☼ ISHAK ☼اسحاق
"Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face / The past, she is haunted, the future is laced"
"Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face / The past, she is haunted, the future is laced"
Your name echoes from somewhere, unhurried and unconcerned. If it isn’t Ruth, it is a very good imitation. You try to pin down the direction it is coming from. Hazarding a guess, you turn eastward down a new path.
At first, this row seems eerily empty. As you step further in and your eyes flick from facet to plane to cracked facade, you begin to notice the bodies. All of them are ones you know. There is the man from house Kamau, and there is his master of arms. (They are both more broken than you left them.) There is a guard, splattered in paint, that you almost hadn’t gotten away from. (He’d been alive when you saw him last.) And there— Motion.
Another doppelganger is rendered before you. He moves like a flipbook, all half-finished sketches when he’s caught still. In turns, he is both art and real, half of one and neither of both. In the lines that overlay him, you recognize your own flourishes. When he opens his mouth, there are too many, too sharp teeth. He follows you with the same ease you slip through a crowd. You try not to look at him too long.
You try not to think about him, about them, about divergent paths. You try hardest not to think about which of these are others and which are might-bes. There is knowledge here, in this grove, but there is no price you’d happily pay for it. There is no price you’d begrudgingly pay, either. You’ve always been an ounce of prevention type, but the gnawing unease at the base of your neck has you wondering if staying here too long would leave you with the sanity to use any of it. And that’s if you can even decipher the damned symbolism.
The further you go, the more the plants seem to struggle to grow. That life seems to be having difficulty finding a way in this maze is bothersome, but you are more concerned about your own wayfinding. If nothing else, perhaps follow the plants can be your means of finding a path back out.
Eventually, there are Ruths populating the mirror worlds in number. Your shadow slips away then, his eye visibly caught by a Ruth with bloody hooves. When he doesn’t return, you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
The Ruths in these shattered prisms are as often the focus as they are part of the background. You already feel less tense. If Ruth weren’t around to be reflected, then you are sure she would remain a secondary character of the mirror world. (If Ruth weren’t around to be reflected, if something had happened to Ruth, you are sure these damned crystals would find a way to taunt you with it.)
A soft-eyed Ruth smiles at you, her crown of flowering vines just barely avoiding slipping off her head. The smile meets her eyes. She presses her muzzle up against the inside of the crystal, and you grit your teeth. A girl that smiles like that wouldn’t be Ruth. When you do not step closer, she beckons at your reflections instead.
You move on.
The inverted you walks out of a crowd when you next come to a dead-end junction. This time his red coat bears a series of designs you remember being painted the winter all Solterra froze over. There is a Ruth with him now, but seeing her in reverse is not quite so jarring as seeing yourself. When she points her head to the left, you go right.
You squint into the refracted gleam. There’s a shape that looks almost solid, and your heart rises on a tide of hope.
“Ruth?” you call, again.
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