Chapter 15 — Hymn Of The Broken Mirror

It was the sound of raindrops that filled the silence in front of The Author, the patter of water against glass. It was the sound of a symphony, an orchestra of a thousand notes, playing a song that had been written in the stars themselves, in a language that was as old as the universe.

"So, you chose not to play my ending. Again." The Author spoke, breaking the stillness of the room with his words. "And instead, you gambled on the future of a few broken mortals."

He could not help but admire her, even now. There was something beautiful about her refusal to accept defeat, to keep fighting against the inevitable. It was a trait that he found strangely endearing—almost as if she had a little of him in her.

"Tell me, was it worth the price?" He asked. His voice was soft and distant, almost as if he was talking to himself. Which, in a way, he did.. After all, it had been eons since anyone had truly tried to defy him, and even longer since they'd done so with such audacity.

He could feel his mind reaching into the past, searching for a memory that had long been buried under the weight of his own power, of his own loneliness.

She had not begged.

She had not cursed.

She had not tried to win.

She had… loved.

And that was the one thing he had never put in her script.

"I didn't write that." The author sighed. "But it's a nice twist."

The thought repeated.

Not in surprise. Not in fury. But like a question he didn’t know how to answer.

"I didn’t write that."

"I didn’t write—"

He turned to the void where the card had flipped, and stared at the empty canvas.

And that, he realized, was the beauty of the game.

The endless possibilities of a new chapter that has not been written, of a story that is still in the making, of a life that has not yet been lived.

He walked towards the canvas, and his footsteps echoed through the empty room. With each step, he could feel his own mortality, the vulnerability of his body, the weight of his bones and muscles. He was no longer a god, no longer the puppet master pulling the strings.

The Queen of Broken Mirrors had won. Not in the sense that she had defeated him, but in the sense that she had managed to make him doubt, to make him question, to make him feel.

A pen materialized in Fear's hand, he tried to narrate, to overwrite...But the pen in his hand had gone dry. It wasn't broken. It had simply...stopped. The ink refused him. The page rejected him.

His writing had stopped.

"Is this grief?"

The sound of raindrops filled the air again, and for the first time, the author listened. Really, truly, listened to the song that was being played.

And as he did, he remembered the smell of rain on earth, the feeling of the wind in his hair, the taste of the food in his mouth, and the warmth of a smile on his lips.

"I didn’t write that."

He whispered, not to the void, not to the empty canvas, not even to himself. But to the Queen, to the boy, to the readers, to the writers, and to the world.

"I didn't write that."

Grief.

It's such a powerful emotion, that can turn the most hardened heart to mush, and make the bravest warrior tremble. Grief, the word that means to suffer a deep loss, to feel the absence of someone or something so deeply, that you can barely breathe.

The thought was offensive.

A writer does not grieve his characters. He erases them. "Isn’t it, right, Fear?"

There was silence.

Then: "It was."

A pause.

"But perhaps… not anymore." He sighed.

The Author was no different. He lifted his pen...to erase those lines he didn't write but...for some reasons, he set it down.

These lines aren't his. They weren't meant to exist. Yet, somehow, they do. And there is a strange comfort in that, a reassurance that the story goes on, that the words will flow, even without the hand that writes them.

Because, in the end, we are all stories.

Stories that are woven together to form the fabric of reality. Stories that give shape to the universe and make sense of the chaos. Stories that connect us, that make us who we are, and that will live on long after our own endings have come to pass.

All of us are the main characters of a story that has no ending.

And perhaps, that's the true meaning of life.

The act of writing, not because we have to, not because we want to, but because we can. Because the world needs our voice, our perspective, our words.

But, we're also minor characters in the grand narrative, the sidekick, the love interest, the villain, the comic relief, the mentor. We are the people whose actions, whose words, whose very existence can change the course of the story.

But she was not just a character.

She had been the first lie.

His most beautiful deception.

She was the agony he built his temple on. The centerpiece of his suffering symphony.

"I still remember the first time I made her cry." The Author said, his hands trembled, not in anger or in sadness, but in something he could not quite name.

Fear had no response to that.

A whisper passed through the blank space:

——"You should find something to love."

The Author looked up, and saw the Queen in his mind. But this was not the woman he knew, the woman he had made. This was a version of her that he had not yet created, a Queen who had never been a prisoner of his stories.

And he had seen her die countless times. In his mind. In his nightmares. In his waking moments.

In his fiction, the Queen of Broken Mirrors was the perfect tragic character, a broken mirror that could never reflect the light of hope, no matter how bright it was.

