The Mirror of Erised

"Look, I know people always say you look just like your dad, but with your mum's eyes —" Ron said.

"No, that's not what I meant. I actually saw my parents in this mirror. And their parents, and their brothers and sisters, and a whole family." Harry told them how, the night before, he'd gone exploring under his Cloak of Invisibility and discovered the magical mirror in an unused classroom.

"Wow," said Ron, clearly impressed. "That must be some mirror."

"Show me," said Milo.

"Wait!" said Hannah. "You can't just go gallivanting off! You're supposed to have complete bed rest, remember?"

"You sound just like Hermione," Ron muttered.

"Someone has to," said Hannah defensively.

Milo cursed. She was actually right — if he got out of bed, he'd have to come back and stay a whole 'nother day to get back to full hit points.

"I think I'll have to chance it," Milo said. With luck (something he very rarely seemed to have) he wouldn't be needing all of his hit points for at least another day or so. Harry's mirror, however, might not be there tomorrow at all, and frankly, it seemed fairly plot-relevant.

"Let's go find it," Milo said, ignoring Hannah's protests. "But first, Harry — put it on your list. That, the Power of Love, and the Imperius Curse."

Harry shrugged, pulling the small stack of parchment which held The List (Milo made a note to make a few backups of it with Amanuensis or the Pen of Plagiarism +5, just in case) out of his school bag and diligently wrote them down.

Milo uncomfortably pulled his filthy Robe of Arcane Might over his pajamas. The way things were going recently, he didn't want to waste a Prestidigitation to clean it off — there was no telling when he was going to be ambushed next.

"All right," he said. "Lead on."

Harry, Ron, and Milo strode out of the hospital wing

"We should hide under the cloak," Harry suggested when they were out of earshot of the other patients.

"Oh, come on," Milo scoffed. "Three people can't wear one magic item. It just can't be done. I know I like to bend the rules sometimes, but seriously. Three people under one cloak? That's a stretch."

"Really?" Harry asked. "That's somewhat surprising. It seems large enough to cover all of us; I mean, it was made for an adult, right?"

"Trust me," Milo said authoritatively. "It's patently impossible. It'd be like trying to cast a spell in the same turn as running, or drinking two potions in a six-second period. Can't be done. End of story."

"Huh," said Harry. "Go figure. Okay, well you should wear it, then, because you're supposed to still be in the hospital wing."

"Good plan," Milo said, pulling the cloak over his dirty, bloodstained magic robes. "All right, let's go."

Harry led them through some unfamiliar Hogwarts corridors (always a rather risky prospect), past a door pretending to be a wall (and once, embarrassingly, directly into a wall pretending to be a door), down a staircase that turns into a ramp if you don't ask it nicely not to, and, finally, into an old, abandoned classroom. The Cloak of Invisibility turned out to be unnecessary, as the only person they encountered (if the word 'person' could even be applied here) was the Bloody Baron, who, as usual, ignored them entirely. In the classroom were cobwebs and a thick coating of dust on most of the desks and chairs, except for a wide corridor down the middle where a number of them had been pushed to the side — presumably to allow persons unknown to carry in Harry's mirror, which sat at the front of the room, where the Professor would stand to lecture the class.

Milo let out a low whistle.

"Now that," he said, "is one Hell of a magicky-looking item." The mirror was, for one, huge. It's top nearly touched the ceiling, and Milo couldn't figure out how anyone could possibly have gotten it through the door. The frame was of intricately worked gold, and if that didn't scream Magic, nothing did.

"That the technical term, you figure?" Ron asked wryly.

"Come on," Harry said impatiently. "Sit in front of it and look, it's my mum and dad."

"Whoa, hold on there," Milo said. "If there's one thing you learn as an Adventurer it's that you don't just go looking in random magic mirrors before finding out exactly what they do."

"But I know what this one does," Harry protested. "It shows my parents."

"Maybe," Milo said cautiously. "I've seen mirrors that create evil copies of anyone who looks at them, mirrors that suck you in and trap you, mirrors that blast you forwards in time, mirrors that switch your mind with the owner's, mirrors that make Suggestions you can't refuse —"

"My mirror does that!" Ron interrupted. "Tells me whether my shirt's untucked, my laces are undone, or there's something in my teeth! And when you ignore it, blimey, does it make a fuss."

"But this mirror doesn't do anything like that!" Harry protested again. "I looked into it, and I'm fine!"

