J. King: The Diamond

"You fall first," he snarled in sudden rage, and clung to what he was, naming himself aloud as he swung shattering steel. Shards boiled away before him like smoke, and suddenly that unreal and trivial world where his body lay dead swam back, overwhelming all else. Snarling silently to muster his will, he returned, seeking the cry of Heart.

Paladin strode deeper into the diamond. The next mirror held a reflection that moved like him, but had cruel eyes and olive skin-and a sword arm whose flesh gave way to bare bone. Paladin remembered this man from the world he'd left but could give him no name.

He lifted his arm. Bare bones moved in unison. "I'm no assassin," Paladin said fiercely, and heard the eerie reflection make the same resolve, the silver-slim words mocking.

"I fight for what is right. I slay for freedom." Paladin and Assassin spoke those words together. Lie and truth lay together, indistinguishable from one another. The diamond's power was deepening with each new chamber. It pressed viciously on head and heart.

Heart. Paladin's lips set in a thin line, and his blade flashed out. Assassin cracked. He stared for a moment in surprise, bony sword arm uplifted, before the cloven mirror gave way and slid tinkling to the floor.

Deeper. Up and in. Heart drew him on.

A young man's face confronted him next, full of hope, honest and determined and inexcusably innocent. Paladin swung his blade without hesitation.

It met not chill glass and uncaring silver but soft flesh. The man sobbed, staggered, and fell forward.

A real man? Another warrior seeking Heart? A comrade!

Heart's own sorrow bled into the moan that came from Paladin. He set a hand to the young man's bleeding side.

This one, too, had a name, lost in the wash of truth and illusion. He was in Paladin's mind nothing more or less than Hero. Paladin's touch closed the weeping wound. Hero rose. No apology or explanation needed to be spoken; Hero understood. Paladin drew and offered his dagger. It was accepted with the ghost of a smile. Side by side, they went on through the silvered maze.

Another young warrior appeared in a mirror, the youthful semblance of Paladin himself.

"I am Jacob. I will battle beside you."

The words bore such earnest weight that Hero motioned Jacob to step from the glass and walk shoulder to shoulder with them.

The fighter emerged. Reflected flesh became momentarily scaly, tentacular, before swimming into solid human flesh! A lie garbed in borrowed shape. Paladin's blade sundered the emerging shapeshifter, dropping him in a thousand shards of ringing glass.

Paladin and Hero nodded warily to each other and pressed on toward the sobbing lady's song. They found themselves in a wide chamber ringed with her-or varying reflections of her. One mirror showed a warrior maiden, clear-eyed and noble. The next held a pirate lass, all black leather and lascivious eyes; a third displayed a meek lady pleading from a tower window; its neighbor showed a medusa with writhing hair. Hundreds of images implored for release from the glass. Hero stood frozen, drawn to each pleading woman.

Paladin shook his head. False images, partial truths. Heart was no idealized image, but a true creature. Paladin would not be seduced by lies told about women. He would be inspired by truths told by them.

Hero nodded, understanding. Young, open, and so vulnerable, he led with his broad, brave heart.

The song rose, mournful, beyond the chamber. Paladin listened and pointed. A curving way opened, nearly hidden between alike imploring images. The two men ventured on.

Fiends lunged without invitation from the glass, a roaring menagerie of rending claws, venom-dripping stingers, scourgelike tails, twisted horns, and smoking spittle. They flooded forth as if the mirrors were portals gaping from the Abyss.

Paladin and Hero stood back to back, blades flashing among tentacles and barbed whiskers. Shrieks arose amid the battle cries. Paladin severed the head of a mantis towering over him, leaping across its carapace to slash the snarling faces of two jackal-men, and shattered the mirror behind them. Cracks segmented shadowy figures who rushed to leap the silver margin, and all collapsed in a rain of shards.

The pommel of Hero's dagger crashed into another mirror, and a dozen fiends tumbled into oblivion. He swung for the next, but flesh interposed itselfscabrous and oozing, cracked and sword-worn. Living meat barred the way to other mirrors, lifting claws and grinning with yellowed teeth.

Crying out the names of their mothers and their gods-names not so dissimilar-Paladin and Hero hacked at fiend flesh, winning through to panel after panel. Dead fiends lay heaped across the silvered floor, strange blood darkening the glass, as gate after gate fell.

Ten living fiends stood atop a hundred dead to guard the last looking glass, aflicker with emerging horrors. Hero and Paladin carved a grim path through them.

The last fiend fell, its left head laid open by Paladin's sword and its right skewered through the eye by Hero's dagger. Black blood steamed, and silence fell.

Standing exhausted, Paladin and Hero looked into the last mirror and saw themselves: two blood-soaked warriors burned by gouting acids, stabbed, slashed and bone-broken. Paladin's sword arm changed direction in two places. A severed beast claw jutted from his temple. Hero's ribs showed through a row of gaping wounds, wherein his organs pulsed through a rain of blood. The comrades were walking dead men, too busy slaying to notice that they should die. Now they had time to look.

Hero wheeled and collapsed, lifeless.

Paladin staggered. His world went black. Falling, he smashed his sword against the glass.

The riven mirror collapsed, and the false wounds it had projected onto Hero and Paladin fell away with it.

At last Paladin understood this house of mirrors. He'd thought it a mind of madness, filled with images twisted to obscure the truth, or a sorcerous cage constructed to hold Heart ever captive behind falsities. But it was neither.

The diamond was a mind but was not mad. It was the mind of a world; in any one facet of the diamond, truth was only partially reflected. Truth dwelt not in one angled view of something too large and complex to be fully seen in a thousand images. Truth dwelt beyond and beneath. It could be apprehended not by staring into one reflection but by staring into them all. Paladin would find Heart not by smashing and slaying but only by combining all reflections into the one true creature they mirrored.

He sheathed his sword, helped Hero rise, and stepped into the space beyond the last mirror they'd shattered: a mirrored passage that snaked away through deceptive turns. Its silvered panes held faces: a moon-faced sharper, a much-scarred old pirate, a pale man-giant, a black-bearded mage, a bronze-skinned man in robes of state, a pair of idiot brothers, a crooked lumber merchant…

Paladin ignored these images, grasping the corners of mirrors and pivoting them slowly, one after another. He was opening up the passage, creating a large, circular space. Hero did likewise, pushing back the mirrors on the opposite side of the passage into an inward-curving silver wall.

They worked speedily, repositioning and checking over their shoulders to match alignments. When they completed the first circle, the diffuse starlight that shone through the interior of the diamond intensified. They made a second circle beneath the first, pushing back the mirrors of the floor. When it was done, the room sparkled in warm brilliance.

When they formed the third, the light grew so intense it pushed at the silver and glass it struck, realigning the other facets of the great diamond. Not merely hundreds but thousands of mirrors were brought into focus, blazing like festival sconces, each witness to all that had happened since Heart's disappearance.