The Palace of Mirrors in front of us seemed to be never ending. The real size was impossible to guess as the reflections mirrored one another infinitely. Perhaps it had no size at all. There were no gates or doors; no entrance or gap to be seen. Only mirrors. Shiny polished mirrors everywhere.
“A door would be useful,” Captain Carrot said. Despite his fur coat, he was shivering in the cold at this height far above his beloved sea.
As if we had said the magic word, a mirror disappeared and revealed a long passageway leading into the depths of the palace. Of course, the walls, floor, and ceiling here were all made of mirrors.
“Do we really have to go in there?” The werewolf’s teeth were chattering. More from fear than from cold. The rest of us were feeling uneasy, too.
“I am afraid the answer is yes,” the captain said.
“I should never have left my pack of wolves.”
Hannah did her best to calm us all. “It’s a good thing the tyrant is a king of mirrors and not of manure.”
“Thank heaven for small favors.” The captain smiled.
Even the werewolf managed to grin, and his teeth stopped chattering.
We entered the hallway. Our distorted reflections were all around us—fat, thin, ugly, pulsating.
“One thing I hate even more than the Mirror King…,” I started to say,
“… is his sense of humor!” Hannah finished my sentence for me.
We smiled at each other. Two sisters who knew each other inside out. Here even more than in real life.
Step by step, the pictures became more and more menacing. After fifty meters, our reflections looked truly gruesome, like monsters with eyes bulging out of their sockets, crippled limbs, and faces rigid with hatred.
The Mira staring down at me with a vile expression was the one who shot soldiers. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at her. And I didn’t want to be her ever again.
I felt my way along behind the others. And then I heard Hannah calling, “Oh, this is beautiful.”
I opened my eyes again. We were standing in a great hall filled with glass crystals, diamond flowers, and mirror chandeliers. Beams of light were dancing in the glass. Everything sparkled. The play of colors was so magnificent, it took our breaths away.
A funny-looking man who seemed to be made totally of mirror glass climbed down from his mirror throne and came toward us. The Mirror King looked nothing like the monster I’d seen in my nightmares.
“So you are the Chosen One,” he said to Hannah in a friendly sort of way.
“Yes, I am,” Hannah answered, and grabbed Ben Redhead’s hand.
“And you want to break my hold over the islands?” His smile looked a little bit less friendly all of a sudden.
“I don’t just want to—I am going to,” Hannah said.
The Mirror King opened his arms wide, presenting himself as a target, and laughed. “Do what you must!”
Hannah let go of Ben Redhead’s hand, opened the knapsack quickly, and took out the three magic mirrors, although none of us had any idea how they were supposed to work. She pointed them at the Mirror King and hoped that something would happen, that the mirrors would make him disappear or at least paralyze him.
But the Mirror King seemed to relish reflecting the three mirrors on every part of his body until all of them were filled with images of him laughing. “The three magic mirrors,” he taunted, “don’t you know I created them?”
“You…? Why?” Hannah asked.
“So that you would look for them!”
None of us knew what he meant.
“I also allowed the story of a Chosen One to spread throughout the world of the 777 islands.”
“Are you saying…,” Hannah asked, “that there is no Chosen One?”
“Clever girl.”
“But why…?”
“As long as all the creatures in my kingdom believe that they will be rescued by a little girl with three magic mirrors, they will never try to fight me by themselves.”
“So it was all a lie…?” I couldn’t believe it.
“The second-most deadly weapon of a tyrant is the lie,” the Mirror King said triumphantly.
“And the first?” Hannah asked.
“Fear.”
Suddenly, he started to grow and expand in all directions.
“I wish she hadn’t asked that,” the captain groaned.
The tyrant continued to swell and bulge, sprouting more and more mirrors with razor-sharp edges that could cut you to shreds. He was the monster from my dreams after all. His grotesque head touched the ceiling. The mirror chandeliers crashed to the ground and shattered into thousands of pieces. In them, I could see myself shooting at the Germans, leaving the baby behind at the Umschlagplatz, and Mama lying dead in her own blood. With Ruth beside her. And Hannah beside them both. Hannah was in thousands of mirrors. Hannah was everywhere.
