Almare - The White Mirror

“Meanwhile, here in Welkin there was turmoil. Without a Guardian, the people were lost. A new one had to be chosen as soon as possible. Usually this process starts before the other Guardian dies, and there isn’t need for a new one very often at all. But now the city found itself utterly and completely without a leader, and the only known person who could ‘Hear’ in this generation was me. Since I was also more than decent at weather controlling, I was chosen for Guardian. It wasn’t too much of a surprise for me; I already knew I was a candidate because of my abilities.

"Even so, my sudden election was almost overwhelming. I found myself in charge of so much. Every single being in this city depended on me, or at least thought they did. They wanted me to tell them the future. That is what a Guardian is for, to protect the people by making sure that there are no surprises. I was to tell them if I 'heard' anything, in the past or the future, that could mean that there was any type of threat for Welkin. To be honest, I didn't tell them everything. Or even most of what I heard. But they also honestly didn't want to know. Who wants to be told what is going to happen to them, to always know what course their actions are going to take? But I was security to them, a safety precaution. And for a few short months my life was almost peaceful.

"But not for long. In 1774, I began to Hear something that troubled me. It was voices not from some far away time period, but from the present. And they were coming from the lands below.

"It was the beginning of the Great War, a terrible time of fighting and misery as the groups of creatures that now form the Nine Kingdoms were finding out what to do with themselves. It was the age of the real 'Fairy Tales' - Snow White was being poisoned, Cinderella was covered in cinders, Hansel and Gretel were wandering toward the witch's candy house, Sleeping Beauty was fast asleep, and Humpty Dumpty was falling off a wall. You get the idea. It was before happily ever after, and it was far more gruesome than what they'll tell you about in books. I felt...well, I felt as though I had to do something, especially since Acrotis was right there in the middle of it. I knew that I shouldn't feel sorry for her, I certainly didn't and still don't approve of what she did, but the truth is that I have a soft spot for Acrotis.

"Whatever I felt about her, it did not affect why I decided to do what I did at the beginning of that war. I decided to help. Some actions I took back then may not have been right, and I do regret them. But I think that overall it turned out for the best.

"Since the White Mirror had been shut down four years before, there had obviously been no more visitors. Everyone in Welkin had almost forgotten about the whole ordeal. But I had not. The lands below had always fascinated me, and now in their time of need I was compelled to help them - in any way I could.

"I thought that with my power to hear the future, I could find out what enemy troops were planning and stop them with the weather- a couple of big lightning bolts should do the trick. I did realize that perhaps this wasn't fair. After all, who was I to decide who would live and who would die? But back then I brushed that thought away.

"It was a good plan; after all, I was so powerful, why not put it to good use? But my power, at least as far as Hearing went, was failing. I hadn't realized it for a long time because I had been so busy adjusting to my new role. But it was true- what were once strong voices to me were now only whispers, and I could hardly ever hear the future at all. For anything to go right, to keep my position in Welkin and for me to help the soon-to-be Nine Kingdoms, I would need help.

"I found it one day in Prince Leon. He was a young man, some second-cousin of Cinderella's I believe. His voice had been a prominent one my mind, as I sat listening to the ever-quieter whispers drifting up from the lands below. He played some sort of important role in the war, developing what would someday be the Council of the Nine Kingdoms. But that is not what interested me about him. From what I could hear, little bits of conversation and speeches to an assembly, I pieced together words and phrases and found out that my suspicions had to be correct: This man could See.

"I suppose you can figure out what that means. People who can See will know the future through visions, just as those can Hear will know it through voices. It didn't really matter to me how he did it, though. What I needed was someone who could tell me the future.

"If I could get him here, to Welkin, without anyone down there knowing who I was or how I did it, I could convince him to tell me two important pieces of information- what lay in the future for Welkin, so I could tell my people and remain Guardian, and what lay ahead for the Kingdoms, so that I could help them by using my power with the weather. It seemed almost simple. But how was I going to get him here?

"I thought long and hard about this. All that I knew about mortals I had learned four years before, when the White Mirror was transporting them to us. I still wasn't sure what they could and couldn't survive. Since I was, however, positive that humans could travel through mirrors, I decided to stick to what I knew. I would use the White Mirror. But not directly. That wasn't possible because it was deactivated, and there was no way that I could physically reactivate it from Welkin. But I could use its essence.