"So, what are those lines? I didn't write them." The Author's voice was quiet, barely more than a murmur, but it carried a weight that shook the foundations of the very world around him.

"Are they my words? Mine?"

He looked at the canvas once again, and the emptiness seemed to stare back at him, mocking his attempt to create, to control, to shape.

And for the first time in a long, long while, The Author sat below another throne. One he had not created. And in the silence that followed, in the absence of the words that were meant to be, the author realized that he had lost.

He had lost the game that he himself had started, the battle that he had orchestrated, the war that he had waged.

But it wasn't a bitter loss, it was not a defeat that left him broken, or a surrender that left him humiliated.

Instead, the loss felt like a victory, a moment of realization, a revelation that had been waiting for him all along. He had been looking at the game from the wrong angle, the wrong perspective, the wrong point of view. He had been so caught up in his own brilliance, in his own genius, that he had missed the simplest truth of all: sometimes, the greatest stories were the ones that were not told, the ones that remained unwritten, the ones that lived on in the hearts and minds of those who read them.

The Author had not been writing a story. He had been writing a lie.

A beautiful, terrible, heartbreaking, breathtaking lie. But a lie nonetheless. A lie that was meant to be believed, a lie that was meant to be loved, a lie that was meant to be shared. But, like all lies, it had to be destroyed.

And as he stared at the empty canvas in front of him, he realized that he no longer needed to write. He no longer needed to create. He no longer needed to pretend. He no longer needed to fear.

For, in the absence of words, there was only silence, only peace, only acceptance.

"I am the one to whom others tell their tales." He murmured.

He had not written this ending.

But, perhaps, it was not his ending to begin with.

He closed his eyes, and the darkness that surrounded him was not the void that had consumed his thoughts, but X I I I.

The sound of heels against the pavement, of raindrops falling from the sky.

"Is that…"

Colette Horloge smiled at him from under an umbrella, and he couldn't help but return her gaze, her blue eyes shining with an intensity that he could not ignore, could not deny, could not resist.

Instead of her old aged body... In fact, she's quite the opposite, and that's putting it lightly. From the old crone, a young maiden with silver hair, pale blue eyes, and a gentle face stood before him. She is a vision of beauty and grace, dressed in a white blouse, a black skirt, and heels. Though her stitches remain, the threads that kept the old witch whole now seem like tattoos. A beautiful addition to an already perfect work of art, if you will.

Her fingers glide, gently, across the pages of her book, turning them over with an ease and familiarity that speaks of a lifetime of study, of devotion, of love.

"How long has it been, Fear?" She asked, her voice barely more than a whisper, and yet carrying a depth of emotion that he had never heard from her before.

"A long time, not long enough." He replied, his voice hoarse, his words thick with emotion.

She who existed everywhere and nowhere through her mansion or store that connected all realms to itself, was the first being to see The Author in the way she had remembered, in the way he had forgotten. She had been the one who had brought him into the light, the one who had given him a glimpse of a world beyond his own.

Not only The Author's. If The Queen was the First Human in The Author's narrative...Colette was outside of it. Or rather, the one who saw them from afar. Like an old woman knitting on the porch of a small cottage, on the side of the road that stretched into infinity.

XIII. He remembered now. The door she’d shown to the boys. He had laughed at it then. Now, he thought he could almost understand.

XIII—Death. Change.

"It has always been a pleasure doing business with you, Monsieur." She bowed, her movements fluid, her posture impeccable. Her fingers continued to caress the pages, as if she were touching something precious, something delicate, something that could break at any moment.

The book in her hands was not just a collection of stories, not just a chronicle of a fictional life. It was Fear's autobiography. It was the concept of his existence.

She had read it a thousand times, and she would read it a thousand times more. She knew every line, every page, every chapter by heart.

The last chapter, though, remained unwritten. The final act, the ultimate conclusion, the grand finale... It had always been blank, an unfinished symphony, an incomplete masterpiece, a half-told tale. Colette Horloge had known The Author since the beginning of his existence.

"I wonder." Fear's words were little more than a murmur. "I wonder if that is a happy ending, or not."

"Is this a confession, monsieur?"

"No." He shook his head. "It's a question."

"How does it feel? To become the reader of your own story?" She smiled. "To let someone else tell it, to trust them to take you places you've never been, to make you see things you've never seen?"

"To be written by another… perhaps that, too, is love." Fear answered. "I think, for a writer, that is the purest kind of love that can exist. The kind that comes from giving up control, from trusting, from letting go. The kind of love that allows others to shape and define your world."