Milo looked at him suspiciously.

"How do we know that?" he asked. "Seems awfully suspicious, doesn't it? I mean, if you were possessed by some evil being who placed the mirror here, the first thing you'd do is try to convince others to look at it, too, wouldn't you?"

"But I'm not — I'm fine, really. You're just paranoid 'cause of Hannah."

"Use Protection From Weevils," Ron suggested. "Remember, the thing you did on Hannah that made her Hannah again?"

"Good thinking. Protection From Evil," Milo cast on Harry. The Boy-Who-Lived was surrounded by a brief glow which faded in a fraction of a second. "Feel any different now?"

"No," Harry said with an audible edge in his voice. "Because I wasn't possessed. Can we look at the mirror now, or do you want to throw me in the water and see if I float first?"

"Why would I —"

"Ah, nevermind. Just look at the bloody thing."

"Fine," Milo said. "Ron, you go first." If the mirror did launch some form of attack, Milo figured that, of the three of them, he would be the best equipped to deal with it and therefore couldn't afford to be neutralized on the first round. That was his story, and he was sticking to it. Eagerly, Ron stepped forwards and stared at the mirror.

Ron gasped, and Milo nearly started raining arcane doom everywhere before he started speaking again.

"Blimey! I'm — I'm head boy!" Ron said, astonished. "And I'm holding the Quidditch Cup! I — wow, it looks like I'm captain of the team!"

"What?" Harry asked. "Let me see that!" Giving Ron a little shove, he positioned himself right in front of the mirror. "No, look, see? It's my mum and dad! They're right there in front of us!"

"Maybe," Ron said slowly, "it's different for everyone?" Then his eyes widened. "Do you reckon it shows the future?"

"How can it?" Harry asked. "All my family are dead, remember?"

"That doesn't really mean anything," Milo said. "There's no reason, beyond the fact that it would be highly improbable, that Ron couldn't become both head boy and Quidditch captain."

"But —"

"And as for your parents, well, there's dozens of ways for my kind of magic to bring back the dead," Milo said slowly.

"Right," Harry said in an odd voice. "I'd forgotten about that." Perhaps it was an unusually high Sense Motive roll for once, or Milo's recent ... confused state, but something told him that Harry was lying and hadn't, in fact, forgotten for a moment that Milo could, one day, Limited Wish Harry's parents back to life.

"Well," Milo said eventually, screwing up his courage. "I think, maybe, I should have a go at the mirror."

With a fair amount of trepidation, Milo stepped up in front of the ornate mirror while trying to avoid thinking of all the various kinds of horrible, trapped mirrors out there. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't recall a single magical mirror that didn't have some form of vicious curse. His eyes were still carefully averted, staring at the toes of his adventurer's boots.

Why, oh why did I use my only Protection From Evil on Harry? Milo berated himself.

Steadying himself with deep, calming breaths, Milo forced his eyes to stare directly at the polished silver surface.

The universe unveiled itself in front of him, and, while, conceptually at least, Milo knew from Wizards experimenting with Divinations and Greater Teleport that the distance between stars was inconceivably far and that the distance between galaxies made even that colossal distance seem completely negligible, Milo could see, clearly, pinpoints of light unfolding before him in numbers so large that they didn't have names. Many of those stars had planets, and many of those planets had moons, and a rare few of those planets and moons had life. Milo saw stout, bearded dwarves bustling about in their mines and forges, not knowing that with every greedy swing of their pick they unwittingly brought themselves one step closer to their own inexorable demise as they approached the horrors which lay beneath their underground cities. Milo saw proud elves, comfortable in the fact that they'd been toying with the very fabric of the universe and living in shining cities and soaring towers while the lesser races had yet to discover fire; blind, in their arrogance, to their ever-waning power, numbers, and relevance to the world outside of their sequestered paradises. Milo saw humans beyond number, living their lives, tilling soil, and always expanding outwards, propelled by their adventurous spirit and search for excitement, not knowing what was in store for them when they found there nowhere else to discover. Milo saw ankhegs, centaurs, chimera, dragons, gnomes, halflings, half-elves, aquatic elves, wood elves, dark elves, high elves, gray elves, wild elves, wood elves, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, half-orcs, magmin, barghests, blink dogs, dinosaurs, dire animals, ghosts, ghouls, ogres, oozes, mephits, medusae, merfolk, sahuagin, sprites, lamias, wyverns, will-o-wisps, and wraiths. Milo saw the entirety of the Prime Material as if he were examining every object, creature, and wisp of smoke with intense scrutiny. Milo saw the Great Wheel of the Outer Planes, the sixteen infinitely large planes of Celestia, Bytopia, Elysium, the Beastlands, Arborea, Ysgard, Limbo, Pandemonium, the Abyss, Carceri, Hades, Gehenna, Baator, Acheron, Mechanus, and Arcadia arranged clockwise around the barren Outlands, which, from its heart, rose the impossibly tall Spire, ringed at its peak by Sigil, The City of Doors. Milo saw the Lower Planes ripped apart by the never ending Blood War and the uncaring laughter of their thirsting gods. Milo saw the Inner Planes of Air, Fire, Earth, Water, and Positive and Negative energy from which the Multiverse itself was made. Milo saw the Astral, Ethereal, Shadow, and elusive Mirror Transitive planes, and the madness of the Far Realm. Milo saw the Multiverse in its entirety, and it was all his.

