The Mirror’s Eye

Olin jabbed the fire with an old iron poker.

‘Come on, let’s have a little heat,’ he said. He heard the brittleness beneath his forced cheer and scowled. ‘You’re not fooling anyone, old man, least of all yourself,’ he muttered. ‘Now stop putting it off. This is why you’re here. And for Sigmar’s sake, stop talking to yourself! Mad old fool…’

Olin abandoned the fire, which crackled weakly and without enthusiasm.

The tower had been cold since he arrived, two days before, to begin his preparations. Perhaps it was because its old stones reputedly shared a spiritual connection with Shyish. Or maybe it was just that it was old, and drafty, and located above the windswept shoreline of an ice-haunted sea.

Elthennia was a long-abandoned corner of Azyr, a ghost of a kingdom that had never been much more than a footnote. Too far from anything of value to be worth claiming, too wild to merit defending, it had lain in ruins since before even the Great Retreat. It was said that its failed line of kings and queens had trafficked much with the spirits of the slain, a reputation that had driven away what little life remained in their ailing realm.

That was why, centuries later, Olin had made the long journey here, hiking along the lonely roads with his old yew staff, his instruments wrapped tightly inside his battered knapsack. It was a land of ghosts. It was the ghost of a land. What better place to find a spiritual connection with the hidden places of Shyish, and to scry out that which Nagash had planned?

Olin was no warrior. He couldn’t swing a sword with his old arms. He knew little of strategy, or the crafting of great weapons. But he could see beyond that which others saw, and he hoped that – insignificant and isolated as he was in the schemes of the gods – that talent might allow him to peer past the enemy’s defences while they were otherwise engaged, and in so doing glean some insight that could aid Sigmar in his war.

The paltry fire cracked in the blackened hearth, doing nothing to stop his breath misting the air. The waves murmured on the shore below. A few candles burned against the gloom of twilight, arranged in stone alcoves around the room. Olin’s bedroll and camping stove were pushed against one wall, along with the remains of a breakfast he’d been too anxious to finish. The stone floor was dominated by a triple-circle of Azyrite wards that Olin had scribed with exacting care and charged with his own blood. At the centre of the circle stood Olin’s scrying mirror, a beautiful, gleaming oval of polished snowstone in a sigmarite setting. Next to it stood his horologue, a complex clock whose duardin-made mechanisms were powered by a minute sliver of realmstone.

These were the tools of Olin’s trade. The one let him see, and the other gave him a focus, a point of reference and a lifeline. The ticking of his horologue would always lead Olin back to himself, no matter where his soul wandered. It had never failed him, and he loved it like a favoured pet.

Now, Olin stood before his mirror and gritted his teeth.

‘Sigmar preserve me,’ he prayed, then stepped up to the mirror and touched his fingers gently to the top and bottom of its frame. Muttering incantations, Olin stared deep into the mirror’s surface. He listened to the tick, tick, tick of his horologue and, satisfied that the sound reverberated in the back of his mind, he let himself see.

Sometimes the visions took hours to come. Sometimes they did not come at all. This day was different. Crackling hoarfrost blossomed around the mirror’s edges, creeping down its sigmarite stand and spreading icy fingers across the floor. Olin’s eyelids flickered, and his pupils became opaque, like marble. The mirror shimmered. An image resolved in its surface.

A desert. Vast, sweeping, its dunes rising and falling like majestic waves in a timeless ocean. Amidst them stands a city. Its spires rise high, bursting up from the desert like thrusting arms that reach all the way to the stars above. A silvery sun beats down upon the gleaming glass of the towers and streets, the statues and prisms that make up this teeming metropolis. Power sings through the streets. The skies wheel overhead, from day to night to day again. He knows he sees Shyish, as surely as he hears the tick, tick, tick of his clock. Power. Portents. Surely this is what he seeks.

Olin drew back as he felt the stirring of something terrible. A darkness passed over the window, occluding the skies and dimming his candles. The fire had gone out in the grate, he saw, and the shadows in the chamber had grown thick and dense. He felt something, watchful and malevolent. His eyes darted around the chamber.

There was nothing, but the feeling remained.

‘Alright,’ breathed Olin. ‘Now don’t you mind me, whatever you are. I’m just looking, and I’m no harm to no one, so you just leave me be, hmm?’

He considered abandoning his ritual, but what had he really learned? His journey would be wasted, and his efforts to aid the war would come to naught. No, thought Olin, he had wards. He was safe. He must press on.

The city draws closer. Its streets bustle with a tide of humanity. Robed scholars and cunning artisans rub shoulders with affluent traders and magnificent soldiers. Yet something is wrong. Everywhere he sees mirrors, not unlike his own, and the people speak to them as though they are friends or lovers. Ghosts move within the reflections. Figures swim there in the beyond, more and more until they all but outnumber the living. The sun dims, and a rumble fills the air. The ground shakes and the city shudders, cracks running like spider-webs through its myriad mirrors. A storm of black sand whirls through the streets, and where it lashes and screams it strips flesh from bone. Darkness rises, and the people of the damned city wail in despair. The reflections of the endless mirrors spread and ripple and burst through one another in a horrifying kaleidoscope until at last all sense and sanity is gone.

Olin felt panic. This was not what he sought. He listened for the ticking of his horologue. He strained to hear it, fear rising within him. It had never stopped, never failed him. He had never lost its sound.

He heard nothing at all.

Terror pinned Olin in place. He felt the gaze of something dreadful settle upon him, cleaving his tongue to the roof of his mouth and his fingers to the surface of his mirror. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move or speak. The fear consumed him. The candles had died. The waves were silenced. There was only his mirror, and the endless, maddening reflections that marched away within it.

Then he saw it. Something moving, crawling closer, passing through one mirror image into the next, and then the next. Closer, it crawled, closer, long limbs clad in grey rags that squirmed like snakes, pale face lost in a veil of shadows that revealed only staring eyes to transfix his own.

‘Please…’ Olin croaked. ‘Please…’

For an instant it paused, close beneath his mirror’s surface, head tilted like a cat watching fish in a pool. Its limbs multiplied in the reflections around it. Its face became several, screaming mouths and staring eyes multiplying and refracting.

It lunged.

Olin’s mirror cracked as though something had struck it a fearsome blow. Shadowy strands that might have been arms shot up from its surface and snatched him by the throat. His eyes bulged as he was dragged forward, into the broken surface and through, down, down into the ever-shattered depths of the city of mirrors. Down into damnation.

In the empty chamber, the fire flickered slowly back to life. The candle flames danced in a faint night breeze, and the waves sighed up and down the sands. Only the clock did not restart. Its hands lay still, its face shattered in the same instant as Olin’s mirror.

It would never tick again.

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

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