Cerberus sat rigid and uncomfortably in the Fae King's study. The fractured mirror glinting "his" reflection back at him. "His" being the Fae King's body he'd been stuck in since he got lost in the mirror. The reflection was eerie 1) because he had never seen the Fae King's actual visage before. While Zion had told him the Fae King cursed him to become a werewolf, he hadn't ever actually consciously recalled the event. His memory before the incident had been fragmented at best. And since being in the mirror he felt uneasy, as if his memories were just as much a facade as the body he was wearing now. 2) the Fae King looked almost identical to his human form, the only real difference being the Fae magick essence that added a faint illuminence and irrodescence to his skin, and his hair which was like strands of opal instead of the ravenesque oil slick of his human form. This made him question Zion's motives, had he held such a coveted place with them because he was Oberon's doppelganger or was something else going on? His mind ran to a thousand different conclusions, but decided to obsess on this one the most. To complicate this barrage of feelings even more there was a faint pang of empathy towards Zion in the same breath. Being in an unfamiliar body (despite how familiar it might look) was a truly horrible experience not just for how disorienting it is, but because regardless of knowing how much your physical form can't truly match your ideal self, the familiarity of your own body is a comfort otherwise taken for granted. Being outside of it feels worse than nomadic, because wherever you roam in the air or on the ground you are still you, but when your soul has no home, when your spirit has no place to rest, it's worse than always being among strangers, because in every moment and every situation you are a stranger to yourself. Nothing really cut deeper. And as suspicious as he was about Zion, he couldn't help but feel a deep and abiding grief having half a taste of what their existence had been for an indeterminate amount of time. Whatever powers over death being a lich gave, the price of that Magick was far more cruel than anything death wrought.
As he contemplated these things in his exhaustion starlight twinkled at him from the mirror and a coyote crawled out through one of the cracks. Though terrifying at first, Cerberus couldn't help but listen to the trickster. "Have you ever considered that your question might be wrong?" Coyote looked at Cerberus calmly.
"What do you mean? How can a question be wrong? This isn't Jeopardy." Cerberus barked back still anxious.
"The purpose of a question is to obtain a specific answer. If you're not finding the answer, then consider that you may be asking the wrong question." Coyote blinked.
"What should I be asking then?" Cerberus thought he'd humor the uninvited guest.
"Up to this point you've been focused on why you got pulled into the mirror because you want to know how to fix your current predicament. That answer, at this point, is inconsequential to your goal. What you should be asking is how did the mirror break?" Coyote responded flatly.
"How did the mirror break?" Cerberus repeated as if he was a recording.
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"Time is no respector of persons, but is still influenced by Luck and governed by Fate. Time is also flighty and won't take kindly to you trying to pin it down or stop it. You can find something though by looking at its most recent footprints enough to figure out where it's taking you. If you look at the tangles in your web you're going to have to consider the last tangle first. Untangling long enough you can learn how to spot Time's tracks and use those markers to reorganize. I can't always help you if you're lost, though, Corvis, sometimes you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and the best thing for you to do is find somewhere better to be. I can promise at least to try to summon you to the right place, but you and I both know that your adherence to my advice is hardly consistent." Coyote said and then dissappeared like he always does. The god of wisdom is always intermittent.
Corvis couldn't be more annoyed with his recurring predicament. Being a being not bound by time it was easy for him to lose his place in it. Knowing the future, or at least having a vague and nagging sense there of, further muddled for him what was the present, what had already passed and what was yet to be determined or played out. Sometimes he couldn't decide if really they weren't just all being played by Fate, though it wasn't truly in his nature to be quite that fatalistic, at the same time he felt like all this jumping through temporal stuff was starting to make him not just lose his place, but lose himself. And that meant only one thing, it was time to take a long, hard look in the mirror...again.
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"There's a strange obsession that possesses those who don't have immortality, but seek it. It's hard to explain to the uninitiated, and completely foreign to the already immortal. Achievement itself is not happiness either, because even if you achieve immortality the suffering that follows is indescribable. As a mortal amongst other mortals there's a frame of time, a space that's finite that seeks to reassure that suffering is temporary even if only relieved by the pain of death. That space is equally traumatic because everything that you love is also just as temporal. As an immortal each loss is marked by a deep and abiding sadness that is never relieved. While as a mortal the understanding is that all things die as will you and all your troubles. With immortality there's an eternity to ponder losing, to mourn, to fixate and fret, to miss everything you've loved, to be reminded. The changeover doesn't come easy and the torture of all other things being temporary becomes isolating. Everything is in motion, while you have stopped. Suddenly you are no longer participating in life, instead you are merely an observer as things live and die a part of a greater cycle and you're left on the outside looking in. I've seen so many just like you, they come thinking they know something, that it'll be different for them. But you're different. You don't have the half crazed look in your eyes or the silent desperation. You're solemn, resigned, as if you've been reluctant, but recently given in like a death rattle rasped through the tight coils of fate." The sage's words were a tired warning. Nobody ever listened to her at this point anyway.
