A Mirror's Silence

[Songwitch 1832]

Spoiler

 

 

…And she walked the earth, tracing paths across kingdoms long forgotten and across lands where few men or beasts dared to tread. For years beyond count, the girl had fled - always fleeing, yet never arriving. Remembering no beginning to her journey, only the endless stretches of road behind her. Towns, villages and cities fell after her wake like shadows swallowed by the night and there was no tether to the past, no memory that held her fast. Even as she plodded through forests thick with towering oaks and pines that whispered secrets in dead tongues. Or through rivers and lakes where the quiet gnaw of something forgotten, something unresolved, hid buried under her reflection. Wherever it may be, she always came as an outsider and always left before anyone could grow too curious or fond, before anyone could speak of how unchanged she was. She was a vision of youth and invention amid a world that constantly grew older, a spark burning bright in the dark. 

 

Yet there were days the girl could hardly remember where she had been the day before, who she had spoken to, or what she had once embarked on to find. Her past felt distant and the ticking of an old clock echoed somewhere near, a sound she had paid little and less attention, or perhaps had forgotten. It carried a sliver of dread that snaked through her veins despite her ignorance, her chest rising and falling in erratic rhythm. And it was obvious that the ticking sound had been there all along, like it was counting down to something she had refused to confront. But she set off again, her steps quickening as if she could outrun the sensation, as if she could forsake the creeping suspicion that something was terribly wrong. Her breath came shallow, the air thick with the weight of some repressed burden. She could feel it, like an old wound torn open, and in desperation the girl clawed at the only thing that would bring her respite.

 

A mirror whose sharpness and gamut had been dulled, perhaps by decay and the ravages of time. In its reflection she found only silence for the most part, a shield with which to protect herself from whatever she was trying to elude. There was a pull, a draw to the echo of her image, as though it had been concealing the truth from her all this time. And now she could still hear the ticking in the silence, faint but steady, rattling through her head. The last, quiet proof that the girl could not escape from what she had long denied. Then and there, while the answer hovered at the edge of her tongue just beyond reach, her legs gave way beneath her. She collapsed onto the floor and something flickered in the recesses of her mind, a memory, fractured and fragile. All fell into place. The girl was a woman, and the woman was a crone. She had believed herself above, that the petty rules of the world and the limitations of mortals were beneath her. 

 

This greed twisted her desire and in turn trapped her in a prison of her own making - an endless cycle of wandering, of forgetting, of fleeing from the inevitability of rot and death. She had been charmed by delusions and illusions, and in some cruel sense, she had become ageless. Unravaged not by the perversion of her mind, but the misery of straying from her prime.

And rebirth was the only solution that she could muster.

 

 

Spoiler

This is just a short story that I decided to write for one of my characters that I would like to actively RP again after my time away from the server, so this just serves as a way (mostly for myself and for my own entertainment regarding her development) to explain the way she is and why she had been acting so elusive and ‘weird’ prior to her departure. What I wanted to reflect in this story is the fact that my character has been endlessly wandering from one place to another without ever settling down for too long not because she merely wants to walk across different lands, but because she is running from the truth: her own mortality. She values her youth and life above all else and in this obsession for staying young she has imprisoned herself under a metaphorical prison where only she is impervious to aging and thus death. The idea of “always fleeing but never arriving” is meant to signify her refusal to confront the reality of who she is, that she is not as ‘invincible’ as she had thought, and her detachment from reality and time as she has broken memories of the past. In a sense, she is haunted by time, but also running from it. Here is where the clock’s ticking plays its part as a metaphor for time itself, that it is the ever-present reminder of death, and that she can only escape it for so long. Finally, the mirror represents the moment where she begins to see past her illusions. But it is dull and this is because it is supposed to feed into the fact that she has not been seeing a clear reflection of her true self but a shield she has been using to protect herself from the painful reality. At the end, it crumbles down and exposes her to the truth. 

 

I liked writing this a lot so I might keep doing similar short stories about her or one of my other characters. Thank you for reading :3