Remember how I said there'd be three parts of this?  Remember how
I insisted on it?

I was wrong.  -.-

You weren't wrong, you were merely mistaken.  An error that results
in more of this is hardly a sin, after all.

Four parts.  I swear.  

"Four!  Four!  Do I hear FIVE!"  :)

And any commentary would be welcome.

You asked for it, you got it... still from my omphalos, of course.  :)

Three - Speculum

     Silverhold, the castle of the Mirror-Lord, stands on a
lunar hill and looks down upon the shattered temples of the city
of the dead gods like a king looks down upon his vassals.  It is

{suggest} as a king

     The walls of Silverhold are mirrors, all of them perfectly
flat.  In them lie an endless sea of reflected images; stars and 

{suggest} images:

space, the surface of the moon, the ziggurats and minarets of the
city of the dead gods.  The joins of the walls, perfect angles of
ninety degrees or forty-five that they are, are nevertheless hard
to see.  One reflection seems to flow into each other, and as the

{suggest} into another,  {or}  into the next,

     From the outskirts of the city of the dead gods, Ranma
Saotome comes walking.  He passes by a squat temple from whose
dark archway the laughter of children can faintly be heard, and
by the dusty courtyard of small shrine filled with the skeletal

of a small  {?}

remains of long-dead plants.  As he walks by the last temple, a
woman fair as twilight beckons from the shadows of a Doric
column; her lips are red as roses.  Ranma ignores her, and 
departs the city of the dead gods at last; the phantoms of that
place have no power except within their sanctums, and they must
tempt rather than compel men to come within to their alien
mercies.

{Oh, my.  I read that three times, once aloud, just because.}
 

walked.  Distorted images of himself paced alongside him through 
the mirrors, shifted and changed their form as they passed from 

{Ordinarily I'd suggest "shifting and changing their form", but for
some reason I like "shifted and changed" better.  It's... um... wrong
in the right way?  Gaah.  Something like that.}

one silvered glass to another.

     He ran down the list mentally in his head.  Find the glass
that held the goddess's soul.  Break it.  Go home.  Get back at 
Cologne for doing this to him.  

{heh.  Silly Ranma.  He asked her for this, and she warned him as best
she was able.  I suppose the day Ranma stops blaming other people for
his misfortunes will be the day he grows up...}

knobs.  Why would you build doors without knobs?  Doors without 
knobs kept things in, but he had come here from the outside, they 

{suggest} outside; they

couldn't keep him in.

     It began as the tiniest itch between his shoulder blades, a
feeling like a spider creeping along his flesh, or the sensation
of being stared at by a distant watcher.  Even as he turned, he
knew what he would see, and a low sound of fear escaped his 
throat.  Back behind him, a red-carpeted hallway hung with
mirrors extended endlessly, walls slowly collapsing inwards with 
the perspective of his vision until the vanishing point, miles

{suggest} vision unto the

distant.  The chandeliers swung slowly.  Shadows danced in the
mirrors, light glittered off the gilded frames.  

     "Ah, damn it!" Ranma swore, kicking at the floor of the
vestibule.  Black and white octagonal tiles had been laid down on
the floor here, endlessly interlocking up to the edges of the
doorways.  "I'm never gonna find that stupid goddess's stupid
soul."

     With a slow rasp, a door on the other side of the room began
to swing closed.  The others stood open still, silent dark maws
open in silent dark laughter.  On impulse (which had caused him 
so much trouble so many times before), Ranma sped across the 
room and leapt through just as it slammed completely shut, nearly 
losing the end of his pigtail as he did.

{heh.  He takes a hint, at least.  :) }

surface of glass.  At that, as if it were a trigger, the light
came back in a gradual process of fading dark.  At first there

{"Fading dark."  I like that.}

was the dimness of twilight or sunrise, and then a full if
artificial daylight.  It was hard to say, however, exactly where

full, if artificial, daylight.

the light was coming from.  Perhaps from the mirrored walls, or
from the mirror-coloured liquid she was standing in, which she 
saw now was not water at all - though it certainly felt like it.  
Where it had soaked her pants or splashed onto her shirt, she had
been coated in silver so that she reflected as a mirror.  The 
room itself appeared to be a maze, constructed entirely of 
mirrored walls that curved and stretched all around him.  Now 

her.

     When she could see by the mirror of the ceiling that the
shape was almost upon her, she readied herself for combat.  The
water - if it was water, it had to be water, it had made her

if it was water;  {?}

     It was Tatewaki Kuno.  She nearly laughed out loud with
relief, before she realized that there was no way he could be
gotten here, and then she saw that he walked atop the silver

could be here  {or}  could have gotten here

     They were coming down either end of the corridor, and Ranma
had never been more afraid in all his life.  Something was

{heh.  Good timing for the pronoun change.  I was aware that something
was wrong... well, more wrong... before I knew what it was.}

terribly, terribly wrong.  His eye caught his reflection in the
mirrors, and the stunning horror of the realization that caused
dried all the saliva in his throat in an instant.  He was neither 
male nor female; the full, rounded breasts that strained beneath
his shirt were contrasted by the sudden existence between his 
legs of something that most certainly affirmed his masculinity.

