Devotion

Time slides to the right.
 
 
 
You have never felt so {hollow} [heavy].
 
There is a mirror. You rest a hand against its surface. Its murky depths are painful to gaze into, but you cannot look away.
 
The face within the mirror shifts from moment to moment. Sometimes it is a metal helm adorned with {a gleaming, polished aventail} [curved antlers of genuine bone]. Sometimes it is an angular face with pale skin, too {gaunt} [soft] to be your own, but familiar all the same, even with its strange, {short-cropped} [long an untamed] hair and its {granite grey} [green and gold] eyes.
 
[Sometimes it is a billowing river of blue and silver stardust, and it burns to behold, and your chest cracks under the weight of it, even as your feeble mind blocks every attempt to comprehend it.]
 
The faces that swirl behind your reflection are familiar, too. You recognize the First Master and First Mistress, with his cold blue eyes and her beautiful black hair. You know their child, and their child's wife, when she finally comes to live at the manor, when they become the Second Master and Second Mistress. You know their sons.
 
You know how they died.
 
{Something is}
 
[wrong.]
 
You see Ferdinand. What happened to his elder brother was a tragedy, but it [was] {not} his fault. As the last remaining heir to the Weiss name, he inherits all.
 
[He pushes you until your joints crack, until your plate is scorched and shattered, and then sends you away with an admonishment to not break so quickly next time.]
 
{He smiles at you for the first time in a decade, and it feels like the sun and stars have rearranged themselves around him, and gods, if only it had been real.}
 
You press your hand flat against your reflection. This hand is used to the weight of a {shovel} [sword]. You have always wielded it with pride in your family's name.
 
[What was it all for?]
 
Your hand curls into a fist.
 
[You try to pull away.]
 
{You push through the hazy glass and catch your own wrist in your grip.}
 
You see [Ama]{Nita}.
 
She is confidence made manifest. She is certainly condensed into a tiny ball of momentum. She knows exactly what she wants, and when she sets her mind on a goal, she is unstoppable.
 
{She is crouched over a garden bed. Her face and hands are smudged in dirt. She is talking about substrates, scribbling frantic notes, furiously debating with herself why her latest experiment failed. You have to physically put the plate in her hand before she finally looks at it and realizes she has to eat.}
 
[The ouroboros eats its own tail. Before the year is out, Ferdinand Weiss dies of a lingering sickness no doctor can identify and no healer can cure. His baroness cares for him into his very last days. She sobs at his bedside, and her tears convince the rest of them, but you know.]
 
[I couldn't have stopped her.]
 
{You chose not to stop her.}
 
[I didn't want to stop her.]
 
She is the master of her house. She knows precisely where everything belongs. She knows where you belong. She knows what you are, and now it is through her [alone] that you continue to survive.
 
[The “combat training” stops. She has no need for such direct, barbaric methods. You came to her well-trained. You need no reminder of whose power matters.]
 
[Her expectations are high, but her punishments only ever match your failures. And as long as you meet those expectations, she damn near ignores you.]
 
[It's the closest thing to freedom you've ever tasted.]
 
{It could have been better.}
 
[Not for me.]
 
In the depths of the mirror, you see [Mark 1] {Whim}, his broad shoulders braced under the weight of [your enthusiastic embrace] {a heavy pallet of paving stones for the garden}. You see [Mark 2] {Id} as clearly as if she were in front of you, standing in the middle of [the creche's busy corridors] {the manor parlor}, hear her voice spinning a melody like [well-oiled clockwork] {liquid love}.
 
[Love?]
 
{Love.}
 
[You try to jerk your hand away again.]
 
{You tighten your grip.}
 
Your insides churn.
 
[No one came for us. There was no one left.]
 
{I came for you.}
 
[You can't save me.]
 
{No.}
 
[Then let me go.]
 
{No.}
 
You close your eyes. A thousand fragments of memory shatter through your mind. They break up and down your spine like shards of glass, splinters embedding themselves directly into your nervous system. The unfamiliar taste of {steel polish and sword oil} [dew gathered on moss on a cold autumn morning] lingers in your mouth.
 
[A hand strikes out of the crowd, holding a needle that glints with something red. On reflex alone, you push Amanita behind you. The needle embeds itself into your false skin. You feel a shiver of poison try to sink into your frame, but poison means nothing to you. All that matters is the glittering steel arc of the zweihander as you bring it down upon the arm of the poor fool who dared try to touch her.]
 
{A cot that is not a cot leaps at Nita. Its teeth bury themselves in her stomach. You have never seen so much blood. Your entire world pivots, and suddenly nothing, not even the family who should hold your complete and unfaltering devotion, matters more to you than her.}
 
[We keep her safe.]
 
{Of course we do.}
 
The images fade. Your reflection begins to go muddy, details hazing out against the murky background. Your interlaced fingers go numb.
 
[Tell her…]
 
{Tell her yourself.}
 
 
 
The mirror shatters.