IX
The lamplight above her flickered once, twice… then steadied, as if gathering its courage. Somehow the gate in front of her had saved her. It had stood sentinel between her and the dancing man. This place was dangerous, truly dangerous. It was also mysterious. Why didn't he just open the gate and have the hounds attack. He had waited until the old man had closed the gate behind him to corner the old man. She sighed. She was so lost. She lifted her gaze, expecting a familiar sky full of stars but the sky above this place wasn't a sky at all. It was shattered.
Weak shafts of light twinkled overhead, but they weren't constellations. They were the wrong shape, the wrong color, the wrong everything. Each point of light was sharp, angular, glinting like a shard of broken glass suspended in the heavens. Hundreds of them, thousands of oddly shaped glittering lights. She realized then what they were. Mirrors shone above her, floating, drifting, turning slowly like fragments of a colossal, shattered dome. Their surfaces caught and bent the faintest sliver of illumination, reflecting moonlight from somewhere else. Not this world. Not this graveyard. A moon from another reality, bleeding its glow through the cracks. The light that reached her was thin, cold, and fractured. It had traveled too far, through too many worlds, losing warmth with every reflection.
The fog around her thinned under that strange glow, revealing more of the crooked headstones, the leaning angels, the wax candles trembling on their graves. The gas lamps flickered in sympathy, their flames bending toward the sky as if drawn to those impossible shards. She realized then that this world wasn't lit by its own moon. It was lit by the mirrors, by the portals hanging above. They were the remnants of all the places the aliens had torn open. Each glowing shard was a window, a wound between worlds, somehow torn open in a reflective surface. Through those wounds, the faintest scraps of other worlds leaked in. Worlds where the moon still shone. Worlds where life still breathed. Worlds where souls weren't hunted, harvested, or broken.
She stood beneath that fractured sky, feeling impossibly small, impossibly alone, impossibly alive in a place where life was a liability. Somehow, she would find her mirror, her world's mirror and pass back through to her own body. It was possible. If the aliens could pull her through, there must be away to get herself back before her body died and she was left as a fragment of soul in this dark universe. The cane‑man's whistle had faded. The hounds were gone. The fog was thinning.
And above her, the mirrors watched ,silent, cold, and waiting.