{Eeek.  Yeah, that'd get to Ranma, all right.}

     "My--"
     
     "--love"
     
     Tatewaki and Kodachi were nearly upon him now, eyes filled
with lust.  But it wasn't Tatewaki and Kodachi; it was something
else, he realized, something that had reached down into his mind
and pulled out their images and thrown them on like masquers at a
ball throw on their costumes.  Terrified as he was, he realized
that whatever lay beneath would be infinitely worse.  If they
touched him it was over, it was the end of everything, it was the

{Is the menace singular or plural? It or they?  Both?  Neither?  :)
This sort of writing is bloody difficult to "correct", because I
never know whether an "error" is intentional or not... up to you.}

     Consider a mirror.  The purpose of it is the deception of
the eye, the creation of entire worlds in flat silvered glass.     
But even the most perfect mirror does not reflect true; left is
right, right is left.

{You know the solution of this conundrum, yes?}

A convex mirror broadens the perspective
of the world, a concave one narrows it.  Stand between two 
mirrors, and you stand between the illusion of infinity.  Some 

{suggest} stand within the

have believed that a mirror can steal the soul.  Whether they can 
or not, there is a power in reflected images that we cannot deny.  
Narcissus saw his face in the mirror of the waters and was 
captured by it; Amaterasu was drawn out of the safety of her cave 
by her own reflection.  Even the gods are not immune to the power 
of vanity.  Imagine then that there may be mirrors more complex, 
more distorting, than any that men have yet discovered.  Most
terrifying of all might be the thought that we ourselves might be
mirrors; that all actions that we think are the functioning of 
our own free will are merely reflections of the movements of
forces we can never hope to glimpse.

{I like this digression that is not a digression.}
 

     There are a lot of worse ways to wake up then in bed next to

than

a beautiful woman.  This was one of them.

{Heh!  I like echoes... or, perhaps, reflections.  :) }

     Yeah, he was definitely gonna get Cologne for this.  This
place was colder than Hokkaido, and he'd had clothes then.  The
only advantage of his relocation was that he appeared to be very
far away from the malformed monstrosity, that impossible 
challenge to sanity that had pursued him through the maze of
mirrors.  He found it hard to recapture the image of it in his
mind, or even to remember much of his terrified flight from it.
That was fine; he didn't want to remember it if he didn't have
to.

{Good example of Ranma's mental fitness to explore the Dreamlands.}

     There was another splash.  This time, he turned, to see a
silver figure rising from the mirror-sea.  It looked like a
beautiful, androgynous child; where the identifying genitalia 
should have been, there was a blank expanse of flesh.  The skin 

{Suggest omitting "of flesh"; it mars the image for me.  BTW, what
happened to the "small child"?  (Actually the Mirrorlord?)  Dropped
off the floe into the water?  Just poofed out while Ranma wasn't
looking?  Decline to state?  :) }

was blindingly bright, so bright it was not possible to look 
directly at it.  The figure rose entirely from the water,
appeared for a moment to stand upon their shining surface, and 

upon its shining {? Water/waters?}

then emerged fully to hover several feet above the waters.

     "Lemme guess," Ranma said through chattering teeth, trying
not to think of the bodies in the ice.  "You're the Mirror-Lord."

     It didn't answer.  Even the eyes were silver; it looked like 
a Grecian statue, perfectly proportioned, but blank of all 
pigmentation.

{heh.  The funny thing is, evidence is mounting that our concept
of Grecian statues is different from theirs; many of them appear to
have been pigmented.  Irrelevant side note...}

     He had never seen anything look quite so bored as the
Mirror-Lord did in that moment.  

{hee hee!}
 

     Slowly, like the ripple of wind across water, a flicker of a
smile appeared on the flawless silver face.  

{Uh oh.}

     The Mirror-Lord said, "Look."
     
     Ranma looked, and saw, and then he began to scream.

FIN THREE

Gaah.  You could have made Chapter 3 longer, and kept to your
initial word, but no, you just HAD to have another cliffhanger,
didn'tcha?

I have every expectation that this will be worth it.  :)

Thanks for writing and sharing!


Vince Seifert    Network Analyst     seifertv@csus.edu
Techie: http://webpages.csus.edu/~seifertv/
Fanfic: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/seifertv/toth/
CSUS hired me to build their LANs, not to give away the homeworld.