XLVI
The scrying pool convulses, its surface rippling like a living thing trying to escape its own reflection. The vision widens again, pulling you back toward the valley of grey stone.
The two elves' spirits hover above their bodies. Their shades grow luminescent, trembling, their tears falling as glowing wisps that vanish before they touch the ground. Their cries echo through the valley, thin and mournful, like wind through broken glass.
Below them, the bodies that once housed those souls twist and warp. Flesh stretches, bones crack, and the fog coils tighter, feeding on the transformation. The mirror's crack pulses with a dull, hungry light.
The souls try to flee, but the fog thickens, forming clawed hands that reach up from the ground. They seize the glowing spirits, dragging them downward. The shadow hounds, newly born, still steaming with fog, lift their heads.
Their eyes burn blue and their jaws open. Transformed claws push the souls into waiting maws. The mutant hounds don't blink. They don't hesitate. They consume what remains of the elves' light, their own bodies shuddering as the stolen souls fuse into them.
The wisewoman's voice trembles beside you. "They've become cannibals of spirit," she whispers. "Feeding on what they once were."
The hat man's reflection looms larger now, his yellow eyes gleaming with satisfaction, his handsome masked face contorts in satisfied glee. Each devoured soul strengthens the crack, widens the breach. The fog boils harder, the monolith groans, and the mirror's surface ripples like water about to spill.
He presses his hand against the glass again, lips curling into a smile that's all hunger and triumph.
The scrying pool shudders violently, the vision fracturing into shards of light and shadow. The wisewoman slams her birch rod down, breaking the connection.
"Uncle," I say, "This is much more than a small problem."
The council gave us a place to stay in the village, a small hut with sparse but comfortable furnishings. The hut lay nestled between three trees, woven from living trees and vines into a naturally camouflaged dwelling. I lay in the cot staring at the vine woven roof.
I could picture him, the hat man, in the cracked mirror. His eyes held burning obsession.
The image we saw in the scrying pool wasn't just a glimpse. It was a warning. The hat man's impatience is a living thing, vibrating through the cracked surface of the mirror world as he presses himself against it, desperate to break through.
Inside the mirror realm, he paced like a caged predator. His long coat trails behind him like smoke, and his top hat casts a shadow that seems to swallow the dim light of that broken valley. Every few steps he stops, slams a hand against the cracked mirror, and the entire monolith shivers.
He's furious, and starving. He's so close to crossing into the elven world. The walls had thinned enough to send his shadow hounds through the crack, close enough to taste the souls they'd already taken, but not close enough to step through himself.
His waxy yellow eyes burn with a greedy, feverish hunger. They flicker toward the bone village, toward the fog, toward the hounds prowling at the base of the monolith. He snarls at them, impatient with their slow work, furious that they cannot widen the crack fast enough. He wants everything.
The elven world is bright, fertile, full of magic and life. This land is a feast compared to the barren mirror realm he's trapped in. He wants its forests, its villages, its people, its spirits. He wants to devour its magic and twist its creatures into more Hollowed servants.
He wants to turn the elven world into a reflection of his own,
a place of bone huts, boiling fog, cracked stone, and endless hunger, consume it to make it a part of himself. He loved the energy of this world enough to consume it, to keep it forever. He wanted to touch life, to live, to hold it between his sharp teeth. We need a plan before the hat man gains any more power and turns the fairy lands into waste lands. The hat man is gaining more energy to create more hounds, the power to corrupt more bodies. He will spread like a plague.
The night grew dark, whatever needed to happen, I needed to sleep on it. In my dream I was carried back to the soul world and my first meeting with the hat man on that long fog filled cemetery night.
Gravestones stretch endlessly in every direction, crooked and sinking, names half‑erased. The fog curls around my ankles like living fingers. The sky is a blank sheet of darkness, no stars, no moon, no horizon, only the flickering graveside candles, yellow gas lamps and the shattered light from a myriad of mirrors dotting the sky.
The dream drags me deeper into the shattered mirror world. Reliving instances where I met him. I could feel him reaching for my familiar soul through the cracked glass into my dream.