Wordsworth – Chapter 18

There once was a girl who looked into a mirror.

She had been playing with a kitten, and a flight of fancy took her to peer into the looking glass atop her chimney's mantelpiece, where she wondered about the room on the other side and how much she would like it if the glass turned to silver mist and let her pass, how she'd love to explore and find out what the world upside down would be like.

It would be the second world she would travel to.

There was something that always bothered me about Alice's tale, though. Aside from the nonsensical words that Mom used to tease me with, as she delighted in my frustration at them not being [proper] words ('There's no such thing as a proper word, Taylor; they all need time to grow up—just like you,'), aside from the twisted logic, ('That's the point, Taylor; it's another world, with its own rules,'), aside from all that…

Where was the other Alice, the one living in the mirror, the one that should've barred the way through the looking glass?

Mom laughed the first time I asked that, and then she spent years telling all her friends about me pointing that out.

Proud of me. Of how clever I was.

But it wasn't cleverness; it was just…

I look at the girl in front of me, fall back, and let my stories catch me.

She waves at me, her pale skin and black hair making her look like a ghost in the dimly lit halls full of her, repeating the same wave in alternating hands, and I step past her as hers drops to her side, the palm of the purple and black fingerless glove brushing against the black leather of her bulky jacket.

There's another of her waiting for me, her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowed as she's caught in thought, as she looks back at me and tries to come up with something.

Another step takes me away from her before she can do it, and then I turn around an angle in the frames of hesitating, lost girls, and something falls into place.

They are all caught in their frames, all of them echoes of the one before them, all of them ghostly and pale, because that's what they are: the ghosts of a moment.

I walk between them, exchanging brief nods and greetings that are symmetrically returned, but none of them stand aside. None of them let me pass through glass turned to silver mist.

They don't have to: I already live in a twisted world with its own rules.

But… Once upon a time…

There was a Lost Girl, but one that didn't walk along a maze.

This same girl would one day go through a Dark Forest, lost in a different, maybe deeper way, but this was before. This was a girl who still had a sister, a girl who still knew herself, or as much as little girls ever do.

And that's a funny thing about little girls: they don't know how little they know. They can read a book and get mad at it not making sense, because books [should] make sense—that's what books do. They can talk with their Red Sister and miss her on the way back home, sitting on the back of a car that they'd one day come to hate. What they cannot do is understand that they… do not understand.

All children claim to know who they are. All of them are wrong.

But, as long as they believe that lie, they are not lost.

The little girl, though… Something happened, and she no longer believed.

Her mother was gone, and a world that can take a mother away is not a world that can be trusted, because mothers are forever, and if that is a lie, what else can be?

Fathers care for little girls. They protect them, feed them, clothe them.

If that is a lie, what else can be?

And so the little girl looked inward, in search of more lies, and she became a Lost Girl.

She wasn't alone, back then, and maybe that was the one thing that let her not stray too far as her Red Sister cared for her, hugged her, listened to her.

But the Red Sister wasn't lost, and that was a difference between them that would never mend.

Until… Until it did.

Until the Red Sister was lost.

And the Lost Girl didn't notice.

Cruelty, anger, spite. Those had never been part of the Red Sister, much as it was part of her color, and the Lost Girl didn't understand, didn't know what she saw. She thought her sister dead, replaced.

And so she turned her back on her.

It wasn't a hurried decision, not something taken carelessly. It was something the Lost Girl needed to do to survive, because being by the Red Sister's side hurt with every minute, with every shared secret turned into a dagger. The Lost Girl couldn't have stayed, couldn't have remained by her sister's side. Not if she wanted to live.

Yet… She still wondered.

Each framed Looking Glass would turn into a window to a world where things had been even slightly different. Each upside-down ghost of the Lost Girl, one that maybe had found a clue to the hideous secret behind the Red Sister's death, or one that had managed to avoid it.

I pass by another ghost of the present, one with a sardonic smile, and I let the tip of my fingers trail along the silvered glass, meeting her own fingers in our brief acquaintance before I go to the next frame, and she disappears forever.

One good thing about my new skin? Paper doesn't smudge glass.

And so, my passing doesn't leave a trace.

There's an old koan, a riddle without an answer, one even worse than pondering what's in your pocket. It says, "The duck doesn't leave a trail in the water, yet it knows its path."

It's nonsense. It's meant to be.

Yet… The Lost Girl didn't know her path.

And she searched for it.

Night after night, she would stay awake, wondering what she may have done wrong, how she may have caused her sister to hate her.

Every morning found her without an answer.

And then, after she gave up, after she decided she didn't need a sister anymore, that she would rather be alone than faced with the cadaver of lost love…

She was sought after.

She was taken.

Because she had been lost. Years and years of drifting through mists without a silver edge, without a whimsy world of wonder on the other side. She had been alone, invisible to those she once thought she mattered to.

But that had not been shield enough. Not when the Lady Who Knew Her Path came.