Milo saw himself, with an infinitely high level in every Class and Prestige Class, with every feat worth taking and a good many that aren't, with infinite ranks in infinite skills, with infinite ability scores and infinite ability modifiers, with infinite hit points, with infinite spells per day and every spell known, lounging on what, at first glance, appeared to be an intricately carved throne of every precious metal, expensive special material, and gemstone Milo had ever heard of (and several others, as well) but upon closer inspection were, in fact, Epic Magic Items and Artifacts. Milo saw a backrest composed of dozens of Staffs of the Magi sitting on piles of Rings of Universal Energy Immunity and Bracers of Relentless Might. One armrest was simply the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords while the other appeared to be the great battleaxe of Heironeous Himself, sitting on a pile of the six weapons of his archenemy, Hextor. Milo, the most powerful character conceivable, lounged on his terrible throne, staring at His gauntleted hand (in some detached part of his brain, Milo realized it was nothing less than the Iron Gauntlet of War), an expression of detached ennui on his blank face. In his other hand, he idly spun the Gold Dragon Orb around his fingers, one of the most powerful artifacts in creation reduced to a mere stress ball. Who has any need of an Orb of Dragonkind, even the most powerful one, when Milo could simply rewrite reality to create a breed of better dragons, forced to bow to his every will?

Milo had no enemies, for they had all long since been defeated. He had no adventures to undertake, for there were none of an appropriate Encounter Level. He had no friends, for he needed none. He had no dungeons to raid, for he had the Multiverse in his inventory. He had no familiar, for they could be traded for more powerful alternate class features. He had no partymembers, because in the impossible event that he would need allies, what could be more powerful than Simulacra of himself?

The Milo in the mirror had everything he'd ever wanted, everything he'd ever seen, everything he'd ever heard of, everything he'd ever only conceived of.

Milo —the real Milo — wasn't sure when he'd started screaming. He felt hands (the detached part of his brain that kept noticing minute details even in impossible situations noted that it must have been Ron and Harry, not that the rest of him cared) struggling to pull him away from the mirror, but even as they dragged him away from it he couldn't summon the willpower to tear his eyes from the horrible visage. Eventually, one of them wrapped the Cloak of Invisibility around the artifact, and the visions stopped — but the memories remained.

"What the bloody hell was that?" Ron asked, his face pale and bloodless.

"I... I saw everything," Milo said weakly. He tasted blood in his mouth, he must have bit his tongue at some point. "And ... and it was mine. I had everything ... everything except a reason to..." he trailed off, his brain still not fully functioning.

"Reason to what, mate?" Ron asked nervously in an odd, falsely cheerful voice.

"Anything," Milo said. "No reason to anything."

"Look on the bright side," Ron said. "If that's the future, it means we beat You-Know-Who."

"You-Know-Who?" Milo asked, his voice full of scorn. "The me in the mirror could have vaporized You-Know-Who with a Silent Stilled Heightened Maximized Empowered Intensified Twinned Explosive Quickened Cantrip just by willing it to be so."

"But that's good, isn't it?"

"I'd imagine it would get dull after a few eons," Milo said, still trying to shake the horrifying images the mirror had shown him. Had it really shown him the future? What were the rules that governed it? "I'll need to take another look," Milo said eventually, staggering to his feet. He spat blood on the floor of the classroom, and wiped at his mouth with his even grimier robe.

