Having failed so completely that they weren't looking at her anymore, she wondered if she had ever existed, or if she was only the notion strung out by the wizard who forged her, then breathed the idea that would become her into the mirror. If audacious in its daring and execution, his was an idea common to heroes, conquerors, and dictators: change the world. Not only save what was good and repair what was broken, but instill hope for a better future. Inspire the masses not to think of their own skins, but of healing the corrupted skin of the world, to purge wickedness and pollution from the pure land.
While she embodied his vision to weld together the disunity of Alsantia, he was innocent of what a vast profunditude that would entail, for if Alsantia was to be ordered, then so must her many parallel worlds, even if they only cast a shadow of and on her eventual perfection. In the end, his dream was ruined when the wizard's dream became an unknowing agent of Suvani's discord, seeding disunity in the lives of these innocents, who were sown in a shadow world and blossomed in a battlefield.
Either her reflections were only a flickering vanity that showed her subjects at their best only to tip them into despair and destruction, or it was a meaningless mist, a kiss breathed by chaos, fogging her surface.
She only knew the children continued to converge upon her glass as in the real world from the whispers passing through Isola's backpack, still synced to the voiceless mouthings that flickered on her image.
In a way, she was the image. She had always been the image, finding herself not only in the intelligence of a situation, but in the satisfaction of its solution. The grasping, griping, opining people,
whether humans or animals, were no different. It was all about having a a point of view. She was only more purely that point of view, being a mirror. While her face only showed the portion relevant to her ongoing narrative, she grasped the entirety of Alsantian reality, and sometimes even the telltale shadows and backmasked echoes of neighboring parallels. The more she looked away, the more she couldn't help noticing these dark flickers, and as she habitually merged random happenings with the plot of her story, she soon had pastiched the ugly intentions brewing in the shadow worlds.
The more they thought of the sphere she protected, the louder the thoughts, and she soon came to resent eavesdropping on Max Milano and Ivanu, for the more trouble they breathed, the more powerless she felt, until she shivered in sympathy to the death-shudder of another world. While not her world, it was, in many ways, the undercurrent of her totality, and she keenly felt its subtraction from infinity.
(SOME BATTLE DETAILS)
Although the clashing, shrieking, and bleeding crossed the glass silently, without a scratch, she felt the chaos like a giant scab, waiting to disgorge its gory mass of blood and pus, not the future the wizard had long worked through her. While she had watched his death many times, his will did not feel posthumous, but active and lively. She missed the wizard's dynamic mind. Merged with a human will, she could do so much more, but this stubborn girl had barely looked at her in days, as if afraid to see what lay ahead. She had so much to show them: not only the wicked beast that was coming, and the monster she rode, but their fallen friend, and the hero that would save them all. The foolish girl not only knew nothing of any of this, she could change the tide of this battle if she would only bring her from the dark backpack into the light.
The Albatron could look backwards better than humans and animals, since its memories still looked as clear as what was happening. Unburdened by sentimentality, The Albatron rarely indulged this faculty, but as she watched her plans unravel, she cast back now, scanning the wizard's notes, skimming his lectures, and even rewinding his drunken binges, in the hope of finding some advice for this very situation. While he had been wise enough to make her,he had displayed no foresight where his diet was concerned, and died forty years too soon. This appalling lack of prevision extended to his prize creation. As far as he was concerned, she would run flawlessly until his dream was fulfilled. She would See and nudge, here and there, until she had accomplished peace in Alsantia. Since she was created perfect, why leave her any advice in the scraps of his life?
Then she saw it.
It was at the fringe of his life, when the fat old wizard had shrunk not only as thin as a rail,
but to a few inches in height, his wizened hands as small and wrinkled as a newborn's. Since vitality only came from substance,in using magic to accomodate his atrocious eating habits and prolong his life, he shrank, bit by bit, until he was a gnomish little wizard. Near the end of these spun thin days, he became obsessed with his wizard's glass, a knob of obsidian he had hollowed and polished until mirror bright. Perhaps since she was a looking glass herself, The Albatron dismissed this obsession as irrelevant, for humans were natural voyeurs, more prone to peeping than the rest of their wicked habits.