“What … what is this?” Hannah asked me. Her eyes wide with horror.
“Didn’t you tell her, Mira?” the monster asked in a cutting voice.
“Tell me what, Mira?” Hannah asked frantically.
I couldn’t say a word.
“Mira managed to survive,” the Mirror King said, “but you, my little Chosen One, are—!”
“Fight,” I shouted to stop him telling the truth, and pulled my sword.
“You can’t defeat me, Mira,” he laughed, “I am part of you.”
“Fight! Fight!” I cried desperately.
Then I heard a little girl calling, “No, please don’t.”
I looked at Hannah, but she was as confused as I was. It wasn’t her calling. The voice came from nowhere.
“No fighting!”
Then I recognized it. It was Rebecca calling from the dark stinking sewage canal where I was telling her the story.
“I don’t want there to be any more fighting,” she begged.
She was right. I lowered my sword. Let the Mirror King destroy me if he liked! If he killed me, I could stop feeling guilty for being alive, at least.
But no sooner had I lowered my sword than he started to shrink. He grew smaller and smaller, and when he was my height, he looked me in the eye and whined, “Fight is my elixir of life…”
Without it he would fade away, I realized.
Although he continued to shrink, my feelings of guilt didn’t completely disappear, and he didn’t vanish altogether. We could still see the horrifying pictures showing in his mirrors. There was still something I was fighting with.
“What didn’t you tell me, Mira?” Hannah asked again.
“You…” I admitted and my voice faltered, “Oh, Hannah! You’re all dead!”
Hannah was so stunned she couldn’t speak. Instead the captain asked, shocked, “I’m dead?”
“I am not feeling too bad,” the werewolf said.
“No, not you sailors…”
“Ah…” The werewolf wasn’t sure quite what to think.
“You never existed,” I explained.
“Well, that’s not much better,” the captain said. He could sense that I was telling the truth.
“D … d … d…?” asked Ben Redhead.
“We’re dead?” Hannah asked, and took hold of Ben’s hand again.
“I’ve brought you back to life in your story,” I tried to explain.
She didn’t blame me for not having told her the truth all this time. She just asked, “Whatever for?”
“I didn’t want you to be gone forever,” I tried to explain, heartbroken.
“But this isn’t me! I’m not a chosen hero. I never was.” Hannah pointed at the mirror showing her lying in the pool of blood and said sadly, “I’m just a girl who got killed…”
“But I…,” I was all choked up, “I don’t want to remember you like that!”
“It’s the truth…”
It felt as if a mighty weight had landed on my chest, which was stopping me from breathing.
“But I’m far more than just a hero in a story,” she continued. “Remember me how I was.”
Pictures shot through my mind. Pictures of the real Hannah: Hannah eating, kissing Ben Redhead, looking at me angrily, being cheeky, telling me stories when I wasn’t well, and, yes, lying dead in the pantry.
“Promise me that, Mira?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, and the weight on my chest fell away. “I promise.”
Hannah hugged me. “I’ll always be with you.”
“So will I,” the little Mirror King laughed behind me with a squeaky voice.
But I hardly noticed him.
I could live with the guilt of being alive if I let myself remember how things had really been. Hannah gave me a kiss, and I left the world of the 777 islands.
Forever.
I was back in the sewers, sitting in the water with Daniel, who was very weak now, asleep against the wall, and with Rebecca, who was staring at me.
It took me a while before I could say anything or give the story I’d just told the little girl some sort of meaning she’d understand.
“That was the story about how I found my sister again…,” I tried to explain.
“There’s no more fighting, is there?” Rebecca asked.
Stories are like that. They work differently for different people.
“No more fighting,” I promised the little girl.
And then I kissed the top of her head.