"No," Harry said firmly. "Absolutely not."

"I need to know how it works," Milo said. "I need to know if that's really the future."

"You're not going anywhere near that thing," Harry insisted.

"Fine," Milo said sharply. "Then one of you two give it a close examination and tell me if you see anything weird. Look at the frame, and try not to get sucked in." Not even Milo was sure if he meant that last bit literally or figuratively. "I'll even close my eyes. See? 'Cause I don't. On account of my eyes being closed."

"I'm not taking the Invisibility Cloak off until you're out of the room or blindfolded," Harry said stubbornly.

With growing irritation brought on by his numerous injuries and conflicted feelings about his vision in the mirror, Milo muttered a few choice oaths as he fished a scarf out of his Belt of Hidden Pouches and obligingly tied it around his face.

"Can we get on with it now?" he snapped. Then he took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. "Sorry," he said eventually, picturing their hurt expressions. "I'm still kind of in shock from the... mirror thing. And yesterday's thing." Then he realized what he was doing, and his breath caught. "Damnit! I shouldn't have to care about your feelings! Argh, let's just examine this mirror and get it over with already."

Milo heard a rustling of cloth as, presumably, the mirror's Cloak was lifted. There was silence as Ron and Harry were (hopefully) diligently examining the mirror's border and not being absorbed by its eldritch powers.

"Oi, Harry, look at this," Ron said.

"Yeah, I saw that," Harry said. "Just looked like a load of Gobbledegook to me."

"Nah, doesn't look anything remotely like Gobbledegook."

"Could one of you tell me, pray, what it is that you are speaking of?" Milo asked.

"There's some writing on the mirror," Harry said. "But it's nonsense."

There were a number of ways Milo had available to transmute nonsensical writing into its sensical variant, but all of them required that he be able to actually see the words in front of him.

"Write it down on some parchment," Milo said. "Make sure you get it exactly right — does it use the Common alphabet?"

"Uh..."

"English. The English alphabet."

"Oh, yeah, definitely."

"Fortuitous. Shouldn't be too hard, then." Milo heard the unbuttoning of a school bag and hurried scratching of a quill before a piece of parchment was placed into his hands. Milo very carefully turned so he was facing away from the mirror and removed his blindfold. Written on a small scrap of parchment was, in Harry's scrawl,

Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.

Milo stared at it for a moment, but concluded it wasn't in any language he recognized.

"Comprehend Languages," he cast, a spell which allowed him to understand any written and spoken language. To his faint surprise, the writing remained completely nonsensical — the only conclusion was that it had to be in code of some form.

"I'll have to do this the good old fashioned way," Milo muttered. He'd been habitually placing skill ranks in Decipher Script every level because it was Intelligence-based and understanding ancient runes seemed the sort of thing a Wizard ought to be able to do, but he hadn't actually had a chance to use them before. Nevertheless, inconsequential problems such as never having tried to decipher anything before did nothing to prevent the fact that, by any standard, Milo was very nearly an expert cryptoanalyst. Milo was a little excited to finally have the opportunity to put his Skills to use, testing them against the no doubt formidable defences of the accursed mirror. He cracked his knuckles and stretched, pulling out a few sheets of parchment and his quill. It was time for some serious, heavy-duty Script Deciphering.

"It's backwards," he said, sounding somewhat disappointed. "I show not your face but your hearts [sic] desire."

"Your heartsick desire, eh?" said Ron skeptically. "That sounds sort of ... racy, to be honest."

"No —"

"Maybe it was confused," Harry mused. "Because we haven't got any heartsick desires, so it just showed us whatever we wanted to see?"

"But —"

"So, you reckon the mirror just shows you whatever you want?" Ron asked, impressed. "Clever, Harry."

Milo simply groaned and seriously contemplated applying his forehead directly to a very inviting-looking hewn stone wall when a thought struck him.

The mirror shows you your heart's desire, he thought. Even if you don't already know what it looks like —like Harry's parents or my, well, my entire Multiverse.

Milo's face broke into a wide grin. He saw an exploit.

All I have to do is figure out how to change my heart's desire, he realized, and I can see whatever I want.

Ron, however, was developing an increasingly worried look.

"There's something my dad always says," he said, "How did it go? Oh, right: Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Mind, I've gotten some right peculiar looks from his Ford Anglia now and again, and it seems perfectly friendly."

