, with eyes bright and young, holding the mirror in her hands.  It was small and oval, with a yellow ivory handle and back.  The back was carved as a monkey from the jungles, the handle its tail hanging down.  She looked into the mirror and saw herself, a child no more than five, with dark hair and eyes that spread over her small oval face.  Eyes to see, her nursemaid said.  Look into mirrors and you will see who you are.

She knew who she was; she was Celia Immortal, the Queen of Celiadon.  The Nameless One, named.  Volmir had found her, returned from death to life in a child’s body, and named her Celia again.  But when she looked into the mirror her nursemaid held with gnarled hand, she saw the nameless one, unnamed.  All she saw was herself.  She told Volmir what she had seen; it troubled her.  He set her mind at ease and silenced her disquieter; she was Celia Immortal, the Queen of Celiadon.  She sat on the throne of ebony and alabaster in the marble hall, a thousand slaves at her hands and feet, and ten thousand more in her armies.  The sands moved at her whispered command, the rains fell and the waters of the Amadahy flowed for her and through her alone.  She would never die, and the vessels that carried her would be buried in splendor, the vessel she saw in the mirror would someday lie in state on the thrones of the dead.  But she was Celia Immortal.

When she looked into mirrors she saw the nameless vessel, the girl of five, six, seven, and eight.  All mirrors were blessed, though the monkey and the hand that had held it were smashed, and gone, buried in the sands with the nameless ones, the dead.

Her nameless vessel, with staring eyes and black hair, was growing and would be a woman’s body someday.  Celia Immortal had sometimes wondered if she had ever worn a man’s body, but Volmir had said no; Celia was a goddess and so she always chose a woman’s body to be her vessel.

The eyes stared, and blinked.  What thoughts, she wondered, did the Nameless One think behind those dark eyes?  She put a hand to the mirror and wondered when she would see immortal eyes stare back at her from the mirror, and thought, someday.  Someday, when she was a woman, she would see what she had become.  Herself, Celia, at last.

When Delfano Ezmoro was ten they had stolen her, little Dollonë, no more than a baby, and broken his mother’s heart.  He had not been able to put it back together again, he was never good at setting things right, he only saw the wrong and could not stop it.

When Delfano was a young man at the age of eighteen, he finally left the pieces to fall to ruins by themselves.  He traveled abroad with his brushes and paper, to the lands of the north, painting the past, the present, and future.  From the time his sister was born, he had been compelled to draw things, sketching in sand on the ground or arranging sticks in a pattern.  From then on pictures followed him wherever he went.  Sometimes his hands moved in ways he did not understand, and he painted in a trance, not knowing what he drew until it was finished.  He could draw things he’d never seen, but he could not draw her face, or see with his paints what she would become.  Dollonë was gone and something else, something faceless, stood in her place.

He painted portraits for the wealthy, and told stories to the young, but he never advertised nor sold the future; those pictures he kept to himself, for what the paints showed was never, it seemed, what people wanted to see.  There were those who tried to kill him when they saw their future, as if the painter made the future.  It was not something he sought after, though he knew that was not the way he would end.  He had drawn the lines of his own future years ago, and he knew whom he would die for, though he could not paint her face.