Now she wished she had heeded her Creator's fascination. For she found them on a distant shadow world, slithering around glossy black rocks like his scrying stone. While dark in the shadow, these glassy puddles gleamed in the light, their black skin so irridescent that they were not only natural mirrors, but living mirrors.
Were they her model? Had he translated one of these living Albatrons to Alsantia? These lazy things seemed driven by nothing but seeing, which they indulged in all its forms, from peeking to peering. The most industrious they got was in searching for something. Although gazing into their flickering skins became dizzyingly paradoxical--for what you laid eyes on seemed to be the actual thing, and not its image--their oozing eye passed through their reality into other worlds. These amoeba-eyes were not only Sight incarnate, but so reflective that every world was in their surfaces.
Although this gnomish wizard was but a shadow of her creator, the Albatron shivered as he scrawled on a pad, for no one's apparent benefit, ONE CAME HERE. Although one day he would have known better, having created her vision to be omnidirectional, he looked over his shoulder with an impish grin, chuckled, and wagged his finger towards the glass.
He knew she was watching. There was no other explanation. By shrinking into a gnomish gargoyle, he had developed the sixth sense you would expect in one. While she pitied the loss of his intelligence, the monstrous cunning that swallowed it had guessed she not only lingered around her creator, but liked to revisit his life.
The Albatron looked into his wizard's glass. Expecting her vision to double, to be magnified by wizardly might, she shuddered as it dwindled, dwindled, as if falling down a hole. Fluttering not only to the shadow world, but through time, the Albatron watched as the shadow thing found the crevice that seeped into Alsantia, then slithered through the winding wormhole, passing countless realities until it oozed into Alsantia.
It arrived in the Sargan Vos of elder days, a beautiful forest filled with the most noble of the ancient Alsantians. As the shadow lurked around these curious nomads, it was distracted by the peep of a chick, and skulked in the trail of its captor, a ginger beast whose shape it swallowed and expressed, then devoured the hatchling.
On seeing the shape it took, recognition dawned. The Albatron had not often seen this one in its animal shape. Not a natural shape at all, she realized.
While she saw past, present, and future with crystal clarity, the present moment could displace any reverie by its unmistakable insistence and urgency. While her charges would never look on her with the attention you give someone who expects eye contact, all of them somehow seemed to find her in moments od desperation, when their eyes widened to a comical degree, as if accomodating her nearly omniscient point of view.
The Queen's steed, a sphinx extorted by its freedom, swept up above the siege, clutching the massive, sparking wreckage of a machine owl, which it hurtled toward the Terianan gatehouse. The spinning, twisting scraps shrieked, whirred, then screeched through the fortification, crumbling stone, hurtling bloody, broken defenders, then crashing down the street, followed by far-flung fragments and a billowing dust cloud.
As her focus contracted to the Architect's omnibus, her chosen ones cringed from the wreckage ball's torpid advance, having spent all of its energy and collected inertia along with the earth it gouged from the thoroughfare. When the badger steered left, and the children veered along in their seats, it seemed they might get snapped in half by their seat belts. When they screamed, their silent agonies looked like drowning.
While The Albatron was not deaf to the world's noise, she was used to tuning it down, so as to focus on the focal point, her ancient objective. She preferred to glean intent from reading lips, facial expressions, and body language, especially the last, a secret language so transparently read that it was like she could read minds. While surface thoughts were not only audible, but visible to her, they were more often than not self-deception, the interior monologues of humans as comfortable lying to themselves as to each other. By reading the surface, she had learned to read deeper, because while their true thoughts were hidden even to themselves, their bodies were always honest.
Isola deceived herself more the rest. While the Albatron pitied her—no matter how deep in the dark Isola buried the horrid execution of her father and brothers, the tragedy was an everpresent fact for the magic mirror, whose omniscience brooked no oblivion—Isola was driven not by the courage to continue, but by an ego-dissolving self-deception that thrust her forward as blind and pointed as a knife.