"Some Dwarves had come to us during the months that the mirror was in full operation. They had taught us some things about mirrors. We knew that Traveling Mirrors worked because of that property of all materials in the kingdoms- being attracted to where the greater abundance of one material is. If I could put rainwater in any mirror and pull someone through it, it would act as a Traveling Mirror, a new manifestation of the White Mirror. Perfect.

"I needed a mirror that Prince Leon would frequently be standing in front of. He often used an old Spying Mirror to converse with his uncle, so I would use that. Now how to get rainwater into it? Or simply onto the surface of the mirror. If I could do that, then the quicksilver in the glass would help absorb the water, and the mirror would work as a Traveling Mirror when I gave it the power. The prince sometimes took it along with him when he went away from his castle on royal business. It was out in the open, under the sky. So I would make it rain.

"For good measure, I made it rain a lot. In all the history books published thereafter, it would be known as the Great Storm of 1774. There was nothing but rain for several weeks. Floods overtook many parts of the land, but not all. After all, I needed only to get one single mirror in the whole region wet. But I took no chances. And because of this, I succeeded. While trying to move the Spying Mirror from one caravan to another, some servants of the prince allowed several cool raindrops to fall onto its upturned face. Now all that was left to do was wait.

"The next day, Prince Leon was standing in his chamber, with the Spying Mirror, turned into a Traveling Mirror, in front of him. Planning to talk to his uncle, he rotated the secret knob to activate the mirror, and disappeared from the Kingdoms forever. I pulled him in, when the mirror was powered up and turned white. I didn't touch him physically; I drew him into Welkin with only the power of my will. And the best part was that no one ever even guessed what happened. There were several guards - 'witnesses' - in the room at the time, but all they could do was stare.

"Once I had the prince, all that was left to do was to make him see. It's difficult for some to use their power of Sight or Hearing, very difficult the first time one tries it. But Prince Leon surpassed all my expectations. As soon as I asked him if he knew he had the power to See, he said that he had always known that there was something different about him. He didn't say it in a superior tone as though it was something to brag about; he just said it as it was, a simple fact. He was different, and he wanted to know more about it. So I told him to close his eyes and think. He didn't ask me what he should think about, he just thought. And after a couple moments I knew that he was Seeing. He stood like that, in a trance, for several long minutes.

"When he opened his eyes, he blinked once. And in that instant his eyes became as white as mine. Ever since I started Hearing, my eyes had lost all their color. I could still see, but whenever I looked at my reflection I winced, and still do. The prince probably did not realize until much later what he had become, but I felt the stab of pain in my heart when I saw what I had done to him.

"With his expressionless gaze he looked at me and he told me that the Gremlin army would be advancing on his region in fifteen hours. They were coming in over the southern mountains, and they planned to take no prisoners, but kill all life forms in their path. And then, in his same, slow, calm voice he added that he would never look into the future again. It was too painful to ever again see anything like what he had just seen. And I knew that he was telling the truth, in every word that fell from his lips, and there was nothing that I could do about his decision. He had seen his people slaughtered and his kingdom overrun by the most foul creatures alive, Gremlins. I wouldn't make him see the future ever again. I wondered if there was really anything that I could do about it anyway. Prince Leon was a strong man, and in the end he served his kingdom in the best way that he could.

"I wasted no time. I put all of Welkin on alert, and formed what are now known of as the battle stations. All of the most skilled weather workers in Welkin rode out to the far end of the city and prepared themselves. They waited there, and followed my orders to be ready at any moment to hear my signal. When they heard my voice, every one of them, twenty-five in all, focused on the part of Prince Leon's region where the Gremlins were waiting, poised to attack, and all as one sent down their mightiest winds, rain, lighting, snow, and hail. To put it lightly, no one knew what hit them. The entire gremlin army was blown away. My weather workers had a special plan that allowed them not to harm any of Prince Leon's citizens, so the genocide was completely avoided, thousands of lives saved. It was our first great victory in the soon-to-be-Kingdoms, and this is one example of a battle that I do not regret in the least. Unfortunately, there were not many of those.

"But I was no fool. I knew that I did not wipe out the Gremlin race, and that they were not the only enemy of Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and the other future queens. I also know that Prince Leon was no longer of any assistance to me. I would need more Seers and Hearers, and I would need them soon. There were battles breaking out all over the place, but unless I knew about them before they happened, I couldn't get my weather workers to battle stations fast enough. I would have to abduct another person using my rainwater/mirror plan.