"I'm not interested in immortality because I am afraid of death. I am pursuing immortality because I don't see another option at the present moment and I'm currently running out of time. I know this decision will inevitably torment me, this is how the world was constructed to punish benevolence and reward the selfish. And that's never going to change if I don't do something, but in order to do that I need time." Medora was deep in her conviction. The age of active mirror gates had ended, but some half baked mystical hippie had decided to park at this particular decommissioned one. All she could think was 'move, witch, get out tha way'.
"Immortality is an impressively long permanence to a situation that simply requires buying some time." The sage again tried to warn.
"I should probably clarify then that I don't /just/ need some more time, I need all of the time, because I'm going to have to outsmart Luck." Medora was beyond the point of being anything but blunt.
The sage's expression sunk as all the blood drained out of her face feeling like it had pooled in her feet instead with some abnormal gravity that had accompanied the stopping of her heart. The uneasy feeling only multiplied when a brown leaf blew by and lodged itself in her hair. She gingerly and methodically untangled and extracted it from her wind blown mane and looked up at Medora. "Bad luck will eventually end, this won't. Once you resurrect you'll have to find a vessel and bind yourself to it, the more magick you use, the more quickly it'll degrade. You'll have to keep finding new vessels. Each time you bind you'll take something with and leave something behind. You will sleep but never rest, you won't be dead, but you won't be living either. Whatever Luck doesn't give you, Life without him is so much worse."
"That sounds like Life begging for her drug of choice. But you know and I know that regardless of what you say I was bound to be here. The reasons that made me I don't truly know, but I still have my own in spite of this." Medora fired back.
"What do you possibly hope to accomplish?" The sage tried to suppress the tremor in her hand holding the leaf.
"Eventually? Fairness." Medora breathed a heavy sigh sensing the impending long conversation, but she also knew why she couldn't just get rid of the sage.
"Fairness is unmerciful." The sage threw back.
"That argument might hold some weight if mercy was abundant now and not currently enabling Life's abusive behavior. You know and I know how she can be. Because life happens without purpose and you die when you don't want to. Nothing is chosen. It might be a mercy to die, but that's only because of the inherent cruelty you suffer being subjected to life can finally come to an end; and that's only if you haven't had a good life, if your life is good, death is the cruelty. Where is the mercy in that?" Medora was nearly fuming, but trying her best to contain her fire.
"You think you could honestly make it fair when no one can choose? That's what death does, ensures that everyone suffers or stops suffering." The sage attempted to set the leaf down in her cauldron she'd summoned to the side of the massive mirror gate, but the wind took it and carried it to Medora who snatched it midair and crumpled it in her hand as the sage watched in horror.
"You can't honestly believe that garbage. You can't compare suffering like that nor can you compare the relief of a terrible life finally ending to the grief of a good one finally wrapping up. One of these got to experience boundless joy and excitement while the other experienced more terror, rage, betrayal and a calvalcade of other negative emotions I don't have time to catalog. You can't equate these things. Likewise, there's not the same amount of time to even compare the two. It's neither fair nor merciful and without choice involved it can hardly be just either. What is justice without choice? And you, Cassandra, of all people should know this in the same way you know the fingertips of Fate that handed you that leaf you couldn't even hold on to because it was meant for me. You're so upset at everyone because no one ever listens to you, but you never think to be upset at who handed you your destiny or yourself for constantly trying what you know will fail. It's not empathy anymore that propels you, it's vanity, which is why you never hear the voice of Wisdom." Medora had lost her patience.
"Wisdom which found you by Fate, Wisdom which you were inclined to listen to because of the web she tangled you in. Fate which still propels you now." Cassandra never willingly accepted Fate having ironically a similar grudge against the zealous spider for trapping her.
A swell of empathy washed over Medora. Of all the feelings she had felt in this life, powerlessness was perhaps the most insidious, because it gnawed away at her autonomy and threatened constantly to undermine her every satisfaction. What was anything worth if you could never do anything about it? The truth was, becoming a lich would be in some ways a relief, while she still wouldn't hold absolute power over her circumstances, she would at least have power over death. It felt like the closest thing to a choice she ever had and she was tired of spectating a life she'd never once been allowed to live. "I realize that perhaps you are predestined to resist by the same destiny that propels me. But I implore you, for your own sake Casandra, come out of the mirror."