Infinite power might be my long-term goal, Milo thought, although, to be fair, I'm starting to seriously reconsider that. Well, within reason, anyways. But what I really want, right now, more than anything else, is to find out what Voldemort's up to. Yup, honest. That's what I want.

"Now show me, mirror," Milo said quietly, and turned around. As a precaution, he readied an action: look away if it shows me anything other than information on You-Know-Who. You can't back down from readied actions.

He winced in almost physical pain as he was given another infinitesimally short view of the Multiverse and his own horrible fate again.

"What are you doing?" Harry asked. "Don't look at the thing!"

"No, trust me," Milo said, clutching his aching forehead. "I know what I'm doing. Sort of."

Okay, so maybe I really don't care that much about the Dark Lord after all. How about something a little smaller... I want, more than anything, to see what Kelgore's Fire Bolt looks like written out in a spellbook. That was sort of true, in fact — he had just decided, after all, that it would be his next research project. If he could somehow finagle the mirror into showing him what to write in his spellbook, he could save a week's work and a thousand gold pieces.

When Milo turned around again, it was with enough presage to fill a Type II Bag of Holding. Unfortunately, the mirror once again saw through his mental tricks, and he was treated to a view of Mirror-Milo killing time by covering every square inch of the Prime Material in Arcane Marks.

"I'm getting away from this thing," he said, flinching and attempting to look anywhere other than at the nightmare being played out in the glass. "The mirror, it's... it's... agh, nevermind. I'm going back to bed."

He'd been about to say 'the mirror, it's Evil,' but it clearly wasn't. It was absolutely, brutally, horribly Neutral. It showed you what your heart desired, but sometimes, what you desire isn't the same as what you desire you'd desire...

As Milo walked back to the hospital wing, his head off in space, he suddenly had another idea.

"I wonder if someone here can bewitch me to desire nothing more than the spellbook entry for Kelgore's Fire Bolt?" he mused aloud. "Or other spells, for that matter. Mordy, remind me to ask Hermione, okay? Thanks."

Milo's familiar poked its furry head out of his extradimensional belt and nodded.

Maybe it was simply an unusually good roll, or maybe it was the +2 bonus to Spot and Listen granted from his bond with Mordy, but Milo suddenly felt as if a White Dragon was breathing down the back of his neck. Mordy's ears perked up, suddenly alert.

Milo knew not to look around stupidly and say 'Hello? Ron, is that you? Harry? This isn't funny, guys!,' followed by the inevitable 'Aaaaargh!' as whatever it was that was hiding out there ate his face. Instead, our gallant hero simply licked his suddenly-dry lips and walked forwards as casually as he could manage.

Cursing himself for leaving the Cloak of Invisibility with Harry and Ron, Milo reckoned his best chance was to — wait...

Harry and Ron.

Patting his pockets as if he had forgotten something, Milo cursed in a somewhat overdramatic fashion (not having any ranks in Disguise or Bluff, Milo was a terrible actor) and started to return to the room with the mirror. Whatever it was that had triggered Milo's Spot check (if that was, indeed, what it had been) had easy access to those two, who, still being relative novices at this plane's peculiar branch of magic, were nearly defenceless. Equally importantly, Milo didn't particularly want to face it alone in his current state.

While turning around and searching his pockets, Milo had a chance to look around the corridor, which remained empty save for the obligatory suits of armour and statuary. Mio considered casting See Invisibility, but remembered how that had seemed to have no effect, oddly, on whatever it was Snape had used to hide himself in his office before the Quidditch match.

"Detect Thoughts," Milo muttered under his breath. Mere Invisibility would be of no use against the spell, which revealed the presence — and, if he concentrated on it long enough, the number — of intelligent, conscious creatures in a cone emanating from Milo.

The spell immediately alerted him that he was right — something intelligent was standing within sixty feet of him. Milo forced himself not to look around nervously, waiting for the spell to cough up how many people — or bloodsucking monsters — there were skulking around him.

When it finally did, Milo was so surprised that it almost broke his concentration on the spell. He'd thought there would be one, or two at the most, sneaky persons and/or bloodsucking monstrosities for him to Glitterdust and run away from.

Within the fairly narrow conical field that Detect Thoughts covers, Milo detected in the seemingly-empty corridor no less than twelve sentient creatures.