If Isola saved herself, it would be a side-effect of revenge, or gratifying her insistent, stabbing love for Lucien.
Isola. The Albatron thought as loud as she could. Although never able to make herself heard before, she hoped now, hard and furiously, to make her will known. While clairvoyant, not telepathic,
the Albatron was a dead wizard's hope for the future, and she let that hope roar now.
Fight, you fools. So what if you're children? You're on a battlefield. Even great truths yield to unrelenting practicalities. Children might be a blessing, but only the lucky find mercy on a battlefield.
As if heeding her desperate wish, one of the wriggling mice bit the Queen's hand, which flew from its hold on the sphinx's mane and flung the mouse into the wind.
As if they had planned their moves in tandem, the Architect barked at the badger, who steered the omnibus over gatehouse debris until the mouse clattered on the omnibus roof and scampered helter-skeleter across the windscreen. The raccoon opened and clung to the side door, then kicked, swinging out over space until his paw closed on the mouse. In the door's slamming recoil, they sprawled in the back of the omnibus.
It was in moments like these that the all-seeing Albatron desired true omniscience. While she had complete and total sight of everything in Alsantia, the future and the inner workings of the mind were a mystery. What were they planning? With not only the Queen's monster, but the Queen's army on the other side of the Terianan ramparts?
Just as she sought answers of her own, Isola snatched her out of the backpack. When the girl's anxious breath and the heat inside the omnibus fogged her glass, she wiped it carelessly, and her surface streaked. Sweat beaded her stray hairs.
The Albatron restored the groans and whispers of the world. How did they not lose themselves in the chaos of sound? Only by concentration could the magic mirror keep her thoughts and images from being shredded by the champing of spears and swords on shields, as the Alsantians clashed their weapons at the sight of the omnibus.
Having steered her inward eye to the omnibus exterior, she watched as it careened from the gaping hole in the city wall, lurched down the muddy hill, and stamped full speed ahead down the gap between two battalions. While the arrayed soldiers would likely not break formation until commanded to do, their riotous clangor was unnverving enough, and no doubt responsible for the jerkiness of their ride, having also unsettled their pilot.
"Is she armed?" Jgorga asked.
"The Queen?" laughed The Architect.
"No. Your land-boat."
"She is," sighed The Architect, "but if they fall in, it will make no difference."
"Isola, find us another option."
"Right," said the girl. "I was already looking, but it's like her eye is closed or somewhere else. I can't see anything, not even us."
"Maybe it's used to Suvani. Tell it what you want."
"Show me a way out," ordered Isola. When the Alabtorn's glass swirled, the magic mirror tinted a cold gray from turmoil and anxiety, for not only had she not conjured these whispers, groans, and hellish embers, they were neither from Alsantia, nor happening now. Whatever was coming through rode Havala's death throes, shunted from the day before yesterday to today.
As flames licked through from the shudder of the dying world, paint peeled from the mirror like petals pulled from a rose. In the fire roaring through two realities, Berangere and Loren's faces shone in the warping glass. The scream rang in the omnibus.
As Isola's hand flew to her mouth, the mirror dangled from her other hand, and its handle struck the floor. When she took another step back, the other handle clattered.
Raging fire poured through the Albatron. Her mirror was no longer a placid reflection, but an oozing gyre, and Jezera's eyes glinted in its roiling depths as they gurgled to the surface. As the ogress shouldered through, fire creeped along her arms, singed her hair, and darkened the cuticles of her nails to charcoal grey.
Although not designed as a portal, when the Albatron's penetrating vision buckled under the brute force of the magic, the ogress had scraped inside, and it was only because the monster had started in miniature, like the dwindled images caught in looking glasses, that the magic mirror did not burst asunder, although her tormented metal bent back, and the warped glass turned smoke black.
Isola's squeal was so piercing that The Alabtron felt her peeled paint shudder and flake. But when the ogrish foot stamped, bursting the monster's tattered boot leather, it left a webbed footprint of shattered glass, splintering the long-dead vision of the wizard, and sending The Albatron, for once in the prolonged flicker of her existence, into dreamland.