“Perfect,” Calliope purred. She had slept for a time, though in her dream she had felt something malign stalking her. She recalled being in a great library in which every book was a copy of the one they had stolen, its binding infinitely scaled up and down but always exactly the same tome. She got out of bed, felt weak, and hated herself for it. She wanted meat but the last thing she needed was servants or the would be guards sticking their heads in at this point. They needed to find some supplies, the gown she had worn to the ball being a little worse for wear. Carefully she wrapped the mirror in one of the small table cloths and then punched her fist into the center of it. It disintegrated in a quiet cacophony of musical tinkles. Calliope paused and cocked her ear, making sure no one was coming to investigate the sound, then she carefully poured the shards into one of the soup bowls she had cleaned out for the purpose.

“You know I think they make you pay for that,” Neil put in sardonically. She ignored him, breaking up a few of the larger shards by hand, careful not to cut herself.

“I thought you still couldn’t do magic,” Neil interjected as she picked up one of the large shards and turned it over in her fingers.

“Me?” she asked innocently, “no. You? Yes.” She cut him across the forearm with the tip of the shard drawing three drops of blood. They ran silver.

 

Neil and Calliope stood on a wind blasted heath, so formless that it made the mind ache. Phantom wind whipped around them, disturbing their hair but not their clothing. In the distance strange and indistinct shaped humped and crawled like blind maggots, just hinted at in the murky air.

“Gods damn it woman!” Neil complained, glancing around them in shock. He looked down at himself and found he was two Neil’s, one whole, the other slightly translucent and an inch or so out of alignment.

 

“Ok spill,” he demanded, crossing his four arms awkwardly. Calliope smiled up at him and lifted the bowl of mirror shards. They flowed together into a single sheet of glass so perfect it might have been quicksilver. Inside the mirror a second naked Calliope was visible behind him, her arms draped over his shoulders, her red lips close to his neck.

“I’ve removed your soul from your body,” both Calliope’s said in eerie synchrony, the words oddly sibilant as they came at Neil from all directions and maybe none.

 

“Don’t worry…” the Calliope behind him said, extending her tongue to scrape along his neck, something he could see but not feel.

“It isn’t permanent,” the Calliope in front of him said. 

 

“Just a trick,” the Calliope behind him said, her lips closing around his ear lobe and tugging playfully.

“Just a trick,” the Calliope in front of him agreed. She clapped her palms together on the disc of quick silver at the same instant the second Calliope’s hands began to stray down the front on Neil’s tunic.

 

The mirror exploded silently. It fell into the bowl in a sound so similar to its original shattering that a musical savant could have found no difference, despite being having apparently been broken in a completely different fashion and falling rather than simply being contained by cloth. Neil thought he glimpsed himself in the mirror shards even though they weren’t oriented to reflect him, but it was only for an instant. She handed him the bowl then tucked the large shard with a drop of his blood on the tip away.

“Take a shard and focus on it, imagine what you want it to show,” she explained.