A Long Way to Fall

by Cinders of War

Chapter 69: Looking in a Mirror

Mirror Match lay surrounded by candlelight, in the spacious bathtub on the second floor of her penthouse. Only the top of her head was visible from the depths of the murky brown sludge, with a small straw to allow for breath. Occasionally a bubble would break the surface with a bloop.

Eventually she elected to surface, a beast from the depths dripping with rejuvenating mud. The straw was spat into the bin while she used a towel to wipe off her face and extremities. Pierce and his team had done a number on her: very little lilac remained on her skin, and her newly healed eyes glinted green and catlike in the flickering tongues of fire.

Taking a seat on the side of the tub, Mirror began to trim her nails, starting with the claws on her fingertips and then her toes, clipping and filing them back to a respectable length in preparation for a fresh layer of polish.

Stepping into the power shower, jets of icy water sprayed at Mirror Match from all directions, stripping the remaining mud off her skin. The previous bath had restored her body to normal workability, though it had left her feeling rather hungry.

As soon as she was clean, Mirror picked up a bottle of unmarked liquid and scrubbed herself with it. Flakes of lilac mixed in with the bathwater, the Templar agent running the brush over every part of herself to ensure all the dye was gone. She repeated the process with a second bottle that washed the faded orange and green from her singed hair, restoring it to its former beautiful royal purple. She admired herself in the mirror, her face charcoal black behind her hair.

Pleased with her work, Mirror dried herself and draped her body in a fluffy white gown that was monogrammed with two gold ‘M’s, heading toward the living room to relax for a while, her hair tied up in a sensible ponytail.

Clicking on her wall sized TV, she quickly cycled through the hundreds of channels and deduced that there was absolutely nothing good on at all. Drawing the line at a 24 hour Ebony Wings marathon, Mirror turned the screen off, her long tongue sticking out between both fangs with disgust.

“Why anyone would make a hack like her an academy acclaimed actress is beyond me…”

Even with most of the windows shuttered, there was an irritatingly bright amount of light coming through between the ones that weren’t. With the push of a button, the rest of the glassy panels went dark as well, plunging the penthouse into a penumbra of artificial light, all the better to suit her currently dour mood.

“Oh, Psithyra…” Mirror sighed to herself. “What has gotten into you lately?”

This sudden brashness in her recent actions didn’t sit well with her. In the old days, it would have been simple with executions: get in quietly, deliver the sentence, and slip out with no one being the wiser. All this open field fighting was… unnaturally foolhardy of her. Something was wrong with how she’d been feeling as of late, but Mirror couldn’t quite place what exactly.

The Templar agent stood up and poured herself a glass of iced scotch from the nearby cooler. Then another. And another. She ended up drinking down the entire bottle, but it didn’t help. Mentally cursing her kind’s inability to get drunk off alcohol, or almost anything else for that matter, Mirror flopped back down on the lounge and allowed her hands to wander down to her belt, where her jagged black dagger hung in its scabbard, one of the few things in the world its venom wouldn’t destroy.

On a whim, Mirror flung aside her bathrobe and strolled into a carpeted corridor lined with glass cabinets and old paintings, admiring her toned body in the numerous reflections.

It didn’t take long for her to find one of her favorite items. A suit of battle-worn chitinous armor inside a transparent case, hung on its display proudly. She touched a palm to the cool surface; in times gone by, she had worn this armor and had been at the head of the charge, rallying others to her spear. Times had been simpler back then, with firearms that only fired one shot and couldn’t penetrate a wooden barrel, much less a top-quality suit of armor. Not like the ones Pierce and the Assassins had been pointing at her not too long ago. Those had hurt quite a bit.

“What a mess,” she muttered at the armor’s empty helmet. She had joined the Assassins on the presumption that with all their spies and contacts, maybe they would have a solid lead on where her queen was. When that had turned up empty, there had been no choice but to defect to the Templars, hoping that their information would be better. So far, it wasn’t looking like much of an improvement.

There was an oni mask on the wall behind her, another one of her favorite items. A little souvenir from her time in the East, one that she had worn of various missions as she searched for meaning, including one for the assassination of a man named Tiger Claw. That had been fun, unlike the dross she was forced to deal with today. Just another price to pay, she thought.

Her previously sour mood lifted by how good the evening air felt against her bare skin, Mirror hurried to the guest room where she slept and made a call on her cell phone. There was something she needed to close the book on.

Upstairs, another phone began to ring. She went and picked it up too.

“Hello, Rovena,” Mirror said into the first phone sweetly. “How are things in Trotsylvania?”

The second phone was held to her other ear while the first one was lowered.

“Qvite vell, my friend,” Mirror replied in a thick Trotsylvanian accent. “Did your executions go as planned?”

Mirror huffed and blew a strand of her purple hair from her mouth before raising the first phone back up. “Most of them. The last one… I had a lot of interference. The target got away.”

“Ah, vell. You’ll get them next time, I know you vill.”

“Thank you,” Mirror breathed. “It means a lot to me, your opinion.”

“I know. You ought to get some rest, Mirror. You are not sounding so vell.”

“I’ll do that,” promised Mirror. “Thank you for all your help, Rovena. I couldn’t have done it vith- I mean, without you.”

At that, Mirror clicked ‘end call’ on both phones and put them away. She scowled, displeased at her mistake on that last sentence.

“You’re slipping, Thyra,” she clucked her tongue at her reflection in the polished tabletop. “Can’t risk a cock-up like that when we’re meeting with dear Friggy, now can we?” Her voice took on an ominous, double-toned inflection near the end.

The Templar agent ran a finger along her supple thigh, which reminded her: she had to mix up more vials of that infusion in case of emergencies. Last night she’d been injecting them like a pyromaniac with burn cream in a fireworks storage shed, and it would be most unfortunate to run out of them in a tight spot.

No matter. First thing tomorrow she would get back to her labs and get mixing, assuming that buffoon Mahogany didn’t have anything asinine for her to do like he sometimes did. Then maybe she would have time to meet up with Frigid Night and have a proper meal from him. She might even go back to look in the Templar database, just in case they had a better lead than the Assassins on where she’d left off back in Trotsylvania all those years ago.

Enthused with the idea of not having to feed on tiny individual scraps for sustenance, Mirror prowled back to the living room and settled down on the cream couch again, the TV flickering to life as she did so. At least there was one thing she could commend that Ebony Wings for: her performances were good for putting her to sleep.

Comments

[Jaxxon Markus Citadel]

A little souvenir from her time in the East, one that she had worn of various missions as she searched for meaning, including one for the assassination of a man named Tiger Claw.

So it was her who Rose Petal saw when she was a girl. She really gets around, doesn't she? In the East and now she's here. As for the weird phone call to herself, I'm guessing there was no actual vampire and it was just Mirror playing dress up? Intriguing.

[Marcthelightspark2004]

There was an oni mask on the wall behind her, another one of her favorite items. A little souvenir from her time in the East, one that she had worn of various missions as she searched for meaning, including one for the assassination of a man named Tiger Claw.

Called it!

[MoonlightRift]

Hmm. How interesting.