There… There was no trail in the water, yet it still flowed in glittering precision, in perfect, purposeful movements.

The Lost Girl had been briefly entranced by her, in that brief, shining moment as she walked out of her own Looking Glass.

Then she had tried to scream, but it had been too late.

She was told. She was unnecessarily taunted with what would happen.

She saw the Red Sister.

Through a Looking Glass.

But one that only let the Lost Girl see through.

And so she watched as the Red Sister drank something, as she was transformed, her colors shifting and bubbling up to the surface, and she had seen her suffer with every one of them. Enough pain and agony that even the Lost Girl of that moment, even the one who had declared her sister dead and lost, felt the pang of hurt, the urgency to care, to jump up and pound on the one-way Looking Glass.

To save her dead sister.

And then she had been forced to drink, and…

She had touched something. She had seen the shards of sad, dying gods. She had…

There were words. There [always] were words, and whoever said otherwise was lazy, cowardly, a sinner to the greatest gift of mankind.

And, even if there weren't?

One could make them up.

Mome rath. Callooh! Callay! Frabjous day!

[Jabberwocky.]

The Lost Girl had once been angry at them, at the made-up words.

But then, as her body fell limp, as something writhed beneath paling skin, as a scream was torn from her throat…

Something of the dead gods touched her.

And words… Words grew.

She had lashed out with them, whispering of ancient warriors, of furious dragon slayers, of vanquishers of monsters.

The Looking Glass broke.

And the Red Sister laid still as her colors burned the world around her.

The Lost Girl was stunned then. Not by a traitorous blow from her enemies. Not by any of the powers raging behind her, locked in battle with Beowulf himself ('Tolkien was inspired by the classics, Little Owl; if you like The Hobbit so much, maybe try reading Beowulf's battle with the dragon,' her Lost Mother had said, and so she had struck with a painful memory as she was forced to face another), but by the writhing, dying girl in front of her.

Because the Lost Girl had thought her sister dead. But seeing it was another thing entirely.

And so she had remained still for long enough that the inky ghost of a dead hero was yet again slain, and then she was struck.

And words, the words that mattered so much to her… were taken away.

Then she was truly lost.

Without a past, without the stories that had shaped her, the Lost Girl wandered through a Dark Forest, one that she never realized was near the house she could never go back to.

And she was alone.

Truly alone, without dead sisters, without lying fathers, without… without the ghosts of the people who should have been there and weren't.

I turn another corner in the maze and look at another Lost Girl.

She's… different than the ones who came before. Something in her eyes is bare after facing something buried that she wanted to remain so.

I take a step forward, my hand drifting up to touch delicate fingertips on the other side of a Looking Glass.

"We loved her," we say.

And we smile.

A sad, little smile as we remember the stab of pain that seeing Emma writhing in agony shot through us.

It's been some time since I remembered, since Lisa allowed me to, yet… yet that is the one memory I was afraid to revisit. The moment where all the anger and hate… No. They didn't fade. I still despised her. Still wanted her to… not exist.

But I didn't want her to die.

Cool glass soothes my brow as I rest my eyes, as I allow myself to relive that moment with the perfect clarity that my power brings me when a memory becomes a story, when facts become meaning.

And I see her. Below me. Burning.

My heart clenched, my eyes widened.

['Emma,'] I whispered.

And I almost wanted her to open her eyes, to look back at me and mutter a last plea for forgiveness before she was taken away, before she [burned] away, before there wasn't even a ghost to miss and be angry at. Because I knew what that was, I understood what it was to be forever resentful of someone no longer there, and I didn't want that. I didn't want Emma to linger in my anger and hate.

I take a deep breath and force myself to continue.

I didn't want my first love to die without telling me why.

And now I chuckle.

Because I have been the Lost Girl.

I have walked through the Dark Forest, and seen what lies beyond at least one Looking Glass.

I have lost. Again and again.

But that's who I was.

Not who I will be.

"Found you," the Clever Fox whispers in my ear, her arms around my waist, her cheek on my neck.

"Yes," I whisper back, leaning away from the Looking Glass and the ghost of the Lost Girl within. "Yes, you did."

And I know her mind whirs as she makes connection after connection, understanding my use of the past tense, knowing I was thinking about the before, knowing I was dealing with something that shall remain between the Lost Girl and I.

I almost smirk when I wait for the silence to break and it doesn't.

It's not often that Lisa holds her need to show her intelligence in check. But it's often that she cares enough about me to put me first… and her urges second.

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This work is a repost of one of my first commissions, and one that I'm both grateful for and proud of. It can be found on QQ, SV, and AO3, and, of course, on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true), where the latest chapter will show up a week before it comes out for everyone else. It is currently 33 chapters and 94k words long and approaching its final arc at a good pace, so I hope you'll look forward to learning about Wordsworth's ending.

As I don't have access to Webnovel's "premium" features, the original italics in the text will be conveyed through the use of square brackets. I'm sorry about the inconvenience.

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