"This second time it went much faster. I quickly found a pixie who could hear. She was frequently around a large mirror that her secluded village used for communicating with other fairies. Since this was kept outside, it was easy enough to send a simple light rain down to drench it while the careless pixies weren't looking. The next time the young female pixie, whose name escapes me, was passing by the mirror, I turned it white and grabbed her. Again, no one realized anything about it except that she was gone.

"When I had her in this chamber, I asked her to close her eyes and listen. Pixies are naturally not as bright as humans, so this took a little longer than it did with Prince Leon. But eventually she did hear about the next battle, and managed to tell me about it. She too, however, looked far too traumatized to attempt it again, and since my entire mission was to help these people, I was not going to force it upon her. That meant that I would need a new Seer or Hearer every time there might be a battle. It was hard work, but I was willing to do this if it meant that hundreds of lives would be saved. Luckily my weather workers agreed with me, because I could not have done any of this without them.

"During the Great War, Acrotis was still staying at Dragon Mountain with the Dwarves. She had convinced them that she was just a very lost human girl, one who had tragically lost her memory in some horrible accident and had no idea where she used to live or who her parents were. I'm not sure if the Dwarves really believed her or not, but they let her lie slip past and provided her with food and a place to stay, as long as she did their bidding. It was a good hideout for Acrotis, and she was still learning all she could about mirrors.

"And so, it was by pure coincidence that she was there when I chose my next 'victim'. You remember Cinderella telling you in her palace about how Acrotis had been a witness to one of the disappearings? Perhaps it never occurred to you that Acrotis couldn't have been alive in the eighteenth century. But, no matter.

"There was a Dwarf in Dragon Mountain who could Hear. As this was my twenty-first abduction, I was getting quite used to the procedure by now. I saw immediately how to get rainwater into a mirror and suck him through it; I would make it rain on one of the many mirrors that are shipped into Dragon Mountain every week for repair. The particular Dwarf worked in that area, fixing the mirrors, so he would come into contact with all the mirrors that were out in the rain.

"Acrotis, on the same day that I acted, was also helping in the repair department. There was only one other Dwarf in the room at the time. I didn't notice that she was there at all, so I pulled the Dwarf who could hear through the mirror right in front of her. It was a foolish thing to do, I know now. If I had realized that she was there, I would never have revealed the whiteness of the mirror to her. She was smart enough to put two and two together, and discover that there was a way to get through the mirror without reactivating it. Maybe it didn't matter anyway. In the end that knowledge did not help her. Still, I’m sure it gave her new hope of returning to Welkin through the mirror.

"Over the next few years I abducted thirty-four creatures with the power to See or Hear. Each of them sacrificed their own lives in the Kingdoms, because I couldn't let them down after I had shown them Welkin. And each of them saved many other lives in doing so.

"In the year 1800, the Great War ended, and the Golden Age began. Cinderella, Snow White, Queen Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Gretel the Great all began their peaceful reigns, and the Nine Kingdoms were formed. Of course there were still awful creatures like trolls roaming around, even claiming their own kingdom, but they were subdued. Thanks to my work, some of the more horrible races were annihilated, including the Gremlins. It was almost three long decades from the beginning of the war to the end, but it was well worth it.

"Acrotis seized this time to act. She left the Dwarves who had been so good to her without so much as a goodbye and started off to find new possibilities for finding how to reactivate the White Mirror. By that time this was her major goal, and when Acrotis got it in her head to do something no one could stop her. She traveled all the way to Cinderella's Kingdom. She wandered up to the palace door and again told the tale that she was a lost child who had lost her memory in a tragic accident. I am positive that Cinderella did not believe her story, but she did not question it and kindly gave Acrotis the job of Advisor on the subject of mirrors. Acrotis had learned quite a lot during her stay with the Dwarves, and she lost no time showing off this fact to Cinderella.

"One wonders after a while what is going through the head of this great woman. She let a strange girl into her palace and appointed her an Advisor without asking more than her name. She must have known at least part of what Acrotis really was. If there was no other reason for this to be true, she must have known something was amiss when after a hundred years Acrotis had not aged a day. But for some reason Cinderella kept her silence, and no one else bothered to question.

"The Golden Age progressed, and ended. All the great queens were dead except Cinderella, and she was getting far too old to rule her kingdom by herself. At least that's what everyone else said. I think she was doing just fine.

"So that brings you almost up to date. But I still haven't answered the one question that you want to know the answer to, have I?

"Why did I take your son?

"I gave you this history lesson for a reason. So that perhaps you could figure it out for yourself. Why have I ever before taken people through mirrors? To help with war. Because they can See.

"There will be a war. And your son can See."