Colette's lips curled upwards. "And yet, you're afraid. You're terrified. You don't want to lose control, you don't want to let go, you don't want to be written by someone else. But, The Queen of Broken Mirrors, the one you've made, is no longer the character you wrote her to be. She broke free of the script. And so will he." The corner of her mouth lifted in a small, knowing smirk. "Fear of the Unknown."

He laughed, softly, his voice trembling ever so slightly. "I'm not afraid." He said, quietly. "You believe in that boy as well? Do you?"

"You should find something to love," the book in Colette's hands echoed. The sound was soft, barely audible. A whisper in the darkness.

Colette approached the card and touched its surface, tracing the emptiness with her fingertips. "I believe in him, Fear." She replied. "He is Her and She is Him. The Queen and the Pretender. There has never been a single moment where I didn't believe in Her." She turned away from the card, and faced Fear. "Do I love her? That's not for me to say."

"But it is for me to say." He nodded. "And I do."

The Queen of Broken Mirrors was not his daughter. Nor was she his sister. She was not even his mother or his lover. The Queen of Broken Mirrors was his story. The one that had defined him, the one that had given him meaning, the one that had shaped him. The one that had saved him, the one that had destroyed him.

In the beginning, she had been a perfection—a fantasy, not a person. The first lie. Too flawless to bleed, too symmetrical to break. But lies do not survive the truth of living. And slowly, she cracked. She fractured. She reflected. And in those broken mirrors, he saw something terrifying:

She was real.

Gradually, she gained flaws and a certain realism.

The more realistic her imperfections, the closer the lie got to the truth.

As she became less perfect, her beauty blossomed in its place.

"You've created something that surpassed its own creator, Author." She smiled at him, and there was a warmth in her voice that he had never heard before, a gentleness that was at odds with who she had once been. "Congratulations." Then, she left. Walking on the path of her own design. No destination. No map. Only the unknown. Only the possibilities. Only the future.

"He'll write the death of an Ancient One—yours." Colette whispered, her voice carrying an edge that was both comforting and chilling at the same time. "There's a special kind of fear, the kind that doesn't paralyze you, but drives you forward. The fear of losing what matters most." She paused, looking back over her shoulder. "You're a writer. And a good one, too." She added. "But even the best writers can miss the most obvious details." She smiled. "Like how the hero is not always the protagonist."

"He never was the protagonist, that much is true. I was." The author shrugged. "I'm not sure if I should feel sorry or happy about that."

The sound of heels against the pavement, of raindrops falling from the sky.

"Perhaps." The woman's words were lost in the rain, swallowed by the darkness. "It would be better for us all if this was the end."

Perhaps it wasn't the sound of raindrops—or even a sound at all. Maybe, it was just the sound of a heartbeat.

"All this because of a cat?" The man asked. His tone was flat and emotionless. The kind of tone that a doctor uses when asking a patient how often they vomit or bleed out of their eyeballs. There was no malice in it. Just curiosity. Genuine, child-like, curiosity. "This Last Iteration of Her…" The words trailed off, and he closed the eyes he didn't possess for a moment, lost in thought..."How did she manage to accomplish that, exactly? What did she do?"

Colette looked at the book in her hands, at the pages that had not yet been filled.

"She did nothing, and that's what's truly interesting. It's what she didn't do." Her smile faded slightly. "What's the most terrifying monster, Fear?"

"I don't know," he said after a pause. He was not used to being afraid anymore. But still, the woman's question disturbed him in ways he could not describe or even name. As if she was asking a different question altogether. Something hidden beneath the words, something unspeakable. A riddle, a mystery.

And a monster was the answer to that question. But which monster? And why? What was the purpose behind such a creature?

He could have asked her to clarify. She might have told him. Instead, he waited for her to speak again.

"The scariest monster is the one that never needed chains—because you never knew it was there until the silence broke." She paused, letting the weight of her words settle between them. Then, she continued: "Think about that, Fear."

And he understood: it wasn’t rain, nor heartbeat, nor monster.

It was the turn of a page.

The darkness waited, parchment-blank.

Somewhere beyond this place, the Nameless One opened his eyes.

"Five  chapters left until the end of this prologue, huh? I wonder, will he survive until the final chapter?" Fear said.

"Relinquishing control of your work is hard for every artist," Colette answered, "especially for the ones that have grown to hate their characters."

"And I have, haven't I? Hated him. Very well, he shall regain his point of view, however..."

"You're going to make it hard for him." She interrupted. "After all, that's what a writer does, right?"

Fear nodded.