Page 159 of Magical Mission
My reflection blinked out, and in its place, Celeste appeared.
My daughter, in all her beauty and wisdom, was smiling at someone who wasn’t me exactly.
I squinted, trying to make sense of things as her arms were wrapped around anotherversionof me, one with soft laugh lines and flour on her sleeves. They stood in a sunny kitchen I didn’t recognize, a cottage that wasn’t my own. They lookedhappy.
I reached for the glass, but my fingers met cold resistance.
A pang hit low in my stomach.
Before I could pull back, the mirror shifted again.
Skye, cradling a baby. Laughing with someone in a rocking chair beside her. My chair. But I wasn’t there. Just the echo of me, somewhere distant.
The mirrors continued as she called her daughter Maeve.
One showed a younger version of myself, possibly twenty or less, dancing barefoot in a summer storm and spinning with joy as a shadow looks on behind me.
Another showed Keegan, alone, standing at the Butterfly Ward, waiting. Waiting for someone who never came.
I stepped back with a gasp.
And every mirror shimmered again.
Until they were allmine.
Dozens of me.
Hundreds.
Each one living a different life, some thriving, some broken, some content, and some empty.
I couldn’t tell which one wasthisversion of me.
I couldn’t findnow.
I spun away feeling terrified.
The shimmer thickened.
Why are you showing me this?
But there was no voice to answer.
No wisdom to gather other than the ache and the echo.
I staggered forward, deeper into the shimmer, as the sense that I had split into too many pieces like lost pages that couldn’t be sorted.
The path bent and then bent again, and again until it was no longer clear what direction I’d come from…until I couldn’t remember what the first step had felt like.
And that was when the sound came that wasn’t music or wind, but a hum that was soft and low and deep inside of me that pulled right down to my ribs like grief on the verge of love and like magic, remembering where it had first begun.
My knees gave out.
I knelt in the center of the path, surrounded by swirls of nothing and too much.
And for the first time, Iwanted.
But I didn’t